How many working parents were asking for just one more snow day, just one more bout of Flu B or some unnamed virus to keep kids home from school for just one more workday?
If you live where it snows, as I do, this winter was brutal. I feel for my Lead Dads in the Midwest who got a mid-March dump that scuppered their plans to remove the snow sticks from their driveways.
It was a brutal winter to be a working parent, whether you’re a Lead Dad or a Working Mom. In my part of Connecticut, too often the schools closed preemptively and stayed closed an extra day to clear the snow. It was anticipatory anxiety meets bureaucratic snow removal.
And still, even after removing the orange snow sticks for the plow, I’m feeling out of sorts. Less productive, more distracted. I’ve got Easter break and parent teacher conferences coming up. How do you work with all of this interruption?
I got perspective this week after being interviewed for a nonprofit board, and I think it might be instructive for other Lead Dads and Working Moms.
I was asked what college had meant to me and what my before and after had looked like. Now college was decades ago but that prompt, in my tired state, set me telling my career and personal story, a full expansive story. I couldn’t imagine having the perspective in this moment to describe, with any nuance, the current state of work and life.
The details of my personal journey don’t matter. What mattered was recounting – and listening to – the narrative of the past three decades. I glossed over the down parts – and there were surely brutal moments where I could name the managers who made life harder than it had to be. I told instead what I remembered, which were the tent poles of my life’s story. And they were instructive and mostly good.
While I’m still digging out from March with kids, I’m taking comfort not in what I didn’t get done this month but in the realization that I won’t remember it – that it will be a small part of the arc of my history as a parent and worker.
Instead, I’m going to hold on to these big, positive memories from March: first-ever family cruise, first-ever family trip for a college visit, and first-ever flight to Kentucky to get a puppy for our youngest daughter.
Our work lives, and our family lives, are these mosaics. If you’re wired like me, you remember and focus on the better moments, you analyze and understand the challenging moments, and you keep going.
Or at least that’s what I’m focusing on instead of a month in which I was pulled this way and that among work, family and school breaks.
What were your strategies that worked and didn’t work this winter?
