I wrote this not for the fathers who work in the front lines amidst this worldwide pandemic, nor for the fathers who’ve fallen victim to what is becoming a nationwide shutdown of several industries. Your lives are likely in a different kind of turmoil than the fathers I have in mind here—the ones who, like me, find themselves working from a home that has suddenly become everyone’s home base, every day.
You know who you are. Cast from our offices, we non-essential knowledge workers huddle in our Zoom and Skype calls. The men sport hoodies and coronavirus beards; our female co-workers don ballcaps and yoga clothes. While the real workers of the world pick up garbage, tend the sick, stock grocery shelves, and run toilet paper mills, we blink at glowing screens and try to conjure remarks about scenario planning and cost-cutting.
Increasing this feeling of impotence are all these children underfoot. To them, this is Christmas. No school! Mom and Dad are home!
They call to us across the house. They demand we play with them. They wander into view during Important Meetings.
A lot of parents are struggling. Our schedules are upended. We can’t focus. Many of us have two working adults (a luxury, compared to families who now have zero), triggering daily debates about who should cover the kids at what time. Whose project is more pressing. Whose work is more important.
Not only is our work suffering, we’re letting our children go to seed. Sure, kids—have cereal for lunch. You can’t get porn on YouTube, right? Okay then, watch all you want. Just don’t knock on my door during this call with my boss.
The walls between work and home have dissolved, and the effect is . . . unnerving. What we have to remember is that the whole world is in chaos. Which means our domestic chaos is, well, forgivable. Who even has time to cast a stone?
So, what I’m thinking as a father is: maybe we should make the best of this passing season. Have you, like me, had your child on your lap during one of your Super Important Zoom calls? If so, have you noticed the smiles? And have you noticed that when someone else has a child on their screen, you’re more interested in that cutie pie than the topic of the call? At some deep DNA level, we know they should be with us, and we with them. And they know it too.
Want to know what I did on my calls today? I wiped a child’s behind. I got my kids to “help” me in my workshop so their mother could get some work done. I taped together wine boxes and told my toddlers it’s their new office. Please don’t tell my boss.
I’m playing during the day and working at night and sometimes I work and play simultaneously. I don’t know if any of the management gurus whose books gather dust in our shuttered bookstores approve, but the truth of it is that I feel more grounded than ever. Everything is a mess and I can’t remember the last time I showered and I’m unnerved by how my children talk about my coworkers by first name though they’ve never met them. But I also feel fully me. A man who works and a father who parents and not one at a time, but all at once.
It’s a bloody mess, but then again, so am I. And maybe all I, or you, or any of us are supposed to do right now is just muddle through. Just serve whoever needs us without worrying about the mixing of business and personal, and be thankful we’re needed at all.