In Seattle last month, I sat next to a young woman who was taking her first business trip away from her two kids.
She had that combined haunted/giddy look that only the newly liberated/terrified young parent can have: such relief from the moment-by-moment of the grind, exhilaration of being among adults, taken seriously, no one calling her name every five minutes.
And yet, and yet…
A near-constant glance at the cell phone, prepared at any moment to be called back. A visceral, bodily missing her children. Looking around every few moment because she is sure she has forgotten something. What doesn’t she have with her? Ah, yes, the little hand to hold to cross the street. Like missing a shoe.
It turns out that her husband travels frequently, about 60%, and has been left at home with the kids for this rare trip from NY to Seattle where she is working as a consultant.
So, of course, he doesn’t have a clue about where anything is, what the kids are supposed to do tomorrow, how to get everything done. He has been left in charge of someone else’s job!…And she is both worried and full of righteous indignation–will they all survive? and “So, get a taste of my life, Buster!”
Oh dear.
I haven’t actually been her–but I have been her husband.
I called my husband the first time he took a business trip to Singapore (after he started working as a consultant again) and asked for a more granular explanation of the two-page list of home tasks he had given me.
Thirty minutes of roaming cell phone charges and explanation. Two different itineraries for Monday. Cash and carpools for Tuesday. Who-will-eat-what-for-packed-lunch Wednesday.
And the very next phone call I made was to an agency to get someone to do the work.
That’s what I do. I manage other people to get things done. No one, I don’t care who, could possibly do the list that he had given me over his cell phone from Schiphol airport.
Interesting, though, that the question that my temporary Seattle acquaintance had for me on our short bus ride wasn’t “how do you get it all done?” but “how do help the kids cope with your absences?”
I’ve thought a lot about this by now. Some of the answers I would have given a few years ago seem too trite now to even list, although they helped. For a while I brought presents home from each trip, but that ended up with me stressing out at airport gift shops, the kids rushing me at the door asking for loot, a roomful of garbage, and me feeling like I was vending machine.
Routines and rituals helped a fair amount–a real cuddle with mom in bed while I recovered from my jetlag, a story on the couch after I cleaned myself off from the airplane. But that was only about clearing the runway for re-entry, not about the time away itself.
I would have to say that the thing that has been the most important has been to discuss with the kids the content and meaning of the work.
Not the stuff you’ll get punished for if you don’t do it. Not the homework your teacher will mark as missing, or the meetings your boss insists that you attend. Because, in truth, it has been better than a decade since I have had anyone dictate to me what I really need to get done on a daily basis, or even on a monthly basis. An occasional request for a this or a that, but the weeks I spend on the road are about my aspirations for the world, not about a dictator’s.
What I hadn’t been conveying, overall, in those first four years of 50% international travel, of the jetlag and the 60-hour work weeks while home, was that I do most of the stuff that I do so I can really be on top of things, so I can really make a difference, so I can really hold my head high when I’m putting my pumps on in the morning.
What helped the most was to stop complaining about my work, and to start talking about the meaning of it.
Why it mattered that I was fundraising for education or for health. What the impact of my work was on other people. Why I felt proud about certain types of things, or insecure about others. How I relied on other people and they relied on me.
In my last year of college I made this pact with my friends–we would no longer talk to each other about the load of work we had in front of us, since the story was always the same whether we majored in clarinet or chemistry. Instead, when we met each other on the street and asked each other “how’s it going?” we would always talk about the content of the work that we were doing. The challenge of mastering a new part in a modern concerto; the methodology of writing up an unexpected lab result.
I majored in neither music nor science, and frequently, I didn’t understand the real content of what my friends would say. But I could always understand the look of perplexity on their faces as they puzzled out, in conversation, the intricacies of what they needed to master, and the pleasure of the becoming–in whatever the small way–that master that they had hopes to become.
In the process of doing the same thing in the family, there has been an interesting transition, little by little, with the kids. Today coming home from school, my ten-year-old was really excited by “the new math we learned at school,” which turned out to be long division by some Swiss name. I got a detailed and utterly confusing story about how you make kind of a house for two numbers, the one you are dividing into and the one you are dividing by, one vertical, the other horizontal, the vertical line shorter than the horizontal and the columns of tens and hundreds and multiplying by the smaller number…and when we got into the apartment he ran for a piece of paper, a pencil and ruler to show me on paper. Twenty minutes spent on how four goes into 160, and then how it goes into 116. Understanding. New math. Cool.
That, there is the joy of work. Something so hard that you are trying to master and you don’t yet know the whole of it. And while it doesn’t replace the needs of being in the same rooms at the same times, the need to hold and touch and kiss each other, it does explain, a bit, why each of us goes out of the house every day, leaves the others behind, and does the very best we can in the paths we have in front of us.