Leading Mama

Beware Anger Management Failure

Besides being a writer, I currently work for the federal government as a social scientist/researcher. Some days I wish I was a lab rat locked away from the rest of the team (it’s like doing your taxes in a room full of 12-year-old girls who are gushing about the latest boy band) and when I want to be really productive, I work from home. But I am a social scientist, after all, and observing our office social – and anti-social – interactions is fascinating when I can avoid being completely sucked in to the vortex myself.   

 

This week I wasn’t so lucky. You know how people’s hair stands on end in a lightning storm? Picture me like that, sitting at my computer Tuesday afternoon.

In walked our newest team member, a writer recently hired to help draft the huge report we’re producing on a very short timeline. We’ve met three or four times in the past month (for a total of about 16 hours) to get acquainted, explain where we are with the project, clarify expectations, go over the outline and discuss the finer points of the introduction, which we’d asked her to draft using information we supplied.   

 

Who’s the “we,” you ask? I share my office with another analyst who is in charge of pulling together the report, and she and I are collaborating very closely on the process and the product. We both feel some sense of responsibility for this report, but she’s the one with the lead role. (insert suspenseful music that alludes not-so-subtly to the possibility of violence here)

 

So the new writer breezes in and asks me if I have 5 minutes to talk. Sure I say, have a seat. "I’ve gone to see the boss," she says. "Just wanted to fill you in."

 

Hmm. Okay. It’s standard practice to have an office call with the big boss when you come on board – say how happy you are to be here, get a “glad you’re part of the team” handshake – so I figure it’s nothing earth-shattering. And she only wants 5 minutes.

 

“I clarified with the boss that I report directly to her,” she says. (I hear sirens go Wah-wah-wah LIGHTNING IN THE AREA) “I’m putting together an alternate outline for the report and the boss and I agreed I’d have it done by the 14^th,” she says.

 

My head nearly popped off, I’m sure. Somehow when you come face to face with an act of passive aggression this huge, it doesn’t feel passive at all! The three of us had been playing so nicely together, and she’d gone to the boss to sell her ideas and grab control of the process behind our backs.

 

I didn’t lose it completely, but I wasn’t feeling calm. I asked her to explain herself, clarified what we’d discussed and agreed to earlier, and (after 2 hours of conversation) ultimately came to the conclusion what she was doing was not going to completely derail our efforts. I felt comfortable that she would go out and get to work.

 

Suffice it to say, when my office mate returned and I explained what had gone down, she wasn’t happy. Initially, her hair stood on end (like mine). Then the smoke started streaming from her ears. Her head turned round and round on her neck like a demonically-possessed individual. Her white-hot anger raised the temperature in our office by at least 10 degrees. Really.

 

The following day she called the writer by phone. She got angry. She didn’t want to discuss, she wanted to explode. And that’s what happened. She started by dragging me into the conflict – yelling about how the writer had wasted two hours of my time.

 

(I’m thinking “That’s the not real issue here.” More warning sirens go off. I say nothing.)

 

She followed that fight with a discussion of who works for whom here. Told the writer that she (the writer) doesn’t report to the big boss (no one here does) and re-asserted her role as the leader of the report-writing effort. The writer blathered on about the collaborative role she wants in the process, but continued to argue she takes her direction only from the boss. The writer asked for the boss’s phone number and told my office mate she’d call the boss to clarify. Fine.

 

(I’m thinking “You need to address her behavior head-on. Tell her you are angry that she went behind your back, and that collaboration requires trust that has clearly been violated here.” I say nothing.)

 

The writer says we should have a meeting to discuss the issues (I’m picturing another 2-hour dialogue, with more people and more vitriol.) My office mate flatly refuses. She tells her we are too busy to get together on Friday, have interviews to conduct Monday, can’t do it. She says “I think we can work together” through clenched teeth, but refuses to spend any more time discussing “the incident” or clarifying roles. Her usual in-your-face-aggression has become door-in-the-face-aggression. She shut the writer out.

 

(I’m thinking this will be painful, but there has to be a discussion or we can’t work together. I say nothing.)

 

To make a long story not quite as long as it might be, the next morning the writer quit. She opted out of a contract worth more than six figures that she would have completed in the next 4 months (yes, that’s about 25K per month). She said ours was a hostile work environment and she couldn’t handle it.

 

How’s that for the eerie calm after the storm?

 

We all feel like we were hit by lightning this week. Our hair is singed, our energy drained. I picture us all walking across a field together, our clothes in tatters. No one really knows what hit them.

 

Misused anger burns everyone. Beware.

 

Protecting Kids in Cars

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post Magazine’s feature story (titled Fatal Distraction) focused on parents who’ve accidentally left their infant or toddler in a locked car, resulting in the child’s death from hyperthermia (overheating). Between 15 and 25 children die like this each year, mostly in the stifling summer months.

 

Though each was in some ways unique, the stories Weingarten described were also eerily similar. Each parent was so absorbed in his or her own thoughts and tasks that they simply forgot the child was there, in the backseat, awaiting daycare drop-off. The parents weren’t deadbeats, they weren’t unloving. They were simply overwhelmed and exhausted. And who among us isn’t?

 

Families are busy. Parents work long hours, often at more than one job, to keep up with their mortgage payments, save for kids’ college, and afford music classes and family vacations. Our brains are constantly buzzing with to-do reminders and the worries of modern life. We travel to work and back largely on auto-pilot, repetition numbs us to the details.

 

Even when we’re driving, we’re not focused – we’re multitasking. Talking, text messaging, reading, eating – you name it, people do it behind the wheel. If you’re a parent, I suspect you sometimes drive to work while talking on the cell phone with colleagues from work, eating your breakfast (black coffee and a power bar, anyone?), and making silly faces in the rear-view mirror to entertain your fussy pint-sized passenger. We’ve all been there. 

 

Leading Man doesn’t often read the Washington Post Magazine. He prefers the newspaper itself, and devours the international news and sports sections while I slurp coffee and read the Magazine. But he usually asks about the feature story, and I give him the highlights.

 

Our discussion of this particular story was somewhat one-sided. I described each of the families Weingarten interviewed, talked about their similarities, the enormity of their losses. For me, it was impossible not to feel some sense of personal connection to these parents – any one of us could (given the right but oh-so-wrong circumstances) forget that we hadn’t dropped our child off on the way to work. Especially if something unexpected happened and our usual routine was upended somehow.

 

Leading Man's response: “That could never happen to me. I’m always focused on being a parent.”

I (mostly) left it at that, since I didn’t want to slip into psychologist mode on Sunday morning. But evidence against his position mounted in my mind.

 

The positive illusions that keep people sane and happy make them unlikely to see the potential for negative events such as leaving your child in a hot car all day. Our identities as loving, capable, devoted parents are 180 degrees out from forgetting about our children. But memory is fickle – when we’re under stress, it fails us miserably. We simply need to believe this could never happen to us. The alternative is too much to bear.

 

I’m sure parents whose errors have injured or killed their children never thought it could happen to them, either. That’s just human nature. But I think it’s healthy for all of us to slow down, tune in, and take precautions so it doesn’t happen to our own children. It’s not so hard to look in the backseat before heading in to the office – I’ve started putting my purse and my laptop back there so it becomes a habit.

Watch Me Pull a Rabbit Out of My Hat

Since I added another job to my Leading Mama juggling routine, I’ve found it’s increasingly difficult to stay sane. If it felt like I had no free time to myself before, I have less than no free time to myself now. I wonder whether mathematicians and physicists would support my contention that working moms have less than no free time – as a social (not rocket) scientist, I say, truly, it’s possible.

 

Frankly, I feel a bit like a magician. On the good days, I amaze even myself. On the not-so-good days, the furry white rabbit who’s supposed to pop magically from my hat never shows, and I pull out a ferocious dingo instead. (I know, you can imagine me dressed in a magician’s cape fending off the dingo with my dainty magic wand. The audience roars, but it isn’t so funny for the magician!)

 

Here are three tricks I’ve found for managing the madness.

Make music. Get a new CD, download new tunes (or old favorites) to your iPod, or pull out the mix tapes you made in the mid-80s and give them a listen. Music has the power to transport and transform. Sing along.

Run away. Even if you have to take your kids with you, get out of the routine long enough to miss it (if you bring the kids with you, you’ll be missing that daily grind in no time!). I traveled to San Diego for 46 hours this month. It was my first nights away from my son. And the longest two days of my life.

Freeze up. When you’re cooking this week, make extra portions of two or three family favorites and freeze them immediately. Put a sticky-note freezer inventory on the side of the fridge so you’ll know what to thaw on those nights when you simply can’t imagine cooking dinner.