I lost the working parent game last week. I hoped I learned something.
Here were my biggest defeats from three snow days followed by two sick days.
Top of the list: I tried to fight a blizzard and work like there weren’t feet of snow outside. It’s taken me 16 years to realize this one immutable fact of working parenthood: snow days with multiple children are not manageable.
I tried to do work, thinking, well, that cooped up, bored kids would be okay until the snow stopped, and we could go outside? When you write it out, it really reveals the absurdity of my thinking.
What could I have done better? Taken the two calls that would have been hard to move and done nothing else. Maybe I could have answered some emails downstairs to keep my inbox from looking like my driveway, piled high with snow. Any real, thoughtful work you get done on a snow day should be attributed to luck, and I wish I’d remembered that from all the other times I tried to work with snowed-in kids.
Second: when people want to reschedule something that got canceled because of a blizzard it might be better to say, no, let’s aim for next week.
I said yes, and it blew up another delicately scheduled snow day. It made it rushed in a way that it didn’t have to be. And then, to catch up, I was short with my kids, which made me feel even worse.
What could I have done better? Said no. That’s it. No dramatic lesson there.
Third: Don’t push yourself to stay up late to work on long-term projects. I did this two nights, and while I made progress on what I was working on, I was foggy the next day and got nothing done. And that led me to stayed up late again, which left me tired again.
What could I have done better? Relaxed and realized I have until August to get this one done.
I had a few wins. I listened to my family when they told me what I’d done wrong. I didn’t react. I didn’t get defensive. I just thought about what they were telling me, even though I wished they weren’t telling it to me.
Later in the week, I canceled everything when I had to take my youngest to the doctor – flu! – and that helped reset my week.
I was honest with my family about the rough week I was having. This is one that so many fathers struggle with – showing we’re wrong, admitting we don’t have it all figured out, being clear that we weren’t at our best.
And now, I’m looking to reset, hoping I crammed all the rough stuff into one week!
