If you haven’t read Part I. of this story yet, start here.
The next day was Easter. The family was planning to drive to Santa Cruz where Rebecca’s parents had organized an Easter egg hunt.
“So we’re getting ready to go. I sit down with Ella to brush her hair, and that’s when I see two nits.”
“That’s too much!” I said. “The cough with the peeing. The foot surgery. The whale watching fiasco. And then lice?…It’s unreal…Can you turn your head a little?”
Sunday evening was spent with mountains of laundry and several bottles of gooey lice shampoo. But the battle with lice was just beginning. You can’t get rid of them in one treatment. It takes mountains of laundry and daily nit checking for weeks before you can declare your family definitively lice-free. You also need to warn other parents, so Rebecca had to call the school and then everyone in Ella’s after school co-op to let them know their kids might have been exposed.
“You can just hear the trauma in these working parents’ voices,” Rebecca said leaning forward so I could inspect the area above her neck. “One of the moms told me, ‘I think you should comb out her hair every three hours.’ She works full time and has really thick hair, and she’s terrified of getting it…I know I’d feel the same way, but what am I going to do? Pull Ella out of class every three hours to comb her hair?”
Monday morning, Jason got the kids off to school. Rebecca was about to drive to work for the first time in almost two weeks when she discovered her car had a flat tire. She left the car parked in front the house and asked a friend to drive her to her office in San Francisco. When she got there, it was non-stop activity.
“This woman is training me on how to lead subjects through a research study. I have these very specific things I need to say. There’s this big machine I have to calibrate. It’s a lot to remember. I’m supposed to look ready, act ready, be ready. But of course, I’m not ready…”
Rebecca spent that day faking her way through the training. On Tuesday, it was another race to make up for missed time.
“I dashed out at one point to move my car. I was starving and didn’t have time to eat lunch–they were waiting for me inside. I started thinking about how tired and stressed out I was…I’d just gotten my period that morning. I could tell I was about to lose it. I thought, Just don’t cry. You can’t cry. If you act like you’re OK, then you’re OK.”
There was barely time to go to the bathroom and when she finally did make it there, she discovered that she’d bled through her tampon and all the way through her pants.
“Anyone else would just go home, right? But I couldn’t go home. I was already feeling so bad about missing work. I had to show everyone they could rely on me…Luckily they were black pants so I just cleaned up as best as I could and continued working,” Rebecca said. “That’s what we do, right? We just keep going.”
“I’m so sorry you had to go through all that,” I said, talking to the back of her head. I know she’s trying to have a sense of humor about the whole thing, but I can hear the despair in her voice.
“I’m sick of being in crisis,” Rebecca sighed. “These women I work with, they’re really understanding but they’ve heard it all before. They’re tired of it. I know they’re thinking, Rebecca, you need to get your shit together.”
When you’re working and raising kids, everything is held together with a very delicate string. One tug of the string, one illness, a few nights of bad sleep, a flat tire, and the whole apparatus, your whole carefully constructed life, starts to come undone.
Being a parent makes you realize how little control you have over the things that happen to you. People who don’t have kids don’t always understand this. So instead of being a hero who is so dedicated to her job that she continues working through the lice, blood, exhaustion, and flat tires, Rebecca feels like a screw up.
“I felt the same way when I was working full time,” I said. “I was in a constant state of apology. Even the most sympathetic people get tired of hearing excuses after a while so you pretend everything is OK when it’s not OK. It’s very lonely–Oh!…Oh no…”
There it was, brownish gray, shaped like a sesame seed but smaller, cemented to a piece of hair about a centimeter from her scalp.
“What, did you just find something?”
***
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
You really captured it, again. After the first part of the story I wrote about humor. But when it’s all too much to bear and you don’t have the luxury of stopping, humor doesn’t help you cope anymore. It just isolates you further and masks the real trouble you are in. But until having strong emotions, suffering from exhaustion, and admitting to having too many demands lead to real concern and support rather than diminished respect in the workplace, overwhelmed working parents will have to hide and pretend and hope they don’t break. Most often, the help would only have to be temporary: recognition of how hard things have been, a “gift” day off to rest, help with an assignment. Can you imagine?
I couldn’t agree more! I think women everywhere need to STOP APOLOGIZING! We haven’t done anything wrong – and what we’re doing is something right. We’re doing what needs doing. We’re supporting our families. We’re raising our children. We’re creating ourselves. How much is too much – that’s got to be up to each woman as an individual. But I’ve seen again and again that apologizing is like an admission of guilt. People respond accordingly. If you do something wrong – apologize. If your co-workers and boss/s know you’re raising a family, recognize, at least intellectually and verbally that your family is important (to you, if not to society at large), than they need to SUCK IT UP. Not you, mama, THEM. Being flexible for working parent, dads and moms, is part of the new paradigm. We make it so. Here’s an example. I came in one morning and asked about a meeting that I hadn’t made it to the evening before. My co-worker – not exactly a boss, but definitely higher up the chain – says snarkily, “well where were you – then you’d know?” Something along those lines. I replied, “I was feeding my children, Pat. You know that whole, raising a family thing?” He went beet red and my other co-workers laughed. Now – is he in my biggest fan club – probably not. But he has not EVER SINCE given me a hard time about being a mommy first. I think we need to remind our employers that family friendly is a choice they made – and will need to make again and again. You either support working parents or you don’t. Like parenting, it’s not always easy or simple.
I second the “we need to stop apologizing” comment. It’s hard to do, but so important. That said, I’ve only learned to do that in my latest job where the culture in my department is decidedly pro-family. My boss leads by example: taking time off regularly to go on field trips, or just stay home with a sick kid. And we follow the lead talking about our kids and respecting each other when we have crazy schedules. Of course, we still have to get the work done, but it’s easier to concentrate on the work when I know I have the support to make my own schedule (for the most part).
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