Not the blogger I want to be

Hey all. I feel pretty shit for not showing up here much these past couple of weeks. It’s not the blogger I want to be.

But I’m struggling. I’m struggling and my husband is struggling and it’s a lot. The weight of it is hard to carry. I’m exhausted by the end of each day.

And I feel… disingenuous coming here to say that because really nothing is wrong. We’re doing FINE, just like we have been this whole time. We are maybe the least negatively affected couple in all of the pandemic. Well, at least within the pool of couples with kids.

Really and truly we are fine. Everything is fine. And I’m not sure why it doesn’t feel fine. I’m not sure where this weight comes from. What it is exactly. I just know that it makes it hard for me to think, to get things done, to sit down and write.

Lately I lay in bed and day dream about not going to work. I think about how nice it would be to NOT go to work the next day. But then I remember that I’d still have to deal with the kids in the morning. And my husband would be home, sulking in front of his own computer. And what would I even do exactly? And then the school day would be over before I knew it and the kids would come and I’d have the same afternoon and evening we always have, and then I’d go to bed. Is that scenario really worth writing sub plans and taking a day? It never seems like it would be.

I’ve been going to bed early lately. And I’m happy to do it. Used to be I felt a little frustrated when I had to go to bed early; I hated giving up my kid-free time on sleep. But lately sleep seems like as good a way as any to pass the time. Being awake, even kid free, has lost its luster.

I don’t even know what I would change, if I could. I don’t even know what would make it better. I don’t really miss martial arts, even though it’s been over a month since I’ve stepped foot in the dojo. Even seeing my friends feels like so much work.

It’s not all like this. Not every minute. Sometimes, maybe even a lot of the time, it’s fine. When I’m teaching. When I’m with my own kids. Many of those moments feel normal. But when I’m alone, when I need to motivate to get shit done. There is just nothing left.

So yeah. It’s been hard to show up here when this is all I can think to write. Not showing up is not who I want to be, but writing this shit is not who I want to be either.

You recognize my dilemma…

Still here

Sorry for not writing all week. I’ve been going to bed early. I’ve been WANTING to go to bed early. Usually I’m annoyed when I have to burn kid-free time going to bed early, but lately it’s been all I’ve wanted to do. I can’t tell if the desire to go to bed early is my subconscious urging me to do what I need to avoid falling into the hole of depression, or if I’m already in the hole and I want to sleep because that what I do when I’m depressed. I think it’s the former. I’m hoping it’s the former. Right now I’m going to go to bed early if that’s what I want to do, even if it means i don’t write a blog post.

Next week at work should be a little easier and I should have some more time to write.

I’m still time tracking. I’m doubting the value of it for my personally, but I’m going to keep it up for a couple more weeks.

It’s a balmy 63* today and we have some low key days planned. I’m grateful for them.

I hope you all have a nice weekend.

Super Fast Weekend Recap

As you’ll see on Monday’s time tracking sheet, I’m writing this late. So I need to keep it short. Here are a couple highlights from each day, with my time tracking added too.

Saturday Highlights

My son and I took a trip to Target. I was getting a gift card for a friend whose baby came very early (he’s still in the NICU, but should be home soon), and my son was spending his Christmas gift card. He did a great job! He didn’t get mad when things cost more than he had, and he ended up getting a game instead of a toy. I was really pleased by how it went.

My parents picked up the kids at 3pm and I got to spend the afternoon and evening with my husband. It wasn’t without some bumpy moments, but it was a much needed break. I picked up Chinese food from a place we like and we watched a movie my husband had been wanting to see. It was really good.

Sunday Highlights

It was nice to sleep in on Sunday, though I only made it to 8:30am. My husband and I started the day pretty lazy, with two episodes of Succession and some pizza for breakfast.

I got the baby gifts ready and brought them over to my friend. It was her daughter’s 12 birthday, and I had a gift for her too (her daughter is friends with my daughter). It was nice to see them briefly and give them a little something to celebrate.

Sunday was also my mom’s 70th birthday. My dad, my mom and I went for a walk in my favorite park after the brought the kids home, then we had dinner at one of my favorite restaurants (her pick, but it’s a favorite of mine too). My mom was very happy to spend some time with me on her big day, and she was surprised that I had a present for her. It was nice to spend that time with them, and to know my mom felt she was being celebrated, despite having such a big birthday be ruined by the pandemic.

I spent the evening hosting two of my friends and their daughters. Both have had Covid relatively recently so we haven’t seen each other in a while. It was so nice to just sit and chat with them. The girls had a blast playing video games in the garage too.

Monday Highlights

Monday was supposed to be a pretty low key day, but my son was feeling left out that his sister not only had friends over on Sunday night, but also got to go to a friend’s house on Monday. His best friend was not available on Monday, and when I asked if we should try to find someone else to have over, or just do something fun ourselves, he chose the latter. So when I saw there were tickets to the Art of the Brick, which we’d been wanting to see, I grabbed them for my son and I (my husband and I agreed that he needed some down time so he declined to join us).

The Art of the Brick was a really great installation and my son loved it. We’ve actually taken him to quite a few museums in the past year and we’ve been surprised by how well he does; he’s genuinely interested in most of the art we’ve seen. He’s a massive LEGO fan, so I knew he would be into this exhibit, but I was not prepared for how much he loved it. I don’t think he was either. We both had a great time.

We walked to the Ferry Building after for an ice cream and I let him get two scoops with hot fudge and caramel. He was in heaven. He let me help him eat it and we barely made it through the sugar and cream monstrosity. It was very, very good, and my son proclaimed the afternoon “epic,” which made me quite pleased. It was nice to spend the time with him, and nice to make those memories.

This week is short (hooray!) and without in person marital arts it’s less busy, but there is a lot going on at work. Tomorrow I’m teaching the lesson that I was teaching last year when I had the panic attack on zoom. I’m really not looking forward to it, as I associate this lesson with that horrible day, but it needs to get done so I’m getting it over with first thing.

I hope this week is uneventful. We shall see.

Déjá Vu

My son is currently participating in a martial arts class. In our living room. On zoom.

It’s truly the worst kind of deja vu.

Honestly, we wouldn’t even be doing zoom martial arts (we’d be skipping it), except my son wants to because he wants to test for his red belt and he agrees that his attendance at zoom classes during the closure might affect his ability to test. I’m trying to focus on his commitment to his own martial arts practice, and his (mostly) positive attitude about taking the class on zoom today. He really has made huge strides in delaying gratification and working toward long term goals the past two years, and I’m trying to focus on that, and not the fact that it feels like we’ve taken a bunch of massive, giant steps backwards in our management of the pandemic.

I’m also trying to focus on the fact that I have an elliptical machine to work out on when it’s clear my body needs a break from running. I’d MUCH rather be running today, but when I woke up it was clear my body needed a break. Every pain point was improved yesterday after my Thursday chiropractor’s appointment, but today I feel the familiar pain in my right glute and I know that while it won’t hurt while I’m running, I will feel it afterward. So I’m on the elliptical while my son takes martial arts on zoom. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday morning. (The cloud cover is definitely helping me feel better about not being able to run.)

Yesterday was an okay day. I had a light day planned in the classroom and I was able to get a lot of work related tasks crossed off my to-do list. That felt good because a few of them had been lingering there a while, as I kept going to bed early instead of staying up to get them done. It’s nice to start the weekend feeling not too behind.

Scoring and putting up these “placas” was definitely a highlight yesterday. So nice to cross both off my to-do list.

And while I was NOT pleased to have to hit up TWO DIFFERENT Costco’s yesterday, I’m so glad to have that unpleasant task behind me. I actually really like Costco, but it never feels like there is a time when I can assume it will be less crowded there, so I do my best to avoid the weekends and cross my fingers that it won’t be a mad house when I go on a weekday afternoon. Yesterday it wasn’t a mad house but the first Costco didn’t have three things I needed, so I hit up the other one on my way home. That one did have two of the three things (of course kid sized surgical masks was the one thing both stores were out of), so I guess it was worth it. Again, I appreciate knowing I don’t have to go again for at least a couple of weeks.

My husband and I watched The Lost Daughter last night. It was really good. I want to write more about it, but I need to process a bit. I had very complicated feelings about parenting small children, and this movie tapped into my ambivalence in… uncomfortable ways. Olivia Coleman was (for course) amazing and I like Maggie Gyllenahall’s style of storytelling a lot (this was her directorial debut). It not a “lighthearted romp,” but I definitely recommend it.

Today my parents are picking up the kids around 2:30pm and then my husband and I have 24 hours alone together. We REALLY need the time to reconnect, and I think my husband ultimately recognized that and decided our separate needs for a break from the kids, compounded by our shared need to reconnect, convinced him that the opportunity warranted possible exposure in either direction. We are letting our daughter continue with the swimming practice we signed her up for in December (that starts next week), and if we’re going to let her spend 30 minutes in an indoor pool with dozens of maskless kids all around her (because she has been waiting for this for two years and we promised her when she was vaccinated she would get to do this again), letting her spend one night with my parents seems totally acceptable.

{My parents might not be as cautious as we are, but they also aren’t totally careless: mostly they are just less likely to turn down an invitation to eat inside someone’s house or even occasionally indoors at a restaurant. But it’s not like they are doing either of those things frequently. And my mom has mentioned multiple times that right now no one (none of her friends) is doing anything. For the first time we both know a lot of people that have caught Covid, so that is definitely altering their behavior somewhat.}

Before I sign off, I wanted to thank everyone who reached out on my post yesterday. It really does help to hear that I’m not alone. I struggle with deciding whether or not I should write about feeling so done with the pandemic, when I’ve weathered it better than 99% of the people in the world. Ultimately I think it’s worth publishing those posts on occasion, because I suspect other similarly privileged individuals are also struggling, and normalizing those feelings is important. We can have it better than others and still find it really, really hard. My (our) struggle does not dismiss or diminish the suffering of others. It’s important to recognize that.

And here is Friday’s time tracking! I might set myself an hourly reminder to update my sheet today – I have a feeling the weekends are going to be a lot harder to keep track of.

Struggling to give a $#!^

I’m not in a great headspace. I’m not really sure why. I mean I can point to external factors being sucky but it doesn’t feel like any of them should be affecting me as much as they are.

But maybe I need to abandon my ideas of should and just accept that they are affecting me, a lot, so I need to take appropriate action.

Except I’m not sure what that appropriate action might be.

It’s a long weekend and long weekends are good weekends for my parents to take the kids. In fact, my parents were going to take the kids this weekend because we were going to SketchFest shows. But the whole festival was cancelled (sorry, postponed), and I honestly forgot that I’d already asked my parents to take the kids on Saturday night.

I reached out to them about still taking the kids, and they said sure. But when I broached the subject with my husband he got visibly tense and asked what my parents were up to these days. He was assessing the possible risk to our kids. Still. Despite their vaccination status. And after a short exchange he muttered, Well we just feel think differently about these things, like it was a judgement neutral declaration and not a admonishment of my lackadaisical willingness to put our children in harm’s way.

I had actually been more concerned about our kids exposing my parents. It’s my mother’s 70th birthday on Sunday. Shouldn’t that be the concern, especially now that our kids are vaccinated?

But evidently, in the eyes of my husband, it is not.

I went into the bathroom and cried, but only for a few minutes. Then I got angry. I am SO, SO TIRED of having this conversation. I am so, so tired of determining our own personal guidelines, in the complete absence of advice from comprehensible guidelines from actual health professionals.

I give the fuck up. I just can’t give a shit anymore.

I don’t know if we’re sending our kids to my parents’ house this weekend. I don’t know if we’re letting them see friends inside, with our without masks. I don’t fucking know! And right now I can’t care about that because I have to teach in 30 minutes.

Happy Friday.

Triaging unexplained breakdowns

Today I had a bit of a breakdown. I’m not even really sure why. I mean yeah, being a teacher sucks right now, but I recognize I have it better than most. And yes, being a parent kind of sucks right now, but again I have it better than most. We haven’t had Covid, despite so many people we know getting it. Our live haven’t been upended, despite some close calls. So far, we’ve weathered the omicron wave relatively unscathed.

So why was I crying in the car today?

I honestly don’t know. But I know enough to respect the fact that I’m not doing great and need to give myself some space. My goal is to get to bed early tonight, but so far I’m not on track for that. We shall see.

I’ve added three things I’m grateful for at the bottom of my time tracking. I’ve wanted to maintain a gratitude journal for a long time, and while just typing some stuff out at the bottom of a spreadsheet is an inelegant solution, it’s better than nothing. If I keep time tracking through the month I might even make it a habit.

Today I was thankful that I could run while still “attending” my professional development meeting. Yes, I was a little resentful to spend my running time learning why the term “micro-agression” is being replaced by “subtle acts of exclusion,” but mostly I was happy that I could run early in the day, when I had the energy and “time” to do it. If it weren’t for zoom meetings continuing to replace in person meetings that wouldn’t have been possible.

Our dojo sent out a notice that it will be moving all classes back online for a couple weeks to wait out the omicron surge. It’s not surprising, but still disappointing. I’m tired of couching my disappointment in, “it’s probably for the best.” We were supposed to be spending this weekend at comedy shows, and instead we’ll spend them at home. Again, disappointing, but probably for the best. Again, it sucks and I’m tired of it.

I’m tired of it. And I’m just plain tired. My back really hurts. I didn’t feel it while I was running, but now I do. Even the blissful bath I took when I got home was not enough to keep the pain away.

I really hope the chiropractor can provide me with some relief tomorrow.

Considerations…

Am I the only one who finds Tuesdays to be more tiring that Mondays? On Mondays you’ve stored up some rest from the weekend. Tuesday is the day you really feel the weight of waking up early and getting your ass out of bed before dawn.

I teach three different classes this year, all of them Spanish. I teach one class, Spanish 1A, three different times. I teach the other two classes, Spanish 1B and Spanish Exploratory, once each. The Spanish 1A and 1B classes have some similarities – I teach both of them with a mixture of language comprehension days and language learning days. The language comprehension days are generally more energy intensive for me; on those days I have to guide the class through an activity speaking almost entirely in Spanish. The language learning days are usually less energy intensive; after we learn or review a grammar topic, they will spend some time practicing it on their own.

I try to schedule my weeks so that I’m not doing comprehensible input in both 1A and 1B on the same day. This week, I moved the comprehensible input day for 1A to Monday so that I didn’t have four periods of comprehensible input to teach on Tuesday. This ended up working out rather well, except today I expected it to be an easier day, since my three 1A classes were mostly working on a little art project, and I only had to really be on for my 1B class, but it didn’t feel that easy, and I was frustrated because my expectations didn’t match my experience.

I find this happens a lot, especially at school. I’ll think I’ve planned myself an easier day, almost a recovery day after a more intense set of lessons, only to find that I’m more tired after the supposedly easier day. I think part of why this happens is that I try to cram a bunch of prep into the student work time on recovery days (like today I scored yesterday’s work while the kids worked on today’s assignment). Doing double duty during part of each class period is obviously not actually providing time for recovery. The other issue is that I am not realistic about how much teaching actually has to happen on these days. I still have to explain the assignment, organize the resources they are going to use, answer questions, manage behavior, and oversee clean up. When they don’t finish as quickly as I think they will, I need to scratch the “when you’re done” assignment I had planned, but I also have to come up with something else because 10 minutes is still a lot of time for a middle schooler to kill in Spanish class (but not enough time to do my original “when you’re done” assignment). These are also the days when students have the opportunity to come up and ask about work they need to make up, or can’t find, or aren’t sure about. I end up being “on” a lot more than I expect to be, and sometimes it’s more exhausting than trying to engage them with language they can understand all day.

I think the afternoons can be similar. It’s exhausting to get my ass to the dojo and participate in a martial arts class, so I expect it to be. But it can also be exhausting to find a 30-45 minute stretch to exercise without throwing off the kids’ schedules. The problem is, I DON’T expect it to be. Today I had all afternoon to work out, but I really struggled to get started because my lower back has been hurting and today it was pretty bad. I knew the strength training video I had planned was a bad idea, but didn’t know what else to do. It took me a long time to find a yoga video I thought would probably work, and once I got started I was so glad I was doing it, but getting on the mat was tough.

All this to say, I need to take these realities into consideration when I’m thinking about what is working and what isn’t. If the days I plan as recovery days are just as tiring as the days I expect will wear me out, I can’t really count them as recovery days. Which means I need to find other ways to recover. I guess what I need to figure out is what actually does feel like a light day – a day that fills me up instead of depletes me. Then I have to figure out how to reliably duplicate that kind of day. Or maybe it’s combinations of days that will eventually feel manageable. I hope time tracking will help me to figure it all out.

It’s late now, and I’m tired. I also have some more work to do. So here is my time tracking. Happy Tuesday.

Where does the time go?

Being a teacher means I have a lot more structured time off (specific weeks where I’m not teaching) that most professionals. It also means that the days I’m working are structured very specifically – there is absolutely no flexibility in my work day. I am supposed to be there from 8:15am to 3:15pm, but I absolutely have to be there from 8:30am to 3:05pm or another adult needs to cover for me. It’s one of the more stressful aspects of my job.

It also means that I’m acutely aware of how I spend my time for a large block of the day. Sure there are some hours that can be wasted or used unwisely. If I linger under the covers (where it’s oh so warm) for too long, I may leave the house so late that I hit more traffic going to work and arrive even later than the mere 15 minutes I wasted under the covers. That means I get less done before I start teaching at 8:35am. My prep period shares a passing period with our 30 minute lunch which means I get 80 full minutes of prep time in the middle of the day. (I do intermittent fasting and don’t eat until 3 or 4pm so I don’t spend my lunch time on lunch.) I generally use that time wisely, but sometimes I squander it.

The biggest wild card in my days, is the chunk from 3:00 to 7pm. I always commute during this chunk, but when that commute happens, and whether or not errands are run on the drive home, varies. Some days I have meetings at work. Some days I have to race back to the city to get my son to martial arts. Sometimes I’m going to martial arts myself. Sometimes I’m trying to run before it gets dark and cold. Sometimes I wait out the high school release time traffic in my classroom doing more prep work. This massive portion of each day is really the most important variable. This is when I can make deliberate choices about what I want my life to look like.

I had a nice little schedule going before the winter break, but we’re about to change it up considerably so my son can attend a class with a high belt session at the end. So now is as good a week as any to track my time to see how my afternoons actually look with this new schedule. LV is hosting a time tracking challenge right now, so her daily posts will help remind me to fill out my own spreadsheet (I never got around to formally signing up, so I won’t be receiving the email reminders). I hope I keep tracking my time through the end of the month so I have an ever better idea of where the hours are going.

Because sometimes I’m really not so sure. Today I had no problem determining how I had spent my time when I was driving myself home or ferrying my son and his friend to and from the dojo. But once I got home it was a lot harder. What exactly did I do from 7 to 7:30pm? Was I on the blue couch the whole time just looking at my phone? Hitting my 90 minutes (!!) combined time limit on my reading apps suggests I did. And I’m only slightly more sure of how I spent the half hours before and after that. I definitely ate dinner, and did some dishes before. I definitely listened to a Spanish audiobook with my daughter at some point afterward. But that time really is nebulous, and that might be why sometimes I feel like I’m not using my time wisely. Or like I don’t have enough of it.

I meant to write about what I want my afternoons and evenings to look like today, but my daughter and I ended up listening to the audiobook for longer than expected and I was too tired to tackle such a long post that late. Maybe tomorrow…

In the meantime, here is today’s time tracking. I guess I’ll upload a jpeg of each day to help hold myself accountable.

Thoughts on Goals and Resolutions

It’s Friday night. I don’t feel great. My throat has been uppity all week, but yesterday and today it felt like it might actually be sore. Or that something in the vicinity of my throat might be sore, like my ears. There have been some dry coughs, to dispense with the tickle, but nothing to suggest I’m actually sick. I’m also tired, but I can’t tell if I’m fatigued. I can never tell if I’m fatigued. What is the difference between fatigued and tired? And if you woke up at 5:45am to take your friend to the airport before work, and had a shit day in your classroom, can you effectively tell the difference?

So it’s Friday night, I’m tired and might be getting sick, but I’m still on the elliptical. I’m working out because that is what I do. I work out 4-5 times a week. I’ve never struggled to do this, I just do it. I always do it. I do it when I’m on vacation. I do it when I’m overwhelmed. There are very few weeks a year when I do not work out four times. I’m not one of those people always trying to find way to avoid my weekly work outs, I’m the person trying to find a way to fit them in.

I’m not saying this to boast. It’s just who I am. I like working out. I (usually) like the way I feel while I’m doing it, and I usually like the way I feel after I’m doing it. Sometimes I’m not in the mood, but I always get it done, because I know that I need it. Not working out just isn’t really an option for me. It’s not something that I really have to work at, so I’m not really all that proud of doing it.

I may be very good at exercise, but I’m a pretty shitty eater. Am I a healthy person? I don’t know. I exercise like crazy but I never eat five servings of fruit or vegetables in a day. That is NOT who I am. I don’t think I will ever enjoy eating enough fruits and vegetables and I’m done feeling guilty about that. It’s just not who I am, and no amount of eating fruits and vegetables is going to make me like them more.

By the same token, I am not organized. That is not who I am. No matter how many things I buy to contain the clutter, or how many times I try to purge the clutter, it will always sully my surroundings. I am a messy person. That is who I am.

I’m also someone who likes to buy things. I know FIRE proponents think we can all live frugally by making the same choices, but after all these years of reading their blogs it’s clear to me they do not have to make the same choices. They just don’t. For whatever reasons, they just don’t feel the same urges to spend money. And other people have stronger urges to spend more money than I do. We all are who we are.

Some of it may be nurture – the circumstances of our youth shaping our relationships with money – but I absolutely believe a lot of it is nature. My sister and I are born of the same parents, who spent money on us, and around us, in the same ways. I love spending money. She does not. She just has no interest in it. My kids are the similarly different from each other. My daughter never wants to get anything on a trip to Target. She doesn’t even want the cash I would have spent on her there. Meanwhile my son covets a trip to the big red bullseye now, right after Christmas, even when he can’t articulate a single specific desire. He just wants to go inside and find something that catches his eye. He expects buying something to fill something inside him he doesn’t know is empty. That space does not long to be filled by things for my daughter, or my sister. For my son, and I, it does.

That’s not to say that we can’t change. But I think some of us will never meet certain goals in certain aspects of our lives. I don’t spend as much as I once did. No one specific strategy led to me spending less, I just gradually, over time, needed that outlet with less frequency. I still have moments, where the boxes pile in our entryway for a week or two. But I can go 1-2 months without buying much of anything, and not really think about it. Before the idea of not buying anything for week felt stifling. Now it’s hard to remember what that was like. So I did eventually changed, but I can’t tell you how or why. I know for sure it wasn’t in response to any conscious decision. I made conscious decisions to spend less, but they never resulted in that outcome. Eventually, I just didn’t want to spend money like I did before. But I can’t promise I won’t someday return to my old habits around shopping and spending.

{I still spend inordinate sums of money on things I absolutely do not need, but I do that much less frequently than I used to. I think I’ve learned to manage those impulses better because I’ve purchased so many things I thought would fix something, but instead just made me feel guilt and regret. I’ve definitely learned that over time, but it took many painful personal experiences to learn it – no one could have taught it to me.}

{I also really struggle to spend money on certain things, things that would probably make my life easier. Spending money on someone cleaning my house is SO HARD for me, even though I hate cleaning my house and am horrible at it. I also hate spending money on transportation. I will always choose the onerous, inconvenient but slightly cheaper transportation method over the flight or rental car or Lyft that would make me so, so much happier. Why can I spend so much money on shit I don’t need, but I loathe spending it on things that will make me measurably happier in the moment? I will probably never know.}

I’ve thought a lot about all this, but I’ve returned to it more this past week, as I’ve read articles and blog posts about goals and resolutions. I haven’t articulated resolutions for myself in a long time, and I certainly don’t plan on starting now. I do want to reflect some of what is working for me, and what is not (or has not) worked for me in the past six months. While I know I will never be an organized person who tracks her spending or follows a budget, I also know that I can make better choices that serve me in these areas. I also know I can make deliberate decisions about how I spend my afternoon and evenings that will improve my mental health and well-being.

When my kids were young it felt like most of my life was out of my control. I was not going to get enough sleep no matter how early I went to bed, because someone was going to wake me up. Working out was always going to make me feel guilty when an adult needed to be actively involved with our children during every minute. No amount of “conversations” with my husband was going to make him understand what I needed, or result in the recognition I craved.

But our lives have changed. My husband participates now in ways I never could have dreamed of two or three years ago. My kids can occupy themselves for hours at a time, and if I have their friends over (or take their friends somewhere), that time can be useful for me for rest or play or pursuing personal interests. I’m comfortable enough at work that it doesn’t require so much prep time before lessons or scoring time after them. There is room in the margins to make choices that are beneficial to me personally.

And I want to make those choices meaningful. I want to recognize that they are in fact choices and think about why I’m doing what I’m doing. I want to be honest with myself about how I feel in certain circumstances. I think I like being home all afternoon, that it’s restful, but actually if I get more than one or two afternoons a week at home I feel restless. Having said that, if i don’t get any afternoons or evenings at home to chill out I feel over scheduled. It’s a delicate balance but a balance is, I think for maybe the first time, possible.

I don’t mean to make it sound like I have things all figured out. I certainly don’t. But for this ADHD mom with two “spirited kids” who has struggled mightily to find her bearings as a parent, for the first time I see that I can be active, instead of just reactive in my life. I can make deliberate decisions instead of just responding to what is in front of me. The reasons this is now possible had little to do with me – regular family dinners and limited screen time did not deliver us to this place. My kids just happened to grow out of a lot of their struggles (a lot, definitely not all) and a global pandemic kept my husband home for two years so he could participate in family life in a way that was impossible before (this change also thrust him into a significantly depressive state (maybe even one of clinical depression) that he’s only now emerging from so it’s not like we traveled a happy, wholly positive path to get to this point). I also recognize that many husbands and fathers did NOT start participating more during the pandemic, I am incredibly lucky that my husband chose to do so – again I had nothing to do with that happening, I was just lucky that it did happen.

So all of that was to say, I don’t think I can change who I am, and I won’t make goals or resolutions that are essentially attempts at altering my character. But I will look at what has served me these last two years and determine which deliberate decisions can make a positive impact in my life. And I hope to do all that this week.

Do you make goals or resolutions at New Years? If so, what are you aiming to change?

Simple, Satisfying Saturdays

I wrote a long post on Friday night but Friday night didn’t seem like the right day to put up a long post, so you’ll be seeing in tomorrow.

Yesterday was a nice day. A simple Saturday. A satisfying Saturday. I really like simple, satisfying Saturdays. We had only one thing planned but the rest of the day kind of fell into place without much effort. At the end I felt very satisfied.

The one thing we had planned was martial arts for my son and I at 10am. He wants to test for his red belt, and needs to add a third class a week to his training to get ready, and he decided on Saturday’s class to add. I already go on Saturdays, so it wasn’t a big change for me, but when I start staying for sparring again we’ll have to figure out the logistics of getting my son home. But today he just waited for my class to be over and we went home together.

On the way home my husband texted with the address of a falafel place we could try. My son had been asking what falafel was (it was mentioned in a book he was listening to), and we both realized we hadn’t had falafel in a long time and really wanted to have it again. So while my son and I were at martial arts, my husband found a falafel spot with good reviews. We decided to walk to it once my son and I got home.

My son wasn’t super enthused about taking a walk AFTER martial arts but he agreed once I offered him an Icee from the 7-11 near the restaurant. I also promised him that Sunday could be a “totally chill day”.

The walk was really nice. The sun was shining after several cold, cloudy days. My daughter was with her grandparents so it was just the three of us. We chatted about stuff. My son ate lunch while we walked. It was very pleasant.

We couldn’t order online, so once we ordered at the window we had 15 minutes to kill. My son filled a cavernous plastic cup with three different flavors of Icee. My husband snagged a few rapid antigen tests from Walgreens. I grabbed a couple things we needed from the grocery store. Then we all walked back home.

The food was good. I really like falafel! We’ll be ordering from there again soon.

After stuffing myself, I walked to the library to pick up some books we had on hold. I found a bunch of other good stuff for the kids too. My daughter was home when I returned.

Back at home I made enough pumpkin pancakes two weeks of both kids’ lunches. It’s easy to push this task back and back until I can’t actually get it done, so I was pleased to finish it on Saturday.

While I was flipping pancakes, our kids got ready to DM their campaigns. We haven’t played D&D in a long time, so it was fun to return to their specific stories. We played for almost two hours, and I was glad we made it happen.

After kid bedtime my husband and I watched Passing, which I really liked.

Today I’m going for a run (I need to leave for this in the next 10-15 minutes!) before we enjoy bagels with my in-laws when they come to pick up our son for his “chill day” (which I decided to outsource because I’m not a fan of keeping my son occupied at home all day). At noon my daughter is getting her ears pierced. I’m worried that getting ears pierced when daily mask wearing is necessary is a mistake, but it’s clear she has to make that mistake herself or I’ll never hear the end of it. So we’re going to a well regarded piercing spot and we’ll see what happens. I hope I can find a new nose ring, I’ve needed one for a while.

Then my daughter and I will try to find her some jeans (she thinks she wants a pair of baggy jeans, but she is very “selective” about what she wears so I doubt we’ll find any she likes. Still, it will be fun to spend the day with her. She is very much an 11 year old and she’s changing so fast these days. I know I need to cherish these moments when she very much wants to be with me. And I’ll do just that. I hope we can eat at In-n-Out because that is her favorite.

How are you spending this weekend? I hope it’s simple and satisfying!