Someone Else's Sick Day

By and large, I don't take many sick days. This isn't out of stubbornness, or a desire to be student affairs' Cal Ripken; I've just been fortunate enough not to need to. I will occasionally tally a sick day (or hours) for a doctor's appointment, but when I'm actually not feeling well and legitimately need to take a sick day, I don't hesitate, or so I thought.

As I take a mental inventory of the times I've called out, I realize that if I'm completely honest with myself, I'll admit that I more or less schedule sick days. It's typically within reason, but if I'm not feeling my best and can push missing any work off to a time that's convenient to leave early/come in late/miss a day, I almost always do.

Things have changed. 

Eleven months (two days and 12 minutes, but who's counting?) ago, I took on a new role in life: That of Daddy. In my role as Director of the First Year Experience (one of my favorite student affairs/new parent jokes, and I've got less than a month to keep using it!) I learned quickly that there's no scheduling sick days when it comes to my daughter. If she's sick, whether it means a trip to the doctor or just that she can't go to day care, my wife and I typically take inventory of each of our days to see which of us is best equipped to miss that time from work. We've been fortunate that it's worked out to a pretty even split thus far, and we will sometimes split a day in half so that we can each attend to things we need to. Still, when we wake up in the morning and realize we'll have to put a sick day plan into place, I can't help but feel inconvenienced, whether I'm missing meetings, events, or jut work that I need to get done in the office.

Don't get it twisted. The world stops for my daughter, and rightfully so. But still, coming from a mold of taking time when it's most convenient for me, I can sometimes feel like I'm missing something, that I'm not present or not pulling my weight. I sometimes try to work from home (though if you've ever tried this with a sick infant afoot, you know how hit-or-miss that can be) but so much of work in student activities is actually being there. And while my staff, students, colleagues and supervisor all certainly understand, I still admittedly find the uncertainty frustrating at times. Of course, it's not anywhere near frustrating enough for me not to do what's best for my daughter, it's just one of many new wrinkles to get used to in my life as a parent.

On Balance

In related news to the previous post, a big theme in our field--and I suspect many others--is "work-life balance". A conversation I had not too long ago led me to take a look at that term a bit.

In the aforementioned chat, someone brought forth the term "work-life negotiation," emphasizing the constant give and take of the two roles. That said, there's a new term I prefer: Job-home balance. The way I see it, my life is exactly that, my life, all-encompassing. As such, my work is naturally part of that. I'm not striking balance between two things, because those two things, by their very nature intersect and overlap. Job-home balance, however, means to me that I do my best to keep my home life at home and my job in (and around) the office. This is the balance I seek to strike.

It could drive a guy crazy!

When I began this blogging endeavor, you'l recall I made no promises as to how often you'd hear from me, but I figured I'd bubble up from time to time when I had a topic upon which I felt the need to expound. Got one!


The topic for today's #sachat was "Mental Health of Student Affairs professionals," as voted upon by participants and followers of @The_SA_Blog. I intended to participate, as I usually do when I'm free, and this topic was of particular interest: I have an undergraduate degree in psychology in addition to my graduate degree in student affairs; I'm married to a counselor, and there's mental illness in my family. So with that in mind, and knowing that "mental health" means different things to different people, I asked a simple question:

CurtisTMEd Curtis Tarver 

Question: Are we talking "Mental Health" as in "I don't feel at my best when...", stress, etc., or actual psychopathology? #sachat

Never was there an answer. In defense of this session's mod, it was quite clear in her questioning that she was allowing the community to take ownership in the definition, but there was quite a bit of confusion. Consider that "health" has two well-accepted definitions: One is the overarching field, while the other is [good] health, as in being healthy. The same is true with mental health, which was pointed out by folks engaged in the chat sharing two different definitions from two different NIH sources. As such, in the conversation, some were referring to things such as work-life balance and on-the-job stress, while others were speaking counseling and medication.

The distinction is, to me a big one; the methods for dealing with both are quite different. Many in our field are qualified/trained in counseling-related fields, but in most cases, we are not counselors. The trouble is that we are a helping profession, sometimes to a fault. It is important for us to know that which is beyond us and needs referring out, and depending on which definition of mental health you are answering for, those answers can be different. To compound things, it seemed to me that when speaking of simple stress, platitudes regarding work-life balance, taking time to oneself, and destressing techniques abounded, making bits of the conversation seem like a chat with a pullstring toy. I was sharing this frustration both off of the tag on Twitter and in a chat window; as I said there, "I've probably dropped more curses into a chat window in one sitting in the past hour than I ever have on my work account."

Why, it was enough to drive a guy mad.