X-ray vision

What you’d see if you could look behind the performance

I went to a concert last night. An all-strings event for the public school district. At the end, they assembled every musician in our town from grades 4 through 12 who plays a stringed instrument, and they performed a single beautiful piece of music together.

There were over 300 of them. They didn’t all fit on the stage. The younger ones stood in the audience with their instruments. It was a remarkable feat of musicianship and, also, of operations.

Having been an elementary school principal, I know exactly what it took to make that moment happen. The emails. The t-shirt coordination. The tuning. The thousand small decisions nobody in the audience would ever think about.

Our two older kids are home for spring break and came to the concert with us, probably totally oblivious. I sat there with x-ray vision, seeing all the invisible work behind the beautiful thing.

If you had x-ray vision into our household yesterday, you would have seen a family admin day. With the two older ones back from boarding school and their respective trips to Portugal and New York City, it was time to get to work.

I made muffins to lure them out of bed. (Not a metaphor. I bribed them.)

With the 18-year-old: we planned a college visit, booked flights using air miles accumulated over two decades of flights between Asia and North America, navigated health insurance paperwork that the system won’t let a parent do for a legal adult, scripted out a phone call she needed to make — because 18-year-olds do not do phone calls — and sat next to her while she did it on speakerphone. We discussed her gap year, her summer plans, her taxes. Her dad walked her through filing, since he’d just done it with her brother. Her phone is on the fritz. That went on the list too.

With the 16-year-old: after muffins and gravel shoveling (the snowplow relocated half our driveway this winter), we sat down to map out his summer. But his summer depends on crew camp dates that haven’t been confirmed, which means his work schedule can’t be set, which means nothing is certain. He’d applied to one camp and hadn’t heard back, so the next step was to email and check in. This took about thirty minutes — 16-year-olds do not do email — drafting the wording together, the way I’d scripted the phone call for his sister.

Then there’s the driving school. We are trying to get two teenagers licensed. The driving school operates exclusively by phone. No portal. No email. Just a voicemail box that can take days to return your call. I called twice, got through on the third try, and scheduled eleven driving lessons and one road test across two kids. Added everything to the family calendar. If it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t exist.

Here’s the part that made me laugh: we have to drive the 16-year-old home from boarding school repeatedly this spring for his driving lessons so that he can get his license by summer so that we don’t have to drive him around anymore.

And that’s just the logistics.

There’s also the emotional realm of a family of five — most of us neurodivergent — adjusting to being back under one roof after months apart. Each person asserting their own independence in their own way, which is developmentally appropriate and also a lot of competing energy. There are hard things we’re navigating that I’ll take up in other posts. Every family has them.

If you saw my kids out in the world — at school, at a concert, walking through a campus visit — you might think, wow, they’re so together. What great kids.

They are great kids.

And this is what it takes.

I know I’m not alone in this. I know you have your own version — your own particular children, your own particular complications, your own list of eleven driving lessons and scripted phone calls and muffin bribes. I know that many of the mothers I talk to feel like they are being drawn and quartered by the demands of keeping a family together while doing professional work that also has a real impact.

It’s a lot. It’s a delicate dance. And honestly, it’s probably what makes us great at our jobs. Nobody is “normal” in our lives, and so we’ve learned to be creative and to individualize and to bring out the best in people — at work and at home.

After the concert, there was an almost-meltdown. But luckily, it was not a meltdown that McDonald’s couldn’t solve.

Some problems in my life can still be fixed with an M&M McFlurry.

I’ll take it.

🕊️

SAM

Standing for applause. I gave myself one, too!