The Roles We Play
I read a great article last week by a guy name Max Schireson, at the time of writing he was the CEO of a company called MongoDB. Here’s an excerpt:
Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO.
This morning I saw a headline of a similar nature, it read: “Mother of Three poised to lead the BBC”
I found these to be pretty reflective of the way many of us treat gender, myself unfortunately, very much included. We decide that women should worry about these things, and men should worry about those ones. Mary and Indra, and that unnamed mother of three should have to worry about balancing careers with their family life, but Max, he just needs to worry about what his next car will be, and which track he’s gonna listen to next.
You know, when Katie and I first got married, I figured that she’d worry about the house and family stuff, and I’d worry about the work stuff. I feel embarrassed to say that I don’t really think I spent much time asking her which things she really wanted to take on. Or even thinking myself about which areas of our family I could best contribute to. In my head it was already laid out for us, we’d just do things the way I’d heard they ought to be done.
Fortunately I’ve been so blessed to learn from the godly example of so many good people in this world. Today I want to share a bit about how my views, and my roles have changed, and how they’re bound to continue to do so.
I have a neighbor Tom (I’ll call him Tom here for privacy), he gets the importance of prioritizing and balancing family life. When we moved onto our street a little over a year ago, Tom had a typical job outside the home. He had long workdays away from home, he had a wife who worked out of the house, and he had a darling baby boy on the way — Andrew (name changed) is his name. Well, when Andrew (or as they like to call him Crusher) was born, Tom’s life completely changed. You see, Tom is completely head over heels for his little Crusher. If you saw Tom in those first couple weeks, you’d be astonished at the love he was feeling for that baby. Of course, Tom took some time off work when Crusher was born, but when it was time to go back a few weeks later, he told his boss that he simply couldn’t do it. He said he’d work part-time for a bit. Well, not too long after that, Tom found it was too hard to bear to be away from his little guy to go to work — even part-time! So Tom told his boss he wasn’t coming back.
Now Tom isn’t irresponsible, so he figured out another way to make money. Now he works from home, he gets to see Crusher almost all day, and he’s still earning an income for his family’s sustenance. But Tom found a way to make his little family his #1 priority, and then worked the rest of his life around that and I admire him so much for it.
All too often I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that school or work are the rock in my life, and that everything else should be oriented around them. In truth, my job is where I spend a ton of my time and energy, but it’s far from eternal. My job brings me great satisfaction, but not when it’s at the expense of those whom I love.
Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to
Now I understand that life isn’t always ideal. Sometimes I’ve gotta do things I don’t really want to do. In those moments I take comfort in knowing that I’m not alone, that others have sacrificed and made it through on the other side.
When Katie and I were newly married, she took a job she hated in order to provide for our family. Katie could have used her remarkable mind and talents to study, to prepare for a career outside our home, but instead she sacrificed to make it possible for me to do that. Now there may have been a way for us to both do it, and had we pursued that path I have no idea where we would have ended up, but at the time this seemed like the right thing for us to do.
Katie didn’t want to do that job, and I didn’t really want her to have to either, but she sacrificed for our family, and I’m forever grateful for her offering to me.
Know your role!
If I ask myself, was it Katie’s role to go and get that job? I struggle to answer the question. The word role is what gets me. In fact, just thinking about it now I can’t help but think of some WWF wrestler I remember being popular as a kid. This guy used to speak outrageously to his opponents — as only a WWF wrestler can — and his signature phrase was: “know your role!”
So when I was asked to speak at church on “How do the roles of men and women compliment each other in families?”, I had to pause for a moment and really stop. It was as if someone was standing over me, and shouting “KNOW YOUR ROLE!!!”
And guess what, I didn’t like the feeling I got from that. In fact I had a bit of an allergic reaction. I felt like I was being asked to lay out which jobs or responsibilities men had and which women had, and why? So I could tell every man and woman in the congregation to “Know their role”? No, that didn’t feel quite right.
So in my allergic reaction I spent a bunch of time reading and writing about how evil society can be in assigning jobs to genders as though men and women were created to perform a certain set of tasks that were mutually exclusive. “Know your role!!!” That is so often the chant of societies. Everyone ought to know what they should do, and the moment someone steps outside of their box the community has license to judge them. To grab the metal chair from outside the ring and smack them over the head, to “remind” them of what their role is.
What is a role though?
The interesting revelation came though when I stepped back for a moment and realized that that WWF wrestler had been using the term all wrong. The way he used it made it sound like you were stuck with your single role forever.
The truth is roles are temporary, they are positions assumed by actors. I have many roles in our family, as does Katie. Somedays we have the same roles, somedays we have different ones. The roles aren’t really about who’s a man or who’s a woman — they’re about who can act.
Sometimes I’m able and willing to act as the dishwasher. Pretty much every day I act as a designer, I go to my office, and I perform a bunch of other roles there. Sometimes I’m able to act as a calming force in our home, easing the pain of a skinned knee, or the scratch of a sister.
Some days I feel like I can’t help myself from acting like a villain. A heartless curmudgeon that doesn’t care much for the difficult day another is going through. Those moments, those roles, they break my heart — and they break the hearts of the sweet women in my life.
Choose which gigs you take on
I try to say no to the roles I know I shouldn’t play, and yes to the ones I feel well trained and well suited for.
But sometimes, like Katie had to, I have to say yes to a role I’m not sure I can perform. Like being a Dad. That’s a role I still don’t know if I can perform, but I’m choosing to act my heart out anyways!
Playing the role you’ve been hired for
Sometimes it’s easy for me to forget which role I’ve been hired for though. Sometimes I think I’m supposed to be the super hero, swooping in to save the day, then rushing off to the next victim. But in reality I’ve been hired to be the steady, constant guy that’s always there for someone.
Here’s what that looks like. I arrive home and the house is a lot crazier than usual. The front entry is covered in stuff, and it looks like a bomb went off in the kitchen. I think I can see that someone’s turned on the bat signal, and I quickly gear up to save the day. I know I “fix” this. So I hurriedly work my way through the house, cleaning up, tidying, and generally acting like someone’s going to award me with a medal by the time I’m done.
But before long I realize that Katie seems to be more agitated then when I arrived, and less interested in having my “help”. I stop for a moment and think to myself, you’ve gotta be kidding me, I’ve been so selfless since I got home, I’ve done nothing but help out Katie, cleaning up and doing my best to make her life a little easier.
Did you catch the problem though? It was all about me, about the super hero, about the role that I wanted to play.
Eventually I come to realize — sometimes all by myself, but more often with some help — that I’ve been acting out the wrong role. You see, on this hard day, Katie wasn’t really hiring me to be the hero, she was hiring me to be her friend, she was hiring me to be the man that’s madly in love with her, she was hiring me to come in, to see her, and to give her all the warmth of my heart.
Some roles are more lasting than others
Both women and men have been hired for a variety roles in our families. Some of these are shared, some of them last for a few minutes, and some for a few years. But there’s just a handful of these roles that are of a more eternal nature.
Jeff Bezos once gave my boss a great piece of advice, he said:
“Make the investments in the things that will not change in your business”
I believe this advice applies outside of the business though, it applies to life and it certainly applies to our families. So what roles do we have that won’t change. Katie and I have the roles of wife and husband — we have promised to play these roles to each other for eternity. We can bank that we’ll yield a return from any investment we put into developing these roles. Katie and I have also been giving children, and we’ve promised to love, nurture, and guide them for eternity. Again, this is an investment that will yield results far beyond what we can likely imagine.
My most important role
There’s one other role that’s most important to us both, and it’s probably the hardest one I have to act in. Katie and I have both promised to follow Jesus forever. He’s asked us to perform the role of disciples of Jesus Christ. A disciple of Christ isn’t a role exclusive to men or women. It’s the universal role we’ve all been hired to perform. To testify of Jesus. To be like him, to love like him.
My life has been changed by Jesus Christ. He has helped me get out of those villain roles, and get into the charitable ones. He has forgiven me of my impatience, my cruelty, and my faulty heart.
Through Jesus Christ I am born anew each day I choose to be. I am given the opportunity for the roles of not only a lifetime, but of eternity. If there’s one role I’m going to set my heart on knowing, it’s going to be discipleship.
“For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” -
Galatians 3:27–28
