Life on the Glacier

Feel like you are stuck on a glacier that is vast, ice-cold, moving at the pace of about 25 centimeters a day?

Families everywhere are trying again to manage working virtually with young kids and college kids schooling at home, Zooming on shared Wi-Fi, and not enough spare bedrooms for offices. We're bundled up on drifting ice with no land in immediate sight. It’s been going on for nine months, we are passing the virus from one to another, and everyone is driving each other crazy in now the darkest of winter.

I was admiring another coach’s backdrop on Zoom last night, picture perfect with cute bookshelves, a potted plant, and a giant red poppy on the wall—but then she turned her camera to show the guest room bed next to her and her teenage daughter sprawled out with a laptop.

I was no longer envious.

I had only seen the top of her glacier, not the 90% that was underwater.

So, how do we manage life on this glacier?

I am group coaching a dozen moms who work full time and are craving help and support in this time. They are figuring out how to get their work done at home while tempering everyone’s tantrums—hollering for their highest spiritual selves to show up—before they do something drastic and irreversible to their husband or their kids.

As one mother was sharing with me yesterday, she knows she can’t control her kids. Or her spouse. Even though she would like to. But she's becoming desperate.

I remember some challenging times with my son back when I was single parenting in a tiny apartment. Once, he spilled our gallon of milk all over my work papers and I literally cried over it.

Now that he is 23 and no longer living at home, I sometimes go through his old schoolwork, and find penciled notes apologizing for whatever he had done: lying about something, not turning in half of his homework assignments, playing Xbox rather than doing flashcards. In one note, he had given me a dollar to cheer me up—just like the Tooth Fairy!

So how do we embrace this muck, the disarray? I don’t know how I survived it when I was single parenting without a pandemic. All I know is that this is a time to be with what is, to learn to tolerate the disorder, and to stop pushing against it—instead, to turn our lifeboat downstream.

What is downstream? Celebrating small wins. Reveling the time we have together—because it will not last. Remembering this child or that teen are just as confused by what is going on. They are trying to find their way.

Leo Buscaglia once said, “It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.”

Play, work, learning, family are all mushed together now. Maybe it’s not such a big deal if kids are not doing their homework when they are supposed to. This is a time for progress, not perfection. Maybe this time is meant to test us. But it's not so much about getting As or Bs. Maybe it’s simply Pass/Fail.

And, if we come out the other side and everyone in the family is still alive with just a few scratches and minor bruises, that’s a solid Pass.