One of the goals I have articulated for The Significance Project is to enhance my experience of significance as a member of my own immediate family. For many years, I felt largely absent from my family as I focused the bulk of my energy on establishing a career. While I was relatively confident about my skills as a parent, my self-efficacy was low; I knew how I wanted to parent, but I just wasn't there very often to do it. When COVID-19 began to snake it's way into Canada, I was actually looking forward to staying home with my kids. They're teenagers, and I figured it might be my last opportunity to do some immersive parenting and forge deeper connections with them.
I've always thrived on routine, so on day one of social isolation the kids and I sat down together to make what we called a "flexible schedule." We negotiated daily times for learning, physical activity, house chores, and screen time. We agreed to take care with our food supplies, cook healthy meals, and eat at the table together. Implicit in this, I thought, was an agreement that we would distance ourselves from each other within the house in order to maintain our collective sanity. There was a bit of grumbling from everyone, but at that time I truly thought that self isolating with the kids would be easy.
Nope. Ten days into isolation, my kids had devoured well over a kilo of chocolate, mostly without me ever seeing it happen. They decimated our food supplies like a swarm of grasshoppers on ripening wheat. Their moods could swing from high to low in a matter of seconds. They began to tease each other, poking all the right buttons to piss one another off. They became extraordinarily loud. The notion of personal space became obsolete. In some ways, the kids even reverted to a toddler-like state; they insisted on conversing with me through the closed bathroom door and became belligerent when they were denied requests for things like lasagna at a moment's notice. They appeared to forget about the conventions of respectful communication, with swear words and insults buzzing around our house like fruit flies.
As an adult who has done a whole lot of self reflection, I realize that my children's pandemic behavior is likely fuelled by stress and uncertainty. But I still laugh every time I see that Victor Frankl quote floating around in internet memes, the one about how there's a space between stimulus and response, and how you have the ability to choose your response. Choosing an emotional response seems impossible when your ordinarily delightful kids become assholes in the blink of an eye. In truth, I have experienced some of my very worst parenting moments in the past couple of weeks, where my outbursts have been just as dick-ish as the behavior I was responding to.
But there's learning in this. I have always associated good parenting with tasks, such as coaching my kids on essay writing whilst baking banana muffins and signing field trip forms from the school. More recently, I've come to know good parenting as being present and in the moment with my kids. Both of these things are important, and I should try to do them. I don't, though, think that tasks and presence lead to significance in parenting right now.
I've come to the conclusion that what I need to do instead is model, and I don't mean that I need to be really really good-looking. I need to model the ways that I wrestle with my own questions and frustration. I need to model a healthy relationship with the internet and social media during a global emergency. More than anything, I think I need to model my own self-care. It's been really, really hard to maintain a meditation and yoga practice over the past few weeks, but I'm starting to see how important it is, and how important it is to be transparent about it. Maybe through this kind of social modelling I can teach my kids how to modify their own behavioral responses to the stress of a pandemic. Maybe the best way for me to be a significant parent is to take care of myself, and show my kids how to do the same.
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