My Coworkers

In early 2020, at the start of our second year in Australia, Mike took a consultancy as acting Country Director for an NGO in the Solomon Islands and left to spend six weeks in Honiara. Back home in Australia I was juggling parenting and my own work, which often involved 5am or 6am meetings because many of my colleagues were based in America. The boys—who were six and eight—were usually still asleep when I got up for my first meeting, but I never quite knew what I’d find when I emerged from my office again at 7am.

Some mornings the boys were awake and calmly watching television. Other mornings they were awake and had used the microwave to make and share five bowls of Uncle Toby’s Oats. Or Dominic was using a fishhook to eat peanut butter straight out of the jar. Or they were taking turns standing out in the backyard while their sibling tried to hit them with a glider launched from the second story window. Or they had taken a set of steak knives, taped them into paper airplanes, and were hurling them off the top of our toolshed to see how far they’d fly. Or Dominic had salvaged a dozen brand new and lethally sharp pencils from our stash of unused school supplies and was busy taping them all together with electrical tape to make a long, tapered spear that he planned to use to “go hunt some bush turkeys.”

What they never were…? Dressed for school with their bags and lunch packed.

Also what they never were…? All that interested in accomplishing these tasks.

One morning after I told them to go get dressed while I fixed breakfast, Dominic grabbed my phone and started talking to Siri.

“Siri,” he said, “where are my underpants?”

“That’s an interesting question,” Siri answered diplomatically.

“Siri,” Dominic continued, “what’s your favorite color?”

“Computer software doesn’t generally get to choose,” came the demure reply, “but I’ll say red. What’s yours?”

“I’ll say red, too,” Dominic said.

“Roses are red, violets are blue, I really like talking about colors with you,” Siri said.

“Siri, you are are hilarious sometimes,” Dominic said.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Siri said.

“I don’t know what a compliment is,” Dominic said, “but it sounds nice.”

Then Alex grabbed the phone.

“Siri,” Alex commanded. “Call Daddy on FaceTime.”

“Who is your father?” Siri enquired.

“Michael Wolfe,” Alex said.

“Calling Michael on FaceTime now,” Siri said.

Ring ring…

Ring ring…

Then a wary male voice spoke.

“Hello?”

Both boys looked at the video and then at me.

“That’s not Daddy,” Alex said, holding up my phone.

Indeed it wasn’t. 

***

We called the right Michael after I had apologized to Michael Kleinman for interrupting his train ride over in Switzerland. And after the boys had said hello and then disappeared upstairs again to locate their clothes, Mike filled me in on what was happening in the Solomon Islands.

“It must be nice for you,” I said, “to be leading a team again where you outline what needs to be done and the team members don’t respond by lying down naked on the tile floor  and stare you down with a ‘bring it on’ expression.”

To my credit, I delivered this line without a single hint of sarcasm and only the faintest tinge of audible resentment.

“What’s been happening over there?” Mike asked, sensibly side-stepping any acknowledgement of just how nice that dynamic was.

What was going on over here?

I reflected on the last few days.

I’d spent the night at my parent’s place with the boys over the weekend, and had come upstairs at bedtime to find that the boys had figured out how to plug in and turn on my parent’s treadmill.

Then, while running on it barefoot (and without the safety disconnect clipped to his shirt), Dominic had pressed the pre-set for SPRINT and increased the machine’s speed for 16 miles an hour.

“I was running really FAST,” Dominic explained. “And then my toe caught on the edge and it almost ripped off half my toenail, and I started to fall, but I grabbed the handlebars and lifted up my body. Then I put my foot up and turned off the machine with my toe.”

Less than half an hour later, in the boys bedroom, I had picked up a small lightbulb that had worked its way out of the bedside lamp.

“Can I see?” Dominic said, snatching it from my hand, looking over, and apparently deciding it was exactly the right size to fit in his mouth.

“GET THAT LIGHTBULB OUT OF YOUR MOUTH RIGHT NOW!” I ordered.

“Don’t worry,” Dominic said, learning forward over the carpet and speaking carefully around a mouthful of glass. “It it breaks, I’ll just spit it out onto the carpet in pieces.”

“I just do not understand,” I said to Mike, after I relayed these two stories to him, “how ADHD has not been naturally selected out of the population.”

“Neurodiversity is essential to the human population,” Mike said, laughing (because you have the luxury of that response when you’re sitting in an entirely different country.)

“Yes,” I said. “But to survive to pass your neurodiverse gene’s on you have to live to adulthood. And if most kids with ADHD are like ours, I just don’t understand how this has happened on scale over time.”

“Well,” Mike said, sighing now. “If we were living in a village on an island in the Pacific there would be fewer unusual ways for him to injure himself. So maybe, yet again, it’s our society that’s a big part of the problem rather than the neurodiversity.”

***

As February slid into March, it became increasingly apparent that I had bigger things to worry about than whether my offspring were outside in their pajamas before dawn, testing out the aerodynamics of our steak knives. Our world was spinning sideways, and there was a massive surge in demand for mental health professionals with experience in navigating uncertainty and managing anxiety in high-threat environments. I suddenly had more work than I knew what to do with, a husband still outside the country, a government that had started to talk about stopping flights and shutting our borders, and two high-octane children to parent.

So I did what any sensible and fortunate adult in my situation would do… I called my own parents and begged them to let us move in with them for a while.

At my parent’s house, my two wildlings had five acres to roam. They had trees to climb and chickens to tend. They had dirt to dig and campfires to light. Most importantly, I had my parents to function as a Human Resources department of sorts and help keep an eye on them.

Hands down my favorite meme of 2020 was the one where parents posted social media status updates in which they referred to their children as their “coworkers”. Here are some of mine from those early weeks of COVID when I was living with my parents, before Mike made it back into Australia on the last flight out of the Solomon Islands before they shut the border.

Day 1: My coworkers went outside before breakfast and found a giant python. Then they had a fight over who would get to tell me about it.

Day 3: Tonight at 7:45pm, after I’d showered my coworkers and put them to bed, said coworkers took a flashlight and snuck out of the house to investigate a large pile of dirt in the trailer. Then I accidentally locked them out of the house.

Day 4: My coworker left the house alone at dawn and rekindled yesterday’s stump fire without a supervisor present.

Day 6: This morning my coworkers figured out that if they loaded a heavy bag of mulch onto the seat of the ride-on lawnmower they could weigh the seat down enough to disengage the safety settings. Then they climbed aboard, started the mower, and put it in gear before they were apprehended and stopped by human resources staff.

Day 10: Tonight one of my coworkers and I had an argument in the bathroom. When he was very rude to me, I made a stand for women’s rights in the workplace and informed him that he could accomplish the rest of the evening’s deliverables without my assistance. After that, my coworker sat naked, wet, and cold in the shower for twenty minutes because he was bound and determined not to get out, pick up his towel, and dry himself off.

Day 11: Today, while I was in a zoom meeting with my ACTUAL coworkers, one of my LITTLE coworkers cracked open the door to my office, crawled under my desk, and proceeded to kiss my knees.

Day 12: They say we learn something new every day. Today, while experimenting with a power tool Papa had laid on the ground, my eight-year-old coworker learned that he can start the pole saw. Then he taught his younger brother.

Day 13: My coworkers tried to saw down a large white cedar tree they’re convinced is “dead” even though human resources is insisting it’s just dropped its leaves from drought-stress and should be left alone.

Day 14: My coworker just swallowed a $2 coin and the on-call nurse has informed me I’m going to have to sift through his poo until we find it.

Day 17: Today I rang up our local clinic to make appointments for my coworkers and I to get a flu shot. When I gave the kids names, the receptionist perked right up.

“Oh!” she said. “You’re the TWINS mother. The ones with red hair?”

“Well, they’re not exactly twins,” I said.

“It was total chaos last year,“ the receptionist said, in the tone of someone who is enjoying a particularly entertaining memory. “The first time around one was totally freaked out, and the second time around it was the other one, right?”

“Yeah,“ I said, well aware that it was indeed my children she was thinking of.

“And one of them pulled everything out from under one of the beds and climbed underneath and you had to get down on the floor to get him out?“

“Yeah,“ I said.

“OK…“ she said. “I’ll let everybody know you’re coming in and we’ll get a plan.”