My fourteen-year-old Lorelai recently gave me an amazing gift. She insisted that I watch the television show Bluey. It’s not every day that a teenager wants to share something she likes with her parent, so when it happens, you don’t exactly jump at the opportunity because you don’t want to be overeager and scare them off, but you do nonchalantly (if assertively) take a large leap-like step in the general direction of the opportunity.
Bluey is now a favorite part of my day. As the evening winds down, some or all of us will end our day warmed and delighted by a cartoon primarily designed for preschoolers.
Parents of younger children will likely already know this, but Bluey is the story of a family of anthropomorphic heeler dogs: There’s Bluey, her younger sister Bingo, and their mum and dad, Chilli and Bandit. Every eight-minute episode is an exploration of kids processing the world around them, mostly through play. The show does a near perfect job of hitting me right in my emotional core, whether it’s remembering similar joys from my childhood, evoking memories of parenting my kids when they were younger, or just providing a conduit for empathy that allows me to feel feelings I don’t often allow to the surface. As Barry Gibb (as portrayed by Jimmy Fallon) put it in a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, “If you don’t cry at Bluey, you’re not a real man.”
In watching Bandit be a father to Bluey and Bingo, it’d be easy to feel like my own parenting is inadequate. While Bandit isn’t portrayed as some sort of infallible 1950s sitcom dad and definitely is shown making mistakes, he’s an example of a dad I wish I was more like – both when my kids were preschool-aged and even now. Bandit seems to have a bottomless reservoir of energy to be present with his kids and engage with their play without dominating it. He works from home and you almost never see him working; whenever his kids ask him to engage with them, Bandit almost always finds a way to say yes.
For most of my career, I’ve worked remotely. I came of age with sufficient privileges and in a time of technological progress that the jobs I’ve been hired to do can be done from pretty much anywhere I have a computer, a phone, and an Internet connection. Before I became a dad, this was a home office in our downtown Baltimore apartment with lovely exposed brick. After my firstborn Arlo arrived and we moved to Richmond, one of the upstairs rooms in our house became my workspace.
I did not spend parts of my workday being an idealistically attentive dad, like Bandit. Following the advice of an early professional mentor, I kept fairly strict working hours and made sure my work stuff stayed separate from my life stuff. I’d go to work in the morning, close the home office door, and even though my wife Kat and kids were just a few feet away from me, we might as well have been in different buildings across town. Kat kept the kids from bothering me, and I didn’t take breaks to be with them, but I could hear their sounds and I knew they were there.
The benefit of this strict separation was that when I was home, I could be fully home. I didn’t bring my work out of the home office. Once I left that room, I was done with work for the day. This isn’t to say I was a perfect, Bandit-like dad 100 percent of the time. I could still be tired or grumpy or stressed, but I didn’t feel compelled to check in with or do anything work-related until I was back at work. And unlike so many folks without the privilege of this flexibility, I never had to spend my time, treasure, and energy commuting across town.
As the kids got a little bigger and had the need for more space for themselves (and their piles and piles of stuff) and they were spending most of the day at school, my dedicated home office was annexed back into family space so the kids could have their own bedrooms. While I was still working from home, I didn’t like being alone all the time, so I started regularly going to different coffee shops and co-working spaces around town. This setup worked well for years until I got laid off and took a normal job that required me to work onsite.
From 2016 to 2020, my routine looked like a stereotypical white-collar life. I’d wake up, help the kids get their day going, take the bus to work, take the bus home, enjoy an evening with my family, and go to bed. Then COVID happened. We were all working from home, existing in whatever space we could eke out around each other. While we were extremely fortunate that the worst hardships we experienced were our isolation and need for more Internet bandwidth, it was precious chaos that our family of four got to experience together.
Now the kids are back in school, Kat’s working at her employer’s office, and my nine-to-five job was officially reclassified as a remote position. There’s no need for a strict closed-door policy because there’s no one else here. I miss being around my family. I miss hearing their noise. I miss knowing they’re around, even if we were all on our own laptops doing our own separate things.
Now I’m the one eagerly awaiting the return of my family members after their busy days. And while I don’t regret my overall approach to my work/life balance, I do wish I’d taken a few more breaks here and there to be a bit more like Bandit. Today and moving forward, I will try to live up to the ideals of an animated blue dog and his family. When my kids invite me into their lives, even if it takes the form of asking me to watch a show for preschoolers, I will find every possible way to say yes.
