Kois - How to be a family: the year I dragged my kids around the world to find a new way to be together

I didnt go to Iceland expecting to meet the perfect family. It was February 2016 and I was there to write a magazine feature about the countrys geothermally heated public swimming pools, a simple municipal investment that had helped make the people there among the most content in the world. But then one subfreezing night at Vesturbaejarlaug, an outdoor pool in Reykjavik, I scampered across the frigid deck and hopped into the steaming family pool with Henry Henrysson and Regina Bjarnadttir and their children. Elin and Emma splashed together while little Henry clung to his mom. My job as a magazine editor usually involves sitting in an office working on other peoples stories, staring at my computer until my eyes cross, so this was not a typical day for mebut this was a typical evening for them, Henry and Regina told me: the whole family in the pool, a final swim before bedtime, pajamas at the ready in the dressing rooms. The ritual helps the kids go to sleep, I think, Henry said. The water calms them. This is a particularly Icelandic parenting strategy, Id learned; Id talked to many adults who could still summon the childhood memory of slipping their still-warm bodies between cool sheets.

Regina was the executive director of an NGO that built schools and waterworks in Sierra Leone and, also, sure, in addition, was a dead ringer for Jennifer Garner. Henry the elder was a philosophy professor so handsome he seemed like a lost member of the Skarsgrd family. The children were a Mini Boden catalog come to life: Elin, twelve, extremely mature with impeccable English; Emma, seven, cute and enthusiastic; Henry, three, mischievous and charming. National Geographic had recently offered them a free cruise of Icelands Westfjords in exchange for their giving a few lectures and mingling with Americans for a week. That is, the entire family had been certified by National Geographic as the kind of Icelandic natural wonder that tourists ought to experience.

After swimming, the family invited me to dinner at the caf across the street. Let me tell you a magical story, I said as we crunched through the snowy parking lot. The girls eagerly gathered near. Say you have a snowstorm here in Reykjavik, I continued. Their mother translated quietly for Emma. Perhaps almost a meter of snow.

Yes, they said, nodding. This was a not-unfamiliar scenario. It was snowing now, though only a dusting, the flakes flickering past the streetlights.

So if there was that much snow here, I continued, would you go to school the next day?

Elin crinkled her brow. What does this mean? she asked.

I mean, would they cancel school?

Elin laughed. A moment later, Emma laughed too, having either worked out the English or decided that if Elin was laughing, shed better join her. No, of course not, Elin said.

Well, I said, just before I came to Iceland, we had a storm like that in Virginia, where I live. And do you know how many days they canceled school for my kids?

Elins eyes were wide. How many?

Seven, I said.

Their screams of disbelief echoed through the dark neighborhood. I think that is too many days! Emma said quite seriously. As the children chattered about this remarkable story, their parents took me aside.

How do parents work? Regina asked me. How do you live?

That was a good question. Even before the snowstorm, it had been a time of particular craziness in my house in Arlington, Virginia. My daughter Lyra, ten, and her little sister, Harper, eight, were navigating more difficult schoolwork, more complicated friendships, and shifting personal identities. I was managing employees for the first time as the editor of a section of a magazine, and finding it hard to balance the personalities and responsibilities involved. Alia, my wife, a First Amendment attorney, was working eighteen hours a day on the toughest case of her career, one that she worried was going off the rails in a state court proceeding that seemed wildly unjust. The stress of both our jobs, the sense of the general out-of-control-ness of things, was bleeding ever more regularly into our home life.

One night a few months before my trip to Iceland Id been walking down the hallway to my bedroom when I saw that Lyras light was still on. As usual, after putting our daughters to bed, Id spent several hours at the kitchen table chipping away at the infinite mountain of work, chugging Diet Coke, tweeting. Alia was holed up in the office downstairs, writing a brief. It was eleven oclock, much later than I would expect Lyra still to be awake. I peeked into her room to find her sprawled across her bed, staring at the ceiling. She turned to me as the door opened, her eyes wide.

Hi, sweetie, I said. Whats up? Why arent you asleep?

She made a desperate gesture of overcapacity around her head. I cant turn it all off! she cried.

I knew the feeling. After rubbing Lyras back and singing to her and turning out her light, I too lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Had I finished all the work I needed to do? (I remembered an email Id intended to write, grabbed my phone off the bedside table, typed it, tapped Send.) Was Alia holding upcould I be doing more to help her out? (She was still downstairs.) Did I remember to send in that form for Harpers school? When was the quarterly tax payment due? Ah, did I forget to buy toilet paper? Why were my eyelids twitching like that?

Maybe the Diet Coke wasnt helping things.

Then came the snowstorm. Two feet in one day, resulting in seven days of missed schoola second, unscheduled Christmas vacation for our kids. But not for us! It was the kind of catastrophe for parents that wrecked weeks of planning and put us at the edge of panic every hour as we juggled the stuff we needed to get done with the task of keeping two bored girls occupied for the nearly two weeks they were stuck in the house. The snowstorm transformed me in my coworkers eyes from a guy they could depend on into a guy who bailed on his responsibilities and disappointed them. We paid our wonderful babysitter, Alias cousin, hundreds of extra dollars just so we could do distracted, not-very-good work during the day and then yell at our children after she left.