AS I PREPARE TO LEAVE, I'm culpably conscious of what I will miss: Halloween, 11-year-old Teal's final soccer game of the year, 13-year-old Addi's first dance, Sue's mountain race. All the ordinary, miraculous breakfasts and dinners.

I've been off on assignment on Sue's birthday or our anniversary countless times; usually I remember to have flowers delivered in my absence, an act that I realize is corny and pathetic and somehow still meaningful. I've missed piano recitals and school plays, swim meets and weddings and funerals. Writing about crawling into a wet sleeping bag in Uganda meant I was not home to tuck my kids in and tell a story and then slip into bed with my wife. Perhaps I now bring home something better than a panda—an understanding that the world is full of choices, and it will someday be up to them to find their own way. They're already becoming writers and athletes themselves.

My daughters, like their mother, miss me, but they don't pine away while I'm gone. Sue says that they bond even tighter, knowing they must take care of one another. That's what I want to be doing.

This is my conundrum, the incurable disease of mountain guides, foreign correspondents, and all kinds of adventurers: We yearn to go, but we don't want to leave.

"I'm not sure I deal with it particularly well," admits Barry Bearak, 56, a New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his coverage of life in war-torn Afghanistan. "I signed up to be the coach of my older boy's Little League team and missed every game. I felt awful."

Bearak's wife, Celia Dugger, 47, is also a writer, reporting on global poverty issues for the Times. They live in Pelham, New York, with their two sons, Max, 15, and Sam, 10, but have been known to travel three or four months over the course of a year.

"Sometimes it is just really, really hard," says Bearak. "I phone home every day. On Thanksgiving in 2001, I was in Afghanistan in the middle of a battle, bullets flying all around, and I called home."

Did he wish he were with his family at that moment?

"No. I felt like I was in the right place for the story. I love my work. The work is important. It's why we all got into journalism: to try to make a difference."

Dugger picks up the phone. "I feel extraordinarily privileged to do what I do," she says. "To travel all over the world and write about something meaningful. But there is a sense of grieving when I leave, and after three to four weeks, I miss the boys so much I just have to come home."

And how is it for Sam and Max?

"I think they've gained from this kind of life," says Dugger. "They have an enormous curiosity about the wider world. But, yes, it's tough. In some sense it's irresolvable. You're always trying to not let it get to the point where you're paying too high a price for this drive you feel to be out in the world."