Eleanor Rigby

Two weeks ago, I emailed a friend.  I wrote, “At this moment (and this could easily shift in the next moment), I seem to be settling in to acceptance of this…as it is.  It feels less of a struggle…less of a longing for what comes next.”  One-hundred moments later, I sat with Sloane trying to teach her to write her letters correctly. I could see she was getting more and more deflated as I emphasized which letters go from the first floor to the basement of the letter “house” and which are first and second floor letters.  Yet, I persisted having her practice writing them until she had them correct. Practice makes perfect.  Her brow drooped.  Her head hung lower.  Then she looked at me and said, “You’re mean!” And, I crumbled. 

Even now, more than a week later, as I write this, I tear up.  I left the room to take a moment to myself.  When I returned, she was sitting dejected on the couch. I told her, “I may not be the person you want to teach you, and this is certainly not the job I want to be doing.  But, it is what it is – like it or not. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to do this job.”  She replied, “Wasn’t Daddy a teacher?”  This broke my heart even further, because he was not, and I was (albeit to adults), and clearly any option was looking better than me.  The incompetence that I’d been feeling since the start of my homeschooling gig was apparently on full display. My kindergartener was questioning my abilities and looking for any potentially available alternative option.  I was devastated. 

I tried to pull it together, to move on.  But, my tears were so close to the surface.  I was hurt that my sweet daughter had had it with me and was looking for another.  I was ashamed for having pushed her so hard to get it right (my leaning), when perhaps a little practice itself without the perfect end result would have been just fine. I was resentful, because teaching my children is truly the last thing I wanted to be doing, yet, I was giving up much to show up to this job day-after-day. I was ashamed that I couldn’t be adult enough to keep my lack of job satisfaction to myself instead of venting it with my 6-year-old.  I kept taking a moment to try to get it together. Alas, it wasn’t working.  At intervals, I cried myself through my day, longing for the light of the next day that would provide a new moment, without the sadness and shame.  Longing for what would come next…to flee from this moment “as it is.”

As I cried my way through pilates in my bedroom, I heard The Beatles sing about Eleanor Rigby. And, I thought about the face that I keep in the jar by the door…  Who is it for? 

***

Recently, I had the great pleasure of speaking with a group of executive coaches in South Africa about fallback.  Several noted how some of the leaders they work with seem to be in denial about how the circumstances of the world have affected them.  A couple of weeks ago, a friend who retired from a 20-year career in the military punctuated by multiple deployments, shared the revisited trauma of feeling disarmed that he experiences when he takes a run or goes to the grocery store in the time of pandemic. When he talked to his family about this, about the heightened threat that seems to lurk around every corner, about the emotional toll it takes to just live daily life right now, they say, nope, they don’t notice it. I’ve taken to referring to this as the nothing-to-see-here-folks syndrome. 

Are we all wearing the face we keep in the jar by the door? Who is it for?

Why do we have such a hard time showing our true face – whatever that face may be in this moment – in the context of these unprecedented times?  

I have a hypothesis that what this may be about for some of us is privilege.  What privilege I have to be able to devote my days to homeschooling my children, to have rooms to disperse them to, so they may engage without distraction; to have time and space that I can go to “take a moment”, to do pilates; to know that very likely, the next day is going to be better, that I have the resources (internal and external) to make it so.  There are so many in this world who live without privilege…and because of this pandemic, we are seeing the disparities between those with and those without that much more clearly and frequently. 

As those who seek to exercise leadership during this time of massive uncertainty, we are seeing it in our teams, our students, our patients, our constituents.  There are so many others who have it worse than we do. Perhaps, we think, who are we to complain about our privileged lives?  Do we feel shame when we give voice to our first-world-problems-cum-coronavirus, knowing that there is so much real suffering beyond our disinfected doors? I’ll admit that I’ve spent the last week trying to write this post, and I keep getting stuck…probably for this very reason.  How do I claim my own sadness, my own sense of loss and despair and frustration, when I can see so very clearly that mine is the privileged version of the Coronavirus sob-story?

Yet, there is also suffering that lies within these doors, within us.  By not acknowledging this suffering, by not accepting it as part of our own human experience, we deny the full human experience of others…be they those who find it hard to adjust their expectations of and find patience for their 6-year-old student/daughter, or those who must leave their students to their own devices as they embark disarmed every day to do their essential jobs. 

This is hard, folks. We make it harder, for ourselves and for others, when we deny the fullness of our lived experience…the fullness of ourselves.  When we deny the suffering of self, the anguish and despair, we leave no space open for others to bring their own. We set an expectation for some kind of superhuman steeling against the forces of our time that are so vehemently assaulting the world as we know it, and the self that we know.

Like Eleanor Rigby, we wait at the window, wearing the face that we keep in a jar by the door. Who is it for?

Is it for my children? Is it so they can feel safe and secure, wrapped up in their hermetically-sealed bubble of shelter-in-place life?  Is it in the hopes that they may reflect back on this time of homeschooling with fond memories of how we bonded over at-home makerspace projects, composition of opinion pieces, and math word problems…nary a hint of impatience to be seen?  What does that do for them? What does that do for them, as they are themselves experiencing an angst, an unsettling, a sense of malaise that they may not yet know how to name?  That I so powerfully want to teach them how to claim. This, too, is you…is us…is me. 

Are we wearing the face for our students?  Hoping they may not notice that they walked out of the classroom one day in March, not realizing that they would not return to complete the school year as they had every year before. That the fun runs, field days, performances, athletic competitions, dances, and promotions would be lost this year.  That the experience of school would look eerily like the experience of home, except stuck in front of a screen for eight hours… only not by choice.  Hoping that they don’t feel the absence of all of the parts of school that we didn’t notice until now were integral parts of learning and development. The conversations; the joking around; the stories told over lunch; the hurt of having your friends not want to play your game; the joy of collaborating in real time and space with two of your classmates on a project for which you got to pick the topic; the pride you feel when you get the physical high-five from the teacher who is not also your parent. 

Are we wearing the face for the teams we lead? So, our colleagues don’t notice the overwhelm of yet another zoom meeting, abutting seven prior zoom meetings, while they hear their spouses lose their shit on their children, because the children won’t rally to write one more reading summary?  For the organizations we head?  So, our employees aren’t aware of the anxiety we experienced when we’ve deliberated between laying off half of our employees or keeping everyone, but cutting salaries across the board by 20%. 

Just because we don’t name it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  Within us.  In the space between us.  The unspoken doesn’t go away.  It just festers in its abandonment.

When we do not acknowledge our own suffering, we leave little space for others to acknowledge theirs. When we claim “all is good here,” we don’t normalize the possibility of others having a different experience. They may begin to question themselves. “Why does this other person have it together, and I don’t?  Why do they seem to be fine handling the complete turn upside down of their worlds, yet I have to give myself a pep talk to bring myself with patience to a kindergartener who is learning how to count on and a fourth grader who knew what 7 times 9 equals 15 minutes ago, but takes three guesses to get it right now?” They may begin to question us – “Are you delusional? Do you live in an alternate reality?”

How about we get a big ass jar in which we can place all of our faces?  Because, folks, we don’t just have one face we wear.  Not in the best of times. Certainly not during the time of coronavirus.  And, perhaps the greatest gift we can offer, from whatever place we sit, is to wear the face that reflects who we are in each moment…our full authentic humanity. Because, while our circumstances may differ, the fact that we are all human is the bond that connects us.  To deny the fullness of our human experience does not allow others to bring the fullness of theirs. In a world that is so drastically marked by the lack of human connection, perhaps showing our real face, as it exists and shifts from one moment to the next, is the most powerful distance connection we can offer.