“One very important key to maintaining our daily sanity is a simple scheduling tactic I call Putting Things the Hell Off.”
― Ian Frazier, The New Yorker: "The Cursing Mommy"
"Are you the default parent? If you have to think about it, you’re not. You’d know. Trust me. The default parent is the one responsible for the emotional, physical and logistical needs of the children. Spoiler alert: It’s typically the one with the uterus. The scope and volume of managing this many lives and details comes with a surprisingly huge emotional and mental exhaustion that is unique to the default parent. It deserves to be understood... and named!" ― M.Blazoned, The Huffington Post, 2014
WARNING***: Not for the faint of heart. Lots of pretend profanity below!
Confession time, as obviously I haven't written in a while: I've been in the pain cave since arriving back home from Boston, overwhelmed by the onslaught of daily life and a whole new level of parenting intensity. So no, I have not had the capacity to write, wholly without the fortitude or brainspace to mobilize my creative juices. In the back of my mind I worried that the spell was broken; that upon the re-entry back home, my own ability to turn off the inner critic and just express with abandon was somehow compromised by being right back in the thick of things, the mundane and the medical crashing together to create an even more intense existential exhaustion than the normal demands of work and life and parenting can bring about even at baseline.
But is the spell broken? I think not: it is just that there is no %$@#^& time! Getting back home was a big relief and the support network we have remains strong and unbelievably helpful. But the logistical burden of the daily navigation of life - especially with this additional sobering and high-stakes dimension - seems herculean to me. It is a balancing act that involves drinking from countless firehoses all at once at a relentless but necessary pace. Firehoses without even the decency to spray a buttery chardonnay rather than a nauseating brackish-smelling water. And when I manage to stop gulping and catch my breath, even to use the Force to turn those firehoses around and think I'm gaining some power or momentum on the things I am trying to get done, I am hardly keeping at bay the wildfire spread of entropy that we are constantly guarding against right now. These days I often picture myself as an octopus in fireman's garb wielding far too few of those powerful sprays to put out the acute fires that no one else has the water to douse. Did I mention that I turned 40 this weekend? So yes ... a middle-aged, over-the-hill &#^$%*& octopus. At least I have my Halloween costume figured out.
We have an awesome community and countless offers of help, but as all parents know, there are things impossible to delegate as far as managing the needs of children, let alone the household, the family schedules, the bills, the coordination of calendars .... and now the countless health insurance calls, hospital check-ins, medical detail management and ever-changing treatment routines, let alone my own business even as I keep my own client work mostly at bay to focus on James’s care. The details and the follow-up fall to the default parent. No matter if you can outsource various duties, one parent still has to be The Node, and any possible delegation takes brainspace and coordination that I just can’t spare right now. I hate being The Node. I always have. Even pre-diagnosis, with both me and Charlie navigating intense work demands and the kids’ needs and nanny dramas and school logistics, and all of the rest of the administravia of this stage of life, I have often thought that we really ... needed ... a wife! My God, what I wouldn't give right now for the love of a good woman. Preferably one with excellent organizational skills.
Case in point: I started this journal entry over two weeks ago when James and I were still in the hospital after an overnight at UCSF to get his new chemo port surgically placed in his chest, hours after the promised discharge … waiting on yet more paperwork, more prescriptions, more protocol updates, more medical personnel to make their presence known. The good news is that his surgery went smoothly (albeit 3 hours later than scheduled and with him unable to have any food or water from midnight the night before until well after the mid-afternoon procedure). I managed him through that pain cave of his own and quelled his fears about what the hell they were about to do to him now, and despite some discomfort and a very late bedtime, we had a decent overnight in the hospital. But with each visit and step forward, the administravia abounds and multiplies ... dare I say metastasizes? And even when things go according to "plan" the medical troubleshooting, ambiguity, coordination and overall logistics of his treatment (let alone life in general) do not let up. Think playing a turbo-speed game of Whack-a-Mole that NEVER TURNS OFF.
James and I finally left the hospital that Tuesday afternoon post-surgery. My heroic sister had flown in to be with us for several days to help us get back on track and to be another set of hands given the aforementioned wildfire entropy. I saw a few clients on Wednesday afternoon while Carrie played pseudo-parent in my absence, and after fighting traffic back home from the city, I entered the house where Charlie had also just returned from work and we noticed James seemed a little warm. We grabbed a thermometer and got out the massive tome of instructions on whom to call when: he had spiked a small fever (anything over 101 degrees means straight to the emergency room in case of bacterial infection) which kept creeping up, and after much back and forth with the clinical team at UCSF Charlie hustled James over to the ER. The nurses tried to access the newly placed port to draw blood and give him immediate antibiotics, with James screaming and kicking so hard that he needed to be restrained and tied down on a board to protect his own body while he fought to thwart their valiant attempts. It seemed the port wasn’t working after all, they poked our shrieking and terrified 5 year-old with more needles in his arm, and finally got his fever down to the safe zone. Another late bedtime for all that night, and back to the hospital for me and James the next day for more lab work and troubleshooting. And then yet more insurance phone hell that afternoon to tell me we should have gone to the lab 4 doors down since that one has a different insurance tax ID and the other isn't covered. Seriously?? When they assured me the whole &%!^&#$%$ facility was in-network? Awesome ... yet more money down the IV tubes.
Despite the insurance frustrations, obviously it is the medical toll on James that is most challenging. To see your child terrified and helpless while you are forced to stand by - or even worse, to collude in getting him to let others pin him down and pierce him - carves out an internal pain in the parental soul that would take some psychological cartographer decades to map out, let alone excavate. While conventional wisdom tells us as parents to let our children feel some hurt in life, to stop helicoptering in to save them from disappointment or failure or fear, this level of fear is on a dimension that this innocent young boy should never have to endure. And as for the parents who have to bear witness to it? Frankly I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy either.
The experts talk of the fault lines and fissures an experience like this can create in a marriage, especially when the normal demands of busy lives are challenging enough to navigate together. Charlie has been an awesome partner, father and co-parent throughout this ordeal, with the medical chops to boot. This is not at all a tirade against him or the other co-parents out there who are not the "default" ones or those not bearing the "uterus" per se - I am not propagating a feminist agenda here. Co-parenting always creates a hard division of labor, and Charlie's line of work is so intense, with the family members of his own patients needing his time and attention and no way to get around the ICU admissions and consultations that don’t relent, the patients who trust him and need his care and input, the thorough medical notes that need to be written to document it all so nothing gets lost in translation that could put a patient at risk. His partners have been awesome and understanding, but they are all pulling more than their weight and they covered so much for Charlie when we were stranded in Boston. There is no room for him to pull back on what are shared professional responsibilities and necessary to maintain the integrity of their medical practice, with human lives hanging in the balance. I understand.
But it also means that my life has done a total 180 since James’s diagnosis, and while Charlie’s life has also been rocked, it is hard not to start going down the default parent resentment route. He has to leave the house for morning rounds before the kids wake up and thus before James starts to throw his standard morning drug-induced tantrum that leaves me drained and exhausted, even bruised at times; he gets to go to work every day in an office of supportive colleagues and devoted patients and inhabit an identity approaching his best professional self; he gets to compartmentalize and escape the hellish daily grind that this diagnosis has delivered and come home when his schedule allows and then finish his doctors notes late into the night from our home computer. I can hardly send an email to a client, let alone return yet another medical case manager phone call without being interrupted a zillion times by someone wanting another thing from me or by James having a major meltdown or another logistical detail needing my acute attention. I will not pretend to be a martyr - it simply is HARD to often be the solo parent on the scene in this situation. It is not how Charlie would want it either, and he is maxed out on all fronts as well and doing everything he can to be on the scene whenever possible. It just is what it is right now.
So while it resonated before, Ian Frazier's awesome New Yorker column the Cursing Mommy has never felt quite so apropos. One of my favorite lines: "In situations like this, the Cursing Mommy recommends that you take three deep breaths, concentrate inwardly on some attractive and relaxing vacation scene, and scream “F*%#!” at the top of your lungs. There—I feel better. Don’t you?"
A couple of years ago a friend forwarded me the blog quoted at the top of this entry from The Huffington Post about being The Default Parent. I think it was during early fall when all of the burdens of having school-aged children are so intense: pages and pages of school paperwork, activity sign-ups, scheduling jigsaw puzzles demanding to be organized like a high-stakes game of Tetris that your child's future ability to thrive in life seems entirely dependent on. Standard doctor's visits and dentist appointments and immunization records, variable school calendars and carpooling duties, school supplies, fundraisers, homework, the tyranny of making endless school lunches, the crazy-making herding cats exercise of getting them out the door in the morning and the endless communications: emails, texts, owl missives, smoke signals regarding any of the hundred balls in the air stemming from any of about 8 million different online forums that aren't coordinated and are the broker's choice for whatever activity is at hand. God I feel like a cliché, but every default parent knows how fast and intensely these additional burdens add up.
Upon reading the article, I wanted to both laugh and cry with an aching recognition of the toll it takes to be the one primarily responsible for conceiving of, strategizing around and executing all of that, all while weathering the emotions and storms of children in transition and trying to carve out some sort of redeeming professional existence as well. Charlie comes home and mentions innocently that we're out of toilet paper and I want to swear at him. The poor guy! It is not his fault, and the observation is indeed helpful - truth be told, I wipe my ass too. And yet ... I will be the one to store that in my brain and/or write it on the list and then do the shopping to get it along with the other 286 things we are out of. When and how and why did the significant bulk of the details of shared life and parenting become my job (which is not what his innocent observation implies, mind you – but it is the default parent who is going to remember and get the goddamn toilet paper in between all of the other domestic demands). I sacrificed my body and my professional momentum to carry the children and nurture them through infancy. I too worked full time to make ends meet while our children were young, and with a hard-won reputation and equally hard-won flexible schedule I now run my own business and make a comparable salary while dutifully orchestrating (aka twisting myself into the equivalent of a pretzel-in-training-to-be-an-Olympic-gymnast) a way for at least one of us (aka me) to be a semi-present parent on the scene in whatever situation calls for it.
This not about assigning blame, nor keeping a tally. This inequity is not Charlie’s fault – and I shouldn't necessarily extrapolate: perhaps many couples have this figured out, as the crazy demands on doctors these days means there is a lot less bandwidth to do anything other than be in survival mode with patient care as the ultimate priority. I admire him for choosing a profession that is noble, meaningful, and high stakes, and there is just no flexibility when dealing with patients whose lives are on the line. I understand this all too well these days given where we are with James and the medical heroes who have helped us along. Charlie is actually saving lives, after all, and apart from keeping our family and household running, my main professional focus is helping executives have the occasional epiphany. I gracefully yield the floor.
But even before this major medical monkey-wrench, it rankled. The fantasy of being able to leave for work without the kids clawing at my legs with heart-wrenching pleas of "don't leave!" that befall me on the days when I am trying to get to an early meeting. The thought of being spared the constant texts and emails and transportation logistics around the kids during the day even when our normal routines are humming along. The notion of coming home to a dinner time that someone else has used bandwidth to consider, shop for, cook, and get on the table. The idea that I could engage during bedtime as the fun one they want to read with who is not constantly henpecking them to hang up their backpack or get their clothes organized or brush their teeth before mommy blows her top. Which. She. Does. A Lot. He's an excerpt from mBlazoned: "All. Day. Long. I handle the needs of our kids: activity sign-ups, transportation logistics, doctor & dentist appointments, friend and boy issues, hurt feelings, school fundraisers, gift buying, haircuts, clothes shopping, and thank you note writing, which, incidentally, is the work of the devil. I also manage the organization of drawers between seasons to see what fits. This is a crap job that only the default parent even knows exists. Default parents know the names of their kids’ teachers, all of them. They fill out endless forms, including the 20-page legal document necessary to play a sport at school. They spell words, constantly. They know how much wrapping paper there is in the house. The default parent doesn’t have her own calendar, but one with everyone’s events on it that makes her head hurt when she looks at it. They know a notary. They buy poster board in 10-packs. They’ve worked tirelessly to form a bond with the school receptionists. They know their kids’ sizes, including shoes, dammit.
Forget the information superhighway, default parents are the real deal in data storage and retrieval... The stuff that the default parent is storing in their brain is in direct correlation to the amount of wine they are drinking. Too much. What’s troubling is there seems to be no meaningful escape for the default parent. They don’t get a break unless they physically remove themselves completely from their families... and throw their phones in a lake. Even when they do get a weekend away, they leave a detailed spreadsheet of daily activities organized by event time with notes. They arrange carpools and playdates, and leave a wrapped present for the birthday party. The non-default parent? They just leave. Incredibly, they just kiss us goodbye, and leave. Motherf***er. OK, deep breath. Serenity now.” Before James was diagnosed, I was already at the breaking point as far as that emotional and mental - and yes, even existential - exhaustion. Do I love my children and my husband? Fiercely. Do I feel lucky in my life? Yes. Do I want to give up the momentum I have and professional esteem I get from my career? No. Do I want to outsource core responsibilities of parenting - or be less of a conscientious and present parent in order to maintain it? No, and I reject that paradigm. Did I sign up for handling all of the bullshit that comes with parenting in the modern era? No ... not with eyes wide open. But I did not have a solution, only a conundrum and a feeling that this just wasn't sustainable. And then that hammer came down, joke's on me. I thought it was a challenge before? Now I write out spreadsheets with medical dosages and days of the week in excruciating detail so that my sleep-addled brain does not forget. I field constant phone calls from various medical parties - the OR, the ER, the oncology clinic, the pediatrician's office, the billing outfits of 8 different specialists who may or many not be coverage by our PPO insurance and yet were deemed medically necessary when we were inpatient. I painstakingly arrange, coordinate, and mobilize the public school district bureaucracy for James to get some sort of education before he is allowed back inside a classroom in (hopefully) mid-April. I leave to god forbid go to one meeting or appointment or exercise break and sweat the small stuff big time - what if he poops? What if he doesn’t? Did I forget to tell them how to use the thermometer? Did I leave the more acute set of emergency numbers by the phone? Come to think of it, do we even still have a working landline or has COMCAST cut us off after our automatic payment credit card has expired and I just have not had the *^&#$*&* time to update it?????
Hmmm .... maybe I could at least throw my landline into a lake. This is not at all a complaint about Charlie - he is an awesome father and a committed husband. It is that one of us, as co-parents - MUST make the bandwidth to manage all of this. And it can't be him given his profession. To rise above, to stay grateful instead of resentful, to have a tragedy like this make us stronger instead of fractured, means practicing a hell of a lot of gratitude, patience, voicing when and where I need his help rather than assuming he should know, pushing him out of his comfort zone as far as where he can establish better professional boundaries without compromising his integrity as a doctor, a professional, a medical partner to his stellar colleagues whose own quality of lives are also adversely affected by any amount he has to scale back.
Resentment and blame are insidious emotions. No one can blame anyone else for what has happened to James. Although I often look at the cleanser I have under the sink, the non-organic chicken in the fridge, the cell phones constantly bleeping around him, and I think … what if? What if I didn’t protect him enough? Shield him from these environmental assaults? Convince us to live a simpler more remote life in Alaska so I could make sure he and Grace didn’t absorb our own level of baseline daily stress? We just have no way of knowing where the hell this cancer came from. And then the medical discharge nurse tells me never to use organic cleaning supplies because they just don’t really kill the surface bacteria. So it’s Clorox and Lysol all the way. Motherf***er. I thought that’s what gave him cancer in the first place!!!!
When the diabolical roots of blame or resentment that we all fall prey to start to create fault lines or fissures in your partnership, especially in times of stress … stop and connect. Empathize. Be kind to each other. Tune in. Create virtuous cycles of generosity and delight. It is trite, but it is powerful: actively remember what you love about your partner every day. Practice gratitude for what they bring to your life. Make it stronger – them, you, your relationship, your family. All of humanity. Make us stronger.
And as you do that? You can still give in to the cursing mommy syndrome, as long as it’s not directed at anyone but the goddamn shitty situation that will eventually resolve. At least that cursing mommy gets my sense of humor.
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