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Close quarters in quarantine

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.

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Control your concern

I was reminded recently of a helpful distinction Stephen Covey made in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I’ve recreated below:

In the universe of our cares, there are things we can control, things we can influence, and things that concern us, but which we can’t do anything about. Common sense suggests that our energy, creativity, and time is best spent on the innermost circle, with effort applied to the middle circle as interest and opportunity allow.

It suggests we bring order to the little parts of the world we control. That we make beauty and peace where we can.

The challenge is that in stressful times, our emotional energy gets drawn to the outer circle. The things we can’t control start to dominate our thoughts. In the present crisis that’s obvious: people worry for their jobs and financial assets. They worry people they love will get sick. They fear needing a ventilator themselves.

And to compound the cruelty, our obsession with what we can’t control prevents us from doing what’s needed in the domains we can control. We begin to fail our colleagues, our friends, our families. When we dwell on the things we can’t control, we become our worst selves.

The good news is that we can control how much we obsess over what we can’t control. We can govern our thoughts. We can restrict how often we check the news or our investments. We can dial into the lives of our children, of our friends, of strangers who need us now more than ever. We can fill the hours with so much labor in that center circle that we simply don’t have time or energy to fret over what isn’t ours to decide anyway.

All it takes is intention, and a plan. Commit to refocus on what you can control. Turn off the TV. Spend less time on the internet. Calendar more time with your children. You can control how much you worry over what you can’t control. And the first step is committing to do it.

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Your quarantine survival kit

Maybe your children are happily ignorant of what’s going on, or maybe they’re worried, and looking to you for assurance. Many of them are home all day now, their schools shuttered into the foreseeable future. It’s a stressful time. Whenever I hear people are being told to shelter in place, I think: I’m a father. I am the shelter.

But what if I’m not enough?

My struggle in crisis is that I worry for my children (their health, their economic future, whether I’ll even be able to provide for them in a year) to the point that I get short-tempered. I grow impatient with their recklessness, intolerant of their foolishness, fed up with their sloppiness. In an ironic twist, my care for them gets transmogrified into unkindness.

Perhaps you face the same struggle.

Photo credit: Markus Spiske

Well, one thing I’ve learned about coping with uncertainty is that we can reduce our stress by creating domains of certainty. We can turn our attention from the things we can’t control to the opportunities all around us to fix, to heal, to teach.

But without a plan, that’s just a nice sentiment. If you’ve been looking through the resources here, and if you get my daily emails, you’ve probably discerned that I’m a big fan of the calendar. If your home life is getting turned upside-down like that of many families, you can inject some immediate certainty by helping your children put together a simple task list for the day. Ask them to come up with some ideas to exercise their minds and bodies, and to have some fun.

While you’re at it, write down some things in your own calendar that you’re going to do with them. Don’t let day after day slip by, especially now, when so many people need the simple reassurance of human contact.

And if you’re wondering what to put on your calendar, below are some resources chock-full of ideas. Whether you make a backyard mortar or find a comfy book to read together, don’t miss the opportunities in this upended world to be the shelter your children need far more than bricks and mortar.

Quarantine survival supplies

Art of Manliness DIY projects: Everything from potato cannons to paper fighter jets.

Arts and Crafts projects: 50 projects that are less dangerous than a potato cannon, but still kind of fun.

Backyard games: Cardboard forts, giant dominoes–there’s something here for everyone.

Exploratorium: Tons of science projects for kids of all ages.

Khan Academy: These people have revolutionized math, science, computer programming, even art history. Sign your kids up and watch them love to learn.

OpenLibrary: With libraries closing across the country, here’s a free resource filled with online books for all ages.

Kanopy: Movies and documentaries available with a library membership, including a host of instructional videos.

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Guard the door

Fear is a thief. I say this as a father whose pockets have been picked many times. I’ve had countless moments of peace snatched from my hands. Hours of sleep pilfered. Excellence replaced with adequacy, because my mind was elsewhere.

Where, exactly? On what could go wrong. An illness, a car accident, a vicious dog on a frayed leash. I am a walking encyclopedia of worst-case scenarios. Go ahead, name something children do every day, and I can tell you a dozen ways they could get hurt, crippled, killed. Where someone else might see a toddler riding his tricycle down the driveway, I see a careless UPS driver behind the wheel of a two-ton truck. A walk on the nature trail? Poisonous snakes. Family cookout? Exploding propane tank.

I was this way before my daughter died from a brain tumor, but that nightmare certainly made it worse. Enduring horror makes you realize the worst things don’t always happen to other people. They happen to you.

But fear, like I said, is a thief. When I invite it to lean over my shoulder and whisper in my ear while I’m working or praying or playing with my children, I invite it to confiscate the small joys that are our only solace in a world of hardship. How foolish, how cruel, to let what has not come to pass steal all that remains untarnished by what did come to pass.

I share this with you because this is a fearful time for many of us. Fear of the coronavirus, of a sagging economy, of what our fellow humans are capable of when they too are afraid. If you need a few dozen other looming troubles to tremble over, I’m the man to see. But right now I’m the man reminding you that there’s good all around you. That the darkness will always and ever have no choice but to retreat in the face of even a little light. That it only wins when we clamp shut our eyes.

So today, and tomorrow, and maybe even the day after that, spend a little time noticing the good. Gratitude has always been the undoing of fear. This world is full of suffering, yes, but it is also filled with goodness. See that. Be a part of that. Don’t let the thief in.