Every Other Labor Day
The hard holidays are not the ones people warn you about.
The schedule tells you where your kids will be. It does not tell you who you are going to be on a long weekend without your kids.
Mine says this weekend is not mine. Some years it is. Some years it is not. That is how almost every one of these agreements works, and I want to be clear about something before I say anything else: I signed mine on purpose. I filed. The calendar on my refrigerator exists because of a decision I made. That matters for everything that follows.
Nobody texts you on Labor Day.
They text on Thanksgiving. Somebody checks in on Christmas morning. On Father’s Day the phone lights up with men who know exactly what the day is going to cost and want you to know they know. Those holidays come with a shape people recognize, and the recognition is a kind of company.
A long weekend at the end of summer is not on anyone’s sympathy calendar. It is three days, a closed office, and a house that is supposed to have noise in it. No one is going to ask you on Tuesday how it went. Which is exactly why it is the more honest test.
Why the divorce holiday schedule is hardest on the small holidays
The big holidays are easier to get right because everybody is watching. You know the day matters. You plan for it. You brace. You have friends who will ask, and part of you shows up well because you will have to answer them.
The small holidays have no witnesses. Three days with no plan and no one checking is where a man finds out what he actually does with himself when nothing is making him do anything.
And what most of us do with an unwatched weekend is one of two things. We fill it so full we never feel it. Or we sit in it until the feeling is the only thing in the house.
I have done both. Neither one is a strategy.
A holiday with no audience
Here is where I have landed, and it took me longer than I would like to admit.
I do not try to skip the feeling. The sadness is real and the disappointment is real. I am missing out on a holiday with my kids, and pretending otherwise is a lie I would eventually have to unlearn. So I say it. Sometimes out loud, in the kitchen, to no one. I am sad about this. I am disappointed I am not there.
Then I put the second true thing next to it. They are where they are supposed to be. They are happy. They are doing the things kids are supposed to do on a long weekend, and none of that happens less because I am not in the room for it. It happens exactly as much. That is not a consolation prize. That is the whole point of every decision I have made since the filing.
Both things sit at the table. The sadness does not get to eat alone.
Researchers at Harvard draw a hard line between being alone and feeling lonely. One is a fact about the house. The other is a story you tell inside it. This weekend I only get a say in one of those, and it is not the house.
What I built instead
Once the feeling has been named, I go to work. Not to avoid anything. Because it is Labor Day and I am a man who has labor to do.
I run a company with employees who will be back on Tuesday. A quiet holiday is the only time all year I can do the kind of thinking that matters to them and to our clients, the kind that never survives a normal week. So that is where the hours go. Work that will still be standing in a year. Work that makes me better at the thing my kids depend on me to do well.
The rule underneath it is simple, and it works no matter how your schedule cuts the weekend. Every schedule is different. Mine does not hand me a clean three days very often. Yours might. Either way, a stretch of quiet is not one long day. It is a row of separate mornings, and each one gets its own start. Each morning I name the feeling, then I name the one thing that matters that day, and I do that thing before the phone comes out. Each evening I sit down for a minute and set the day down, so yesterday does not become today.
And the last night gets the most attention, whichever night it is, because the last night is the last version of me before my kids walk back through the door. Whatever I built or wasted in the quiet, that is the man they get.
The calendar is not mine to carry. I signed it and I do not argue with it. The hours inside it are mine, and no one is going to grade them but me.
Carry what is yours. Put down what is not.
If you are heading into this weekend without your kids and you want a place to start, the Week One Reset is seven mornings, one anchor each. It is free and it was built for exactly this kind of quiet. You can get it at scottsuperfine.com/weekone.
That is the standard.
If you want a simple place to start, I built a free Week One Reset. Seven mornings, one decision each, for exactly the days that try to run you. Get the free Week One Reset.
#IllCarryIt
