Yesterday my wife customarily drove up to the front of my office door after the close of her day to pick me up and drive me home. Normally our son would be sleeping (which is his customary response to being in a moving vehicle), but today was different. Earlier in the week, of course, he was subject to a fever and a general feeling of miserableness. Once his fever subsided he returned to daycare but wasn’t completely over his cough and his cold. This particular day, when my wife pulled up to pick me up, our son was crying and coughing and choking… so we took him out of the car.
As I stood there in the parking lot I realized that my son really hadn’t ever been outside of a vehicle in the location where I study and work. (Perhaps this is why there are “take your child to work days?”) He had, of course, been there for a couple of hours while we hung out together when Mom was attending a performance, but he hadn’t been there very much at all… and I was there ALL THE TIME! At any rate, it was an interesting realization. It certainly wasn’t anything that was actively planned for. The thought of keeping our son away from my place of work was never a goal. It was nice, for me, to have him there.
Due to this realization I’ll be actively attempting to include my son & my wife in some of the evening activities I will be involved with later this semester. I’ll be directing a play and my wife and son will be coming to some of the rehearsals. This is important because “directing a play” is a very abstract concept to most people (including my family). They have ideas of what that might be, of course, but actually seeing it as a living and lengthy process grants more knowledge than assumptions based on entertaining television shows and films. Inclusion, then, is what I’m working towards. Not because that option hasn’t been open all along… but because I never actively thought about it. How do you include your family in your work? Or, do you choose not to? Is your approach successful? What defines success?