I have a tendency to disengage with society when life around me becomes too overwhelming to process. It isn’t something that happens often, maybe only a handful of times in my life, and it’s a tendency, or habit, that has never been too impactful on others. I have one vivid memory of this disengagement impacting someone, and it really only impacted this person because it was less of a moment and more of a two-year period of total disengagement. However, my life is quite different now than back then, and prolonged disengaging would disrupt the entire structure of our family.

Now, thankfully, I’m also at a point in my life where disengaging from society doesn’t feel necessary. My wife and I have worked diligently to take care of children, each other, and most importantly ourselves. 

Then the coronavirus happened.

I picked up on the signs right from the first week. The prolonged amount of time on social media or absorbing COVID-19 information, the lack of involvement in parenting day-to-day, and then the distracted parenting when I was physically present. The signs were plastered all over the wall for everyone to see, yet I still found myself falling into those bad habits during those first few quarantine days.

I don’t share this to expose my poor tendencies, but simply to point out that we all have them. Maybe your bad habit when you’re overwhelmed isn’t disengagement, but it’s alcohol, or smoking, or just being rude to those around you. Whatever it is, this is the easiest time for it to surface and also the easiest time for us to excuse it. I often found myself thinking, ”This is an unprecedented situation, so I’m allowed to act this way.”

Yes, it is unprecedented and each day it’s both heartbreaking and stressful, but at the end of the day, I woke up to the fact that I can control none of the stuff happening in the outside world. Unfortunately, consuming massive amounts of information about the pandemic isn’t going to stop the number of new cases, and isn’t going to stop people from dying.

We can’t control this, but we can control how we respond to it. We can control the example we set for our children, our friends, and our family. The way I’m doing that is by setting priorities.

Priority number 1: My children. When I spend massive amounts of time on my phone they don’t’ see an informed father. They see a father who’s telling them his phone is more important than they are.

Priority number 2: My responsibilities. When I stop co-parenting, it sends the message that whatever my wife needs is less important than my own needs. She sees a partner who’s telling her that his support is conditional.

Now, when I find myself wanting to disengage, I just think back to my priorities and the message that my actions send.

The truth is, we’re all overwhelmed, stressed, and concerned. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be human, but half of those emotions are caused by things we cannot control. The only way to ease them is to focus on what we can control. We can control our priorities, and we can control the message we send to others through our actions, or lack thereof.

Acknowledge your tendencies, make your priorities, and control what you can control.