The Journal of Best Practices (25 page)

“Yay!” She ran upstairs and returned a few seconds later, reporting that Mommy had okayed the vitamins.

“Oh. Umm . . . okay, hang on. I’ll be right back.”

I jogged back upstairs.
I’d be eating cereal right now.
Getting into the bedroom was easy enough, but at some point in the last thirty seconds, Kristen had locked the bathroom door. So I grabbed the pin that we keep above the door and jimmied the lock open. She was shampooing her hair.

“Knock knock,” I said.

“Dave, seriously?”

“I’m trying to exhibit initiative.”

“Well . . .” She stopped herself, finishing her response with only a sigh, a sigh that seemed to say,
You’re failing.

“Anyway, what do I give the kids for vitamins?”

“Read the bottles,” she said. “It’s written on the bottles. Whatever the bottle says to give to them, that’s what they get.”

“Okay, so a multivitamin, a D vitamin, a calcium, and a probiotic?”

“You got it.”

“Okay. Have a good shower. In fact, take your time this morning. I got it under control.”

She didn’t say anything, so I went back downstairs to administer the vitamins. I was hoping to get my routine started without further interruptions, but it was only a matter of time before Parker started trying to tell me something. After five minutes of me not understanding what he was asking for, Emily translated for him: “He says he wants you to put chocolate milk in his orange juice.”

What the . . . Is this what goes on down here in the mornings?
“Parker, do you want Daddy to put some chocolate milk in your orange juice?”

He nodded, as if to say,
Duh! What have I been blabbing about this whole time?

“Oh. Umm . . . okay, hang on. I’ll be right back.”

This time, even the bedroom door had been locked. The shower was no longer running, and I could hear the morning news blaring from the television so that Kristen could hear it over the roar of her hair dryer. I reached for the pin above the bedroom door, but then I stopped myself.
Initiative. Come on, man. Show her you can do this.

I wasn’t sure what to do about Parker’s chocolate-milk-orange-juice, so I stood in front of the bedroom door, staring at my toes. “Kris?” I called quietly. No answer. I took a deep breath and headed back to the kitchen.

“Okay, Parker, but just a little bit.”

By the time Kristen came down, I had given up on servicing demands and had turned on our kids’ favorite cartoon,
Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!
They sat on the couch in a trance, while I did what I could to salvage my routine.

Kristen seemed none too appreciative of my efforts. I had been expecting her to say something like “This morning proves that we are in a fifty-fifty, full-partnership, enlightened marriage. I’m so proud of you. I love you.”

What I got was “Why aren’t the kids ready to go to Mary’s?”

“You didn’t ask me to get the kids ready,” I said through a mouthful of cereal.

“I didn’t know I needed to ask, Dave.” She looked at the clock. Two minutes to eight. “All right, I need to leave,” she said. “You’ll need to get them next door.”

Ah, geez, come on! Are you kidding me?!
I was about to ask Kristen when I was supposed to have time to get ready, but my Best Practices rushed in to save the day:
First of all, buster, this is just a little glimpse of what Kristen goes through every morning—and wouldn’t some empathy feel great right about now? Second, you’d never argue with your boss or with a customer. You would just say “Okay” and be done with it. You need to be that flexible at home, remember. Go on, now. Give it a try.

“Okay,” I said.

She thanked me, gave the kids a kiss good-bye, gathered her things, and left. It wasn’t the first time I had ever gotten the kids ready in the morning, but I almost never had to fly completely solo. Kristen was usually home to help, and if she wasn’t, she’d set out all their clothes and leave a note for me with detailed instructions.

But there was no note, so during Kristen’s first session with a client, I sent her a barrage of texts:

It was clear that no more texts were forthcoming, so I called her. The first time, it rang four times before going to voice mail. The second time it rang twice, meaning that she had hit “Ignore Call.” Finally, my calls went straight to voice mail without ringing.

That night, we talked. It was day one on the job for me as Mr. Tuned In to the Needs of Others, and I wanted some feedback from Kristen. She was working in the family room, submitting bills to insurance companies, but I figured she could make time for a brief mini performance review.

“So, I thought this morning went pretty well,” I said.

“That’s good,” she said, reviewing one of her forms.

“It wasn’t a slam dunk, I guess. I could have used some help there toward the end. All those phone calls and texts, you know. I mean, you kinda blew me off, and I didn’t really appreciate that. You know?”

Kristen looked up at me and nodded.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’d like to hear your first impressions.”

She pressed her lips together, leaving only a tight crease where her mouth had been, while she continued staring at me. It was as if something was causing her physical pain. For a few seconds, anyway, because suddenly her face relaxed and she smiled, almost chuckled.

“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” she said, setting her forms down. “I guess it depends on what you thought you were trying to accomplish this morning.”

I explained that I thought I was taking care of everything so she could have time to get ready for work without rushing around. “I was trying to take initiative,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t like getting blown off.”

“Okay. And at what point did you start taking initiative?” She was asking this as if she already knew the answer, like a trial lawyer.

“When I came downstairs—”

“No.” She shook her head. “That wasn’t it. Running into the bathroom a hundred times to ask me what to do isn’t initiative. When did you start to take initiative? When did you take control of the situation?”

I caught my reflection in the glass door of our entertainment center and took a moment to hate myself for not knowing the answer.

“Was it when you turned on the television and let the kids watch cartoons?” she asked.

“No.”

“Was it when you interrupted my first kid’s session with fifty calls and messages?”

“Oh. No. It was after that.”

“When I blew you off?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then.” She let the point swirl around in my head for a minute before she continued. “Part of me was just fed up with answering your questions,” she admitted. “But I knew the only way to get you going was to cut you off. I would never just ignore you for the fun of it.”

I told her that it would have been so much easier—I could have gotten to work before lunch—had she just told me exactly what to do, and she reminded me that she had no one to call when she had to figure stuff out.

“You just get in there and you do it,” she said. “If you’re paying attention to what they need, and you’re making their needs your highest priority, then you’re probably going to make the same decisions that I would make.”

Just like that, we were back to empathy. She picked up her forms, tapped them a few times against her knee, and got back to work. For about twenty minutes, I stared at the faceless wooden figurines of a man and a woman holding an infant on a shelf by our television, trying to imagine myself as a spectacularly tuned-in dad. I could see myself supervising breakfast with Emily and Parker and getting them through a typical day without any help, but then I tried imagining the steps it would take to get there and saw nothing.

“I’m going to have to start journaling this thing until I figure out how to assess the needs of toddlers,” I said.

Kristen punched some numbers into her calculator, nodding, if only to acknowledge that I was done speaking.

“You know what I mean?” I said.

“Dave . . .” She set her stuff on the coffee table and turned to face me. She looked like she wanted to kick me in the teeth, but then she took a deep breath and her face softened. “Look, normally I wouldn’t shortcut your learning process, but I can see this dragging on for months, so I’m just going to help you now.”

“That would be great,” I said. “Hang on while I get my journal.”

When I got back, she told me to make a list: “Put down you, me, and the kids.” Next, she told me to write down what I thought each person had needed that morning.
Oh, I see where she’s going with this.
I completed my list and read it back to her:

Written down, it was hard not to see where my focus lay.

“Wow. So, I don’t need to eat breakfast?” she asked. I added
breakfast
to my Kris line, and she continued: “And all the kids need to do is eat breakfast? Hmm. Parker doesn’t need his diaper changed? They don’t need some time to cuddle with us and get their engines started? They don’t need help getting dressed? They don’t need someone to explain to them what they’re doing that day?”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, shaking my head, trying to keep up.

“See what I mean?” She smiled.

“Hang on . . .” I finished writing down her comments and immediately started thinking. How was I supposed to get through my day without focusing entirely on myself? If I wasn’t going to be allowed to assign the highest priority to my own needs, then who would? No one?

Suddenly, the simple task of giving Kristen time to shower seemed like the hardest thing ever. I’d spent the afternoon at work explaining space vector modulation to eggheads. That task wasn’t without its challenges, but in terms of relative difficulty, it couldn’t hold a candle to this particular Best Practice, a Best Practice that essentially translated to
Pay attention to your family
.

“I am a piece of shit,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not a piece of shit, Dave. You’re just focused inward. Meanwhile, there’s a whole world that exists outside of you and sometimes you just don’t see it. Not unless somebody shows you it’s there or reminds you to see it. We’re all out here.”

“So if I’m not naturally aware of other people’s needs, then we need to define a process that will help me overcome that. Right?”

Kristen looked at me blankly for a second, then explained that there was no process, that it was just a matter of engaging with people and putting my needs at a lower priority. It seemed so simple to her, as though I’d told her that my eyes were drying out and she was instructing me to blink. “In the mornings—or anytime—you just have to remember that there are other people who are trying to have a life, too.”

She went on to coach me a little bit about spending time with the kids, explaining something else seemingly obvious: that I’m the adult—the dad. “So, when the kids need something, you just need to get in, work it out, and move on to the next thing. That’s the initiative piece. The empathy component may come along, but only if you’re present. And you can only be present if you’re actively engaging with us.”

Every morning for the next several weeks, I tried mastering a new routine that would allow Kristen plenty of time to get ready. Most mornings, she had at least thirty minutes to herself without interruption and I considered that a success. A half hour may sound like no great shakes, but compared to the amount of alone time I had been giving her—zero minutes—it was a considerable improvement. The end goal was being met, but there were significant problems. Without my normal morning routine, I had no idea how to get to work on time. Kristen encouraged me to multitask—to take a short shower while the kids played in our bedroom, for instance—but as someone who took sixty-minute showers, it was clear that I had a hard enough time single-tasking.

I just couldn’t merge the kids into my morning routine. While their needs were every bit as urgent as mine, they seemed to operate with no sense of routine whatsoever. Parker would demand a bagel, Emily orange juice, and as I’d service one of those requests, Parker would insist that he wanted to go look inside the potty; Emily would then say that she had to
go
potty, so I’d tell Parker not to play in the bathroom until she was done, resulting in tears.
A house full of toys and you need to play with a toilet?
On her way to the bathroom, Emily would suddenly change her mind and demand a waffle and—in the same breath—ask for a change of clothes. “Is my waffle ready yet, Daddy? Can I go upstairs and pick out a dress?”
Waffle? Dress? What happened to orange juice?! My God, can we just do one thing at a time?