By Shirlee Press
My husband and I both work in roles that ramp up during election
campaigns as we try to stay on top of every twist, promise, pledge, and tidbit
of information our respective clients hunger to consume.
Much like parenting, it is all-encompassing, which is where we run into
issues at home.
Though we have hired a babysitter to help out with dinner and bedtime
during this difficult period, our toddler has so far refused to interact with
her.
There goes my brilliant plan to finish up work when I get home while the
kids are entertained.
Though our four-year-old loves the babysitter, the second she leaves,
the battles begin. Acting up before bedtime is now a nightly thing. As she
watches her parents pass each other like ships in the night in a thick fog, she
has become more clingy, emotional and demanding.
Just the other night, she emerged from her room at almost 10 pm to
declare she couldn’t sleep; no amount of counting sheep or any other animal
would help. We agreed to let her lie in our bed for one minute as long as she
promised to go back to her room without crying.
She agreed.
The minute passed and the meltdown ensued.
What followed was a serious talk about the importance of keeping
promises to ensure people trust you. For a moment I thought about all the
candidates vying for our votes and my anger at her completely disregarding the
promise she made softened. Start ‘em young, I thought.
If only it were that simple.
Parenting is challenging at the best of times when you’re already on the
edge of exhaustion. It’s doubly challenging when you’re exhausted before you
even get home and have to find a way to parent and work at night, prep for the
morning and somehow get enough sleep to wake up and do it all over again.
Our work responsibilities are so demanding that we don’t get to spend a
lot of time with our daughters during the week. In the morning, my husband gets
the girls up, fed, dressed, and shipped off to daycare while I work, seeing
them only briefly before they leave. We reverse roles in the evening, with my
husband often missing the youngest before bedtime.
Then we both get sucked into our laptops, email and Slack messages.
So what is a parent to do when pulled to extreme ends of the work-life
balance?
It starts with setting boundaries and trying to be present without
devices for time with our children. We have desperately tried to do that, and
I’m not sure we’ll get better at it as the days roll on. From now on, if our
eldest asks for an extra minute of snuggle time in bed, she gets it to let her
know she remains the most important person in our lives.
It also includes trusting that our four-year-old in particular can
understand why we’re as busy as we are. We have talked with her, in her own
terms and on her time, about what we as her parents are doing for work. We talk
about how there are people who are hoping we will choose them to be in charge
or important – language from one of her favourite books, John Oliver’s The
Adventures of Marlon Bundo (a must-read for kids!). We explain that we are
trying to make sure voters have information to help them choose who they want
to vote for, which makes our work important, but not more important than her.
Sometimes my husband will let her cuddle up while he’s typing away to
show her what he’s doing and make her feel part of things.
We will keep working on work-life balance during this campaign because,
to paraphrase a Portland father, it’s too late to start finding that balance if
you’ve already lost it.
J.R. Storemont’s LinkedIn post in early September put this issue in
stark terms for us. He spent so much time at work that he barely saw his twin
boys. Then one day, during a meeting, he got a call from his wife that one of
his eight-year-old boys had died in his sleep. I won’t go into the
heart-wrenching details, but will note this one thought he had: Work can help
us grow and offer something to the world, “but that work needs a balance,” he
wrote, adding “it’s a balance that lets us offer our gifts to the world but not
at the cost of self and family.”
It’s a good reminder, not only for our household, but for any parent
struggling to leave work behind and be truly present with their kids.
October 21 can’t come soon enough.
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