Oh, shit! You ready? I haven’t written in almost 3 weeks. In that time I’ve started a new job, gotten sick, my car shit the bed, I experienced what felt like a Craigslist “missed connection” at a comedy show in Chicago (Phil Hanley late Saturday show if you’re reading this, Sam!), and have already begun plotting on how to morph my new job role into something that isn’t tantamount to babysitting+.
Let’s start local. I got pink eye. I don’t think I’ve had pink eye since I was 4 years old. I’m a site director now for the YMCA. I’m around, by definition dirty, kids and the things they touch for at least 5 1/2 hours a day. No matter how much wood I’ve knocked in recalling how infrequently I get sick, they got me. This happened at the tail end of getting over a mild cold that decided to get worse just as I thought I had efficiently beat it. I wear contacts and don’t have backup glasses. My eye’s aren’t terrible, but driving has been extra.*
While sick, I’m getting a handle on the true nature of my role and responsibilities. As with most organizations, they have a “mission” and “ethos” and “goals” which are on thousands of pages of wasted paper and policy, but no less inform how some of the most true-believers operate. I’m at a poorer school that no less has figured out how to raise enough funds to consistently engage its kids. I’ve found some people to click with, and found some people who it’s clearly not in their nature to click. Underneath that is the fundamental problem all companies seem to have with basic demonstrations of competence and communication.
I can’t pretend that my job is that complicated, especially given my experience just in my hobbies, let alone at DCS or in counseling. I try not to say it in a condescending way, but I have said it dozens of ways, that I’m a glorified babysitter. At least, that’s how the role was translating my first few days when it sunk in that the difference between a YMCA program and an actual daycare is, drum roll, the programming of activities. If you don’t have anyone concerned with implementing and consistently executing programs, you’re just babysitting. Hence, in spite of 9 people currently hired to oversee 30-ish kids at my site, they hired me to, you know, actually direct something.
At first, naive me was asking things like, “Why can’t the 9 adults do what I’m told needs to be done here?” Several more days of watching people respond to my questions with deer-in-the-headlights faces and pensive toe digs while trying to explain how they’re getting paid to essentially hang out, I got my answer. Also, everyone before me is to blame, as well as the broader chaos of the YMCA leadership.
I’ve done that thing where I have immediately found common ground with the most adult and introspective person and we’ve had quasi-therapy sessions in the mornings about how things are ran or what informs our perspectives. She will be vital in helping me get on committees and pushing reforms that hopefully flesh out that identity and values the YMCA professes. The takeaway is the same as elsewhere, you need to be the adult.
I’ve got some experience with children, but I’ve never been interested in raising them, am bored to tears after too much of doing whatever it is they want to do, and am generally ambivalent about people which informs how I engage with them professionally. A key thing about this is that I don’t seek to control or dominate. I don’t yell at kids. I don’t condescend. I, viscerally, remember what it was to be a child, and actively attempt to mitigate unconscious cultural norms that aren’t helpful in cultivating what you want.
Thus, I have to be the adult for both the kids and the adults I’m now responsible for directing who might feel licensed to get loud and lecture-y and disingenuous in their approach to a kindergartner. For me, who does not profess to be an expert in child-rearing, but who is informed by his experiences, developmental science, and in watching how others operate, I maintain a certain degree of confidence my kids will figure out how to operate along more structured and accountable lines. I’ll suggest something like, don’t reward and entertain the kid who is being performative in their crying. I’m pliable, but keep a decently strong opinion about the efficacy of certain types of intervention, for what age, and under what circumstances.
Some people deeply appreciate this approach, others get petty, aggrieved, and gossipy. You will, under every circumstances, become “the enemy” in one form or another by virtue of any whiff of change altogether, but more accountable change in particular. That’s baked into any leadership role. To me, this means even more not to try to be a dictator more than demonstrator. I speak to the kids like I want you to speak to them. I credit them when they do something right. I trade in time, so when they waste ours, they get theirs wasted while they’re itching for the gym or playground. It’s literally only been 3 days of mild implementation of “my” way, and I’m already seeing positive results.
It’s hard for me to not think about what my day-to-day looks like at scale. We’re now tasked with hoping and praying our way through the next Trump catastrophe, but that’s only to frame it as though we aren’t the fuck ups. That’s to again distance ourselves from our impact and ignorance and hate that dictates the ship. I’ve no less been listening to all my podcasts and reading about how people attempt to digest the zeitgeist. I can’t recommend enough listening to someone like Anthony Scaramucci and then the 5 vs 4 crowd back-t0-back. Or the guests of Michael Moynihan and Bari Weiss and then up-in-arms Leftist academics on Michael Shermer. The nature of wanting/needing a story to supplement or replace personal responsibility beams brightly.
I don’t think there’s a room with or interaction between any two people that exists where there isn’t both an obligation and potential. The obligation would be to something like an imagined universal human value. You treat people a certain way or expect something even as simple as holding the door open for all of space and time. The potential is for that interaction to be dictated or mitigated by personal folly and ambivalence. “It is what it is” as though you have no conscious choice. As though “reason” doesn’t exist or isn’t defined by how it’s executed in good or bad ways.
Monday this week, at 4:45 AM when I tried to leave for work, I discovered my tire was flat. I live in the countriest of country. It’s pitch black, freezing, and recall, my job isn’t that hard or needing of me to actually be there in order for the kids to be kept basically safe and supervised. It’s already extremely wasteful the hour drive I make there and back every day. I’ve been sick. I’ve got the excuse to stay home and sleep in playing out brilliantly. My truck is at my friend’s house. I’m not sure if the new-old car has the equipment to change the tire, further complicated by being on a gravel driveway. I could have left it at that.
I informed my boss of what happened. I sat briefly with my coffee, and proceeded to get to work navigating the problem. The tire wasn’t just flat, but the car I’m driving is very old and 2 windows are taped to try and hold them up. The tape failed, so the car froze on the inside too. Gotta get that fixed. After 3 hand-cranked failed attempts to get the jack to balance, I get the boot on. I drive straight to a tire shop up the road from my job. It takes hours, I overdraft my account paying more for needed tires than the car cost, and navigate from the lobby trying to get money from an account I almost never use, forgetting the pin. In the waiting hours, I cross the highway to mail a package, get food, and make some other errand calls. I was at work for the after school shift.
That night, a flash frozen rain descended upon the area. Parents were over an hour late to pick up kids. Wrecks blocked traffic. I’m perpetually tired the last 3 weeks adjusting to my schedule, sick, and am trying not to ruminate on the irony of being more in debt after getting a job and in needing to get there than by just being broke and at home. I’m staring down the hour and a half minimum drive. I, too, have to navigate remote country roads at 5 mph so I don’t end up like the SUV I stopped for just before I reached home. A “let’s drag this day out even more” cherry on top.
This is either a story of one massive bitch-fest meant to draw sympathy or a basic story of adult accountability employing the tools and skills of perspective and resilience to meet obligations. Some people will view it defensively and try to engage in a pissing match about who has it worse. Some will be ambivalent because...yeah it’s just life and we all get flat tires and deal with the cold. It’s vitally important to me that we all understand most the moments of inflection and choice. I could have sat out the entire day, blamed circumstances, and lied about my ability to address any part of it. I think that’s precisely what we’re doing at less viscerally obvious moments every single day.
You are accountable to you first or you cannot claim to be accountable for anyone else. I would not deserve a leadership position if I were the type of person to pretend I don’t know how to begrudgingly change a tire in the dark, freezing, and on my gravel driveway. I do, I did, and I’m sure I’ll have to do it again some day. I’m sick, so even if it’s more debt and I can’t “really” afford it, I have my medicated $150 eye drops and Urgent Care bill, and began reflexively disinfecting everything I touched at work. I need to continue to watch myself not being an excuse-ridden piece of shit in the world in spite of my very real, very reasonably felt grievances for things I suffer each day.
I unironically bring up unionizing in every job I take. I get zero enthusiasm, feedback, or curiosity about it. Everyone is keen to complain about the pay, disorganization, conflicting feedback, etc., no one, ever, will even entertain the conversation about how to do it better. They also know that, on balance, they’re probably getting away with a certain kind of murder in how they’re making their money or conducting their role. A union is an attempt at a more formal accountability. We, as a species, instinctively and reflexively do not want that.
Don’t be a screaming ape or in denial about your inner insecure kindergartner. We live and die by what we are bringing into or seek to take away from how we engage with one another. I want patience. I want beat by beat reasoned understanding and reflection. I want an earnest investment towards positive changes and values that aren’t empty abstracted truisms eking out of ambivalent cliches masquerading as adults and leaders. Getting by or through each day on some egocentric story of your rights, victimization, or entitlements is not the same thing as demonstrating your understanding and embodiment of your value system. You might profess to be the boss of your own life, but you should be acting as a avatar of what the best version of that life could look like.
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