Somewhere along the way, quitting your job to spend more time with your family turned into code for "I got fired" or "I quit in a huff."

And that’s too bad, because quitting a job to spend more time with your family would be a wonderful dream-come-true for many people, and unfortunately it’s an almost impossible dream, especially in this economy.

As we all know, there’s time with the family and there’s working to feed the family, and the two can’t usually happen at the same time. It’s tough to pull off even if you work from home. Quitting to spend time with the kids is the new luxury, more valuable and hard-to-get than a weekend house on the beach or a private jet.

That’s why when high-profile people say they’re quitting to spend more time with their family and then you see them pop up a couple of weeks later in some new high-profile, pressure-cooker job, you realize it was just a make-nice line and that everybody has bills to pay.

The reasons for busting out the spending-more-time-with-family canard are obvious: to save the staffer from embarrassment and to save the boss from having to explain. The problem is, it’s been used so many times by figures in politics and business and public life that it has become a punch line, something accompanied by a wink.

The people who have recently departed the Abercrombie administration probably told the truth when they said they wanted to spend more time with their families, though perhaps they didn’t tell the whole truth. Certainly, there was more going on there, like a house-cleaning or a course-correction. Their replacements have pretty much acknowledged that.

In the Lingle administration, the preferred line was "left to pursue other career opportunities," which also held at least a kernel of truth, except when Rod Haraga stood up and said, no, actually, Lingle fired him.

Which raises the question, what’s wrong with telling the truth? Especially in politics, where straight-talking is such a rare and valuable commodity. The folks who grow up to run state agencies and executive offices and to set policy are all big boys and girls who know their jobs depend not only on competence but on the fickle winds of political popularity. It would be refreshing to hear someone simply say, "We needed a change. I decided we were off track and I needed some new people with a different set of skills." No scandal, no make believe. The public can handle candor. Really.

But if leaving a job to "spend more time with the kids" actually works for someone, then congratulations are in order. It is a choice to be commended and a career/financial maneuver to be admired.

Lee Cataluna can be reached at lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.