So, it turns out my son Adler, just over five months old now, doesn’t know we’re quarantined.
His life hasn’t really changed very much. He “gets up” at the same time each day (as if he ever really slept), does the same stuff over and over – gets entertained by his siblings, soils his diapers, laughs, “talks,” does tummy time, naps, nurses, stares off into the distance, deep in thought – and he goes to bed (again, sort of). The sun comes up and the sun goes down, time always progressing, and Adler just is, and is unaware of the world around him and of COVID-19. Yet he is totally present wherever he is and whatever he’s doing. His non-productive presence – or better, his not very visibly productive presence, since the baby specialists tell us that he is growing by leaps and bounds, that his brain is developing at a hugely rapid pace – is a gift to me.
For I am a man of enormous productivity, constantly creating and organizing and re-organizing to-do lists and making sure to check them off as I accomplish each task (really, I dramatically write DONE in all caps and bold after each task has come to fulfillment, taking huge pride in reviewing the spoils at the end of the day), managing my schedule, tracking how many words I’ve written and how many steps I’ve taken in a day, noting how many books and pages I’ve read each year, setting goals and achieving those goals. Being productive, getting things done, translates into significance and importance, value and worth, a problematic equation at best I’ll admit.
Working from home – something I do some of the time when not quarantined, but now all the time – has serious implications for my productivity and thus my emotional well-being. There is a fine line, a very thin veil in fact, between being a husband, father and employee when working at home. The noisy chaos, the interruptions that often start with, “Can you help me for a minute…” that turn into twenty minutes, the impossible-to-not-overhear conversations (there isn’t a door on the room that is my “home office”), the occasional grief of not being able to participate in something that sounds pretty fun out there, the combo of guilt and relief of being in my office “working” while my wife attends to a sibling squabble, more whining or another failed infant nap, the struggle to maintain motivation and to concentrate, struggles which seems so much more difficult than normal because of the emotional toll of the pandemic, and perhaps worst of all the aggressive shifts in register from an out-of-nowhere-should-be-reserved-for-the-end-of-the-day-conversation between husband and wife about sleep training (after so many failed naps) and what we need at the grocery store that gives way, two minutes later with so little buffer, to a staff meeting on Microsoft Teams that transitions, not into an hour of quiet to decompress and work on the tasks the staff meeting kicked up, but rather to an hour of “daddy-duty” in the middle of the workday’s schedule so my wife can go walk or run or even run away from this quarantine facility.
Suffice it to say – and I hope form and content came appropriately together in that unaccountably long, rambling sentence, with all its commas, hyphens and starts and stops – I’m not feeling very productive these days. In fact, I feel very non-productive (though I can assure you and myself and my family and my boss (of course!) that I am actually being very productive). But the by-product of my non-productivity is not feelings of insignificance, unworthiness, or a lack of importance and value. Instead, taking my cue from Adler, I feel present, a gift to my family.
Adler and I are united in our common humanity, creatures made by God – Father, Son and Spirit – and valuable irrespective of our productivity, given and sharing the gift of God’s being (I’ll let you sort out the analogia entis in this regard). Our shared task, whether or not it gets a glorious DONE next to it at the end of each day, is to attend to the place (our home as a quarantine facility) and people (our quarantined family – Jameson, Rachel, Charlotte, Winston, Adler, who still doesn’t know about his isolation) and responsibilities of our lives in the midst of this pandemic (for him, being a baby; for me, being a husband, father and pastor-theologian), and in so doing to attend to God, the Triune Other who looks at me and Adler in both our productivity and non-productivity in love. That love and the ability to receive that love, its own kind of hard, productive work, is all gift.
Jameson Ross is the Director of Fellowships for the Center for Pastor Theologians. He served in pastoral ministry for over 10 years before moving to England to pursue his PhD in Theology from Durham University, where he studied under the supervision of Francis Watson and wrote on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ecclesial hermeneutic. He joined the CPT staff in 2019.
