It's A+'s last week of virtual Grade 4 before summer vacation. This time of the year, when the teachers turn to filler activities like games and movies, she tends to find the pace excruciatingly slow and of little interest to her. There was a substitute teacher on Monday. She's not keen on having a substitute teacher since they tend to run into technical issues or go at a much slower pace. She already finds the regular class pace agonizingly slow. Her classmates goof off a bit more around a sub, too. But I needed some time for paperwork, so she begrudgingly signed into class. She reported that, as predicted, they got absolutely nothing done. The students played games and watched a movie. On Tuesday, there was another substitute. I'd done my paperwork for now, so I called the school to let them know she'd be absent. We were about to head out for some ice cream after breakfast, but she got upset about something and decided to stay in her room for a bit. I finished putting together Emacs News and played a bit of Stardew Valley with the Tileman Reworked mod to destress after the last few days of paperwork, and then I started on this reflection.

(Wednesday update: Back to the regular teacher, but now there's a Zoom update that's making it hard for the students to connect to class, so the teacher is switching back to Google Meet for a bit. It sounds like A+ managed to make it back on. This afternoon, they're going to play some more games and watch a movie, so I think I'll take A+ out if she wants to do some math or go shop for earbuds to replace the one she lost.)

The change of routines to summer is a bit challenging for us. Well, the schoolyear is challenging for us too. I suppose summer is challenging in a different way. The playgrounds are busier and louder. The sun is brighter and hotter. The usual rhythms of playdates with her friends changes as they go to sumgmer camps or other activities. I move from having medium-sized chunks of fairly predictable focus time to playing everything by ear.

Time analysis

Before we officially head into summer, I want to think about how I used my time this schoolyear, and how I can prepare for summer and next schoolyear. How to read this graph: gray is sleep, pink is childcare, blue is more focused time, orange is consulting. If you click on the image, it opens an SVG with tooltips.

The biggest difference was that A+ wanted to exert more independence and autonomy when it came to school. In Grade 3, she wanted me to stay in her room so that she could ask me for help or hang out with me when she was bored. In grade 4, she preferred to have her room all to herself. W- helped me set up a little desk in the corner of another room on the same floor, so I could still be close by, but A+ mostly did things independently. Or didn't do things, as the case may be; I learned not to push her on schoolwork, since the only thing that accomplished was grumpiness all around. I've been practising stepping back. It's her experiment, after all, and the teachers can give her feedback on school things. I can keep myself busy with my own focused-time stuff so that I don't fret at her. After I got through my initial anxieties, I settled into doing more of my stuff during the schoolday.

Category	2024-2025 %	2025-2026 %	Diff %	h/wk	Diff h/wk
Personal	9.2	13.8	4.6	23.2	7.7
Discretionary - Productive	13.9	18.4	4.6	30.9	7.6
Unpaid work	4.1	4.6	0.5	7.7	0.8
Discretionary - Family	0.3	0.7	0.4	1.1	0.6
Discretionary - Play	1.9	1.1	-0.8	1.9	-1.3
Business	2.1	1.1	-1.0	1.8	-1.7
Sleep	33.4	32.2	-1.1	54.2	-1.9
A+	35.1	28.1	-7.1	47.1	-11.9

In grade 4, A+ started learning French. I started learning French too so that I could help her. I practised pronounciation with a virtual tutor once or twice a week, and I wrote journal entries in French too. (These images are just screenshots.) There were other discretionary activities, of course.

Category	2024-2025 %	2025-2026 %	Diff %	h/wk	Diff h/wk
Discretionary - Productive - French	0.0	5.2	5.2	8.8	8.8
Discretionary - Productive - Emacs	4.5	7.3	2.8	12.2	4.8
Discretionary - Play - Stardew Valley	1.2	0.7	-0.5	1.2	-0.8
Business - Earn - Consulting	2.0	0.8	-1.1	1.4	-1.9
Discretionary - Productive - Writing	2.9	1.3	-1.6	2.2	-2.6

I tended to turn to Stardew Valley for de-stressing or revenge bedtime procrastination. Interestingly, my nascent fixation on French pretty much replaced Stardew Valley until it got slowed down by other things happening in my life starting April, which also coincided with my time on Stardew Valley picking up again in April in order to unwind.

Emacs continued to be another good way to unwind. I gave myself permission to spend more time just having fun with Emacs. Following up on my reflection for Emacs Carnival March 2026: Mistakes and learning to reach out, I started scheduling conversations during A+'s schoolday. I did some Yay Emacs livestreams and Emacs Chat interviews as an experiment. I think it was a good way to get lots of tips out of people's heads and into videos/transcripts/screenshots, and I also improved my workflow for editing transcripts and extracting images. Not counting Emacs News, I wrote 47 Emacs-related posts during the previous schoolyear and 65 posts during the current schoolyear.

Other changes this schoolyear:

• Pre-adolescence: A+'s been having a harder time with her feelings. I think this might be related to pre-adolescence. Totally normal. One of my goals is to keep myself calm and regulated, and another one is to help her connect with more people she likes so that she can feel supported even when she's grumpy with me. She can chat with her aunts and cousins via Stars Messenger without needing to go through me, so that's good.
• Gymnastics: We figured out how to get one-on-one gymnastics classes going, and A+ has been enjoying them.
• Pokemon: A+ and I started playing Pokemon Go. We play it pretty casually, and we've joined a couple of the meetups. It's been a good excuse to go for the occasional walk, and it's also a good way to take advantage of a bike ride. She's also gone deep into the lore (so many books!) and has watched more than a dozen seasons of the Pokemon TV series. She occasionally plays Pokemon on W-'s old Game Boy Advance.
• Dungeons & Dragons: We've also been playing D&D. We started playing in virtual sessions with my sisters and nieces. A+'s really taken to it, including experimenting with DMing. We've gone through much of the Keep on the Borderlands Starter Set (thanks to my sister) as a duet adventure, except for a number of the Caves of Chaos which were too scary for A+ even though I tried to balance things differently. She's more into roleplaying than combat, so we mostly improvise our own adventures. I keep a d20 and a d6 in my vest, and my phone has virtual dice too for when we're walking around.
• W-: W- retired, yay! He's been enjoying biking and working on personal projects. A+ still hangs out with me more than with him, but that's fine.

Thoughts for next year:

• Neurodivergence: A+ and I find it a little challenging to adapt to changes in routine and also to handle boredom. I think I'll talk to our doctor about considering a neuropsych assessment in case knowing more about our brains can help make things a little bit easier for us. I think she'll still have a bit of leeway at school for the next few years, so it's a good time to experiment and figure out things that work better for us. We've been talking about neurodivergent strategies, too.
• Pre-adolescence: It's probably going to be a little tougher next year (pre-adolescence, extended family challenges, etc.), but this is fine. We signed up for all of this, and this is where we get to see how our preparations work out. It's also good equanimity practice. The turbulence is natural. I want to stay loving, patient, and supportive.
• Emacs: For now, Emacs Chats (and the transcription thereof) might actually be more useful to the wider Emacs community than my hacking around with idiosyncratic Emacs Lisp code, especially since I still have a hard time getting my brain to cooperate with the extra bit of polish needed to finish an idea and/or properly contribute things upstream. Livestreaming while I'm tweaking Emacs is an interesting trade-off which I think ends up being mostly positive: I'm slightly distracted because I have to talk out loud, but on the plus side, people's suggestions and questions (and the feeling that other people are watching) also help me focus on the current task instead of going down a different rabbit-hole. Or at least it encourages me to either capture the TODO for the next idea or leave myself some breadcrumbs if I really do want to go down that other rabbit-hole on stream. I'll pause these for summer. I'm looking forward to experimenting with them more next schoolyear, especially if I can balance it with the work I put into organizing EmacsConf.
• Virtual school: Virtual school continues to feel like the right choice for us both in terms of health and the ability to manage stimulation levels. When she finds her classmates too noisy, she can lower the volume. When she needs a break, she can sign out and we can work independently. We hope next year will be a good fit too. This year, the Toronto District School Board consolidated all its virtual students into one virtual elementary school, which was nice because they didn't feel left out of hybrid activities. We still had the usual transition pains this schoolyear, but maybe next year will be smoother.

Getting ready for summer

Here's what my time looked like last summer:

Unsurprisingly, it's mostly childcare. A+ had a series of private swimming lessons (too short to do much during) and one afternoon summer camp (during which I did a lot of consulting). Aside from that, we basically hung out with each other unless she was grumpy with me or one of us was in the bathroom. She tended to wake up early, so I didn't usually get focus time during the morning. Or any time during the day, really. But now I can practise French in my head, so that's good. A+ is thinking of getting her own Bluetooth earbuds since they're helpful for managing overstimulation at the playground, so I'll be able to get mine back and maybe even listen to comprehensible input podcasts when she's not directly interacting with me.

Comparing summer 2025 with schoolyear 2025-2026:

Category	Summer 2025 %	SY 2025-2026 %	Diff %	h/wk	Diff h/wk
Discretionary - Productive	10.5	18.4	7.9	30.9	13.2
Personal	9.8	13.8	4.0	23.2	6.7
Sleep	30.7	32.2	1.6	54.2	2.6
Discretionary - Family	0.1	0.7	0.6	1.1	1.0
Unpaid work	4.3	4.6	0.2	7.7	0.4
Business	1.5	1.1	-0.4	1.8	-0.7
Discretionary - Play	6.2	1.1	-5.1	1.9	-8.5
A+	36.8	28.1	-8.8	47.1	-14.8

As expected, the schoolyear means less time with A+ compared to summer (-14h / week), which mostly gets shifted to productive time (+13h/week). I actually get a little more time to sleep during the schoolyear, too. So, preparing for this upcoming summer, I can anticipate less sleep and more time with a possibly tetchy kiddo, but if I can take advantage of little moments here and there (like when she's in the bathroom for an unpredictable length of time, or when she needs space for me), then I can take care of whatever I need to stay sane.

I'd like to continue with my sessions with French tutors, although I might have to experiment with the timing to see what works. Shortly after lunch might still be nice, since it's probably going to be too bright and hot to enjoy being at the playground. If I keep improving, then I can use little snippets of idle time (like when she's playing with her friends) to rehearse sentences, listen to comprehensible input, or write my journal entries.

Let's compare summer 2024 with summer 2025:

Category	Summer 2024 %	Summer 2025 %	Diff %	h/wk	Diff h/wk
Discretionary - Productive	2.5	10.5	8.0	17.7	13.5
Discretionary - Play	1.6	6.2	4.6	10.4	7.7
Personal	7.5	9.8	2.3	16.5	3.9
Unpaid work	4.1	4.3	0.2	7.3	0.4
Discretionary - Family	0.6	0.1	-0.5	0.1	-0.9
Business	4.5	1.5	-3.0	2.5	-5.1
A+	42.5	36.8	-5.6	61.9	-9.5
Sleep	36.6	30.7	-6.0	51.5	-10.0

Some thoughts for this upcoming summer:

• Sleep: I probably want to get back to about 8 hours of sleep a day (33%), which is totally doable if I resist the temptation to squeeze in gaming or coding. This probably means I need to take better care of myself during the day so that I don't feel the urge to indulge in revenge bedtime procrastination, which probably means (1) finding ways to spend time with A+ that I enjoy more, like D&D, biking, or swimming, and (2) using French or other portable pick-up-and-put-down activities to take advantage of little snippets of free time.
• Childcare: A+ might want to spend lots of time with me, but less than the previous year as she becomes more independent, and the sharp drop in the time kids want to spend with their parents is coming inexorably. I can probably keep the discretionary stuff to just whatever keeps me sane, and focus on enjoying time with A+. Maybe more D&D, especially since we're figuring out ways to improvise on the go. Swimming is nice, too.

FAQ:

• How much time does it take to track and analyze your time?
  • Hardly any time to track it, maybe a couple of seconds between activities. I made a home-made web-based system for tracking my time, and I can easily update it by tapping buttons on my smartphone or specifying a less common category. It doesn't have to be super precise. Most of the analysis reuses code from previous years, including the web-based graphs. I generate the tables with Emacs Lisp in an Org Mode Babel block. Thinking about how I've been using the time takes time and reflection, but it's good for me.
• Can you share your tracking system?
  • I used to let other people use it, but bots kept hammering it, so now it's just for me. Here's the source code just in case you want to try self-hosting.

My stress level seems to be higher this year compared to last year. There are a number of ways I can tell when I need to slow down. I feel more tired, less energetic. Enthusiasm is difficult to muster. I need to break things down into smaller tasks. I make lots of little mistakes: I misplace things, I forget things, I don't think ahead.

I track my mistakes in my home-made web-based journal under the Oops category. It feels a little better, come to think of it, when I can recover at least some data from a mistake. It's part of life, just a signal that tells me my brain is getting overloaded.

I thought it would be interesting to analyse the frequency of my oops. For example, here are some recent oopses:

• I forgot to check the EmacsConf upload folder before e-mailing the speakers a nudge about videos. There were a few more videos in there, whew! It's all good, people are patient and wonderful. Impact: people's patience. (2025-11-21-01)
• I ate the last of the brown rice because I forgot to check if there was more. Good thing W- had more in the freezer. (2025-11-18-06)
• I fumbled the Apple Pencil as I took my iPad off the piano. It disengaged from the magnetic lock, slid down the piano cover, and fell on the floor, breaking the tip. I didn't want to rush to catch it because I was tired and I was also holding the iPad. Fortunately, I have a number of backup tips. Impact: maybe $3 to replace that tip eventually. Cause: tired. (2025-11-18-03)
• I washed the clothes on hot because I'm trying to avoid insect bites, but I accidentally shrank A+'s favourite purple shirt. Maybe next time I can just do a small load of my stuff. Impact: $10. I made up by buying new clothes for her, which I've been meaning to do anyway. #household (2025-11-15-16)
• I crossed the street against the lights because I wasn't looking at the pedestrian light. (2025-11-11-06)

Here's a yearly analysis:

(append '(("Year" "Count"))
(sort
 (mapcar (lambda (group)
           (list
            (car group)
            (length (cdr group))))
         (seq-group-by
          (lambda (o) (substring (my-journal-date o) 0 4))
          (seq-filter (lambda (o) (string= (my-journal-category o) "Oops")) (my-journal-get-entries))))
 :key 'car))

import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

df = pd.DataFrame(data[1:], columns=data[0])
df['Count'] = df['Count'].astype(int)
df['Year'] = df['Year'].astype(int)
df = df.sort_values('Year')
plt.figure(figsize=(12, 6))
ax = sns.barplot(x='Year', y='Count', data=df)
plt.title('Oops by Year (2017-2025)', fontsize=16, fontweight='bold')
plt.xlabel('Year')
plt.ylabel('Number of oops entries')
plt.xticks(rotation=45)
plt.grid(axis='y')
for i, v in enumerate(df['Count']):
    ax.text(i, v + 1, str(v), ha='center', fontsize=9)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig('year_count_plot.svg')
return 'year_count_plot.svg'

2017 was not a full year of data, so that's probably why the number is so low. 2018 was when my dad died. I flew to the Philippines several times with my 2-year-old daughter so that we could spend time with my mom. It's a wonder that I managed to keep things mostly sorted out. Things were mostly manageable in between despite the ongoing pandemic. This year, though, a confluence of factors added a lot more strain on my brain. I wonder if part of it is because I'm concerned about health issues for people I care about. I also worry about the kiddo, school, change, and possibly adolescence. Who knows, maybe I'm starting to go through perimenopause, which apparently tends to include brain fog and mood swings. Fun. These are big things that I won't be able to resolve on my own, but I can get better at not overextending myself.

Might be fun to do a month-by-month analysis.

(append '(("Year" "Month" "Count"))
(sort
 (mapcar (lambda (group)
           (list
            (substring (car group) 0 4)
            (string-to-number (substring (car group) 5))
            (length (cdr group))))
         (seq-group-by
          (lambda (o) (substring (my-journal-date o) 0 7))
          (seq-filter (lambda (o) (string= (my-journal-category o) "Oops")) (my-journal-get-entries))))
 :key (lambda (row) (format "%s-%02d" (car row) (cadr row)))))

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

df = pd.DataFrame(data[1:], columns=data[0])
df = pd.pivot_table(df, columns=['Month'], index=['Year'], values='Count', aggfunc='sum', fill_value=0).iloc[::-1].sort_index(ascending=True)
plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
sns.heatmap(
    df,
    annot=True,
    fmt="d",  # Format as integer
    cmap="YlGnBu",  # Color map
    linewidths=.5,
    cbar_kws={'label': 'Count of "Oops" Entries'}
)
# Set the title and axis labels
plt.title('Heatmap of "Oops" Entries by Month and Year', fontsize=16)
plt.xlabel('Month', fontsize=12)
plt.ylabel('Year', fontsize=12)
plt.savefig('number-of-oops-by-month.png')
return df

Month  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10  11  12
Year
2017    0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   7   2   0   3
2018    4   7   4  10  10   8   8   1   7   7   5   4
2019    4   4   2   4   4   1   3   5   1   1   2   5
2020    3   1   2   2   1   5   7   7   4   2   2   2
2021    2   2   1   1   2   4   6   4   2   2   1   6
2022    2   3   2   1   3   2   0   3   2   2   4   1
2023    3   1   1   1   5   2   4   5   0   0   3   3
2024    0   1   1   4   4   8   8   1   3   3   2   2
2025    7   1   7   2   6   4   9   8  10   4  15   0

Oooh, what's up with this month, yeah…

Most of my mistakes are small and easy to fix, just wasting time or patience. Others are a bit more annoying (dropping electronic devices, etc.). Some are potentially life-limiting (gotta make sure I look at the right lights before crossing the street). I tend to have a hard time with:

• transitions, like coming home after a bike ride: I might accidentally hang up my keys on the wrong hook if I'm not paying attention. I've started saying the steps out loud.
• tidying: If I have an attentional lapse, I put things in not-quite-the-right-place, so I probably can't listen to podcasts or think about complex thoughts.
• travel: If I'm biking or walking, I have to pay extra attention.
• task switching: interruptions, stacks, etc. I say things out loud and write them down if needed.

When I notice myself making more oopses than usual, I try to sleep more, take things more slowly, offload more of my thoughts to drawings and notes, ask for help, and do fewer things.

I'm working on single-tasking more instead of getting distracted by interesting thoughts. Maybe I used to be able to think about stuff, but now it's probably better to just let my mind be slightly bored if necessary instead of letting it get overloaded. I have to adapt to my capacity at the moment. I can either trust that those thoughts will come back if they're important, or take a moment to write them down on my phone. I can also give myself more focus time during the day to revisit those thoughts so that I don't get tempted to squeeze them in while, say, I'm putting away the dishes.

Maybe routines, songs, physical cues like checklists, or pointing and calling (physically pointing to something and saying it out loud for confirmation) can help me with some of my frequently-made mistakes.

Little by little. I might not be able to get rid of all the little mistakes, but if I can smoothen out some of the frequent ones, have an oops fund for the monetary costs of moderate mistakes, and keep myself from making the life-limiting ones, that might be enough.

I am going through a lot. It is not much compared to what other people are going through. But it is more than what I usually go through, so it's a good idea to slow down and give myself space to learn how to handle it.

Part of handling times like these is touching base with what I know. I know that to be human is to have challenging times, so I don't find this surprising. I know that it is objectively difficult and that other people have a hard time with situations like this, so it's not a personal failure and there are no easy solutions. I know that it is temporary and that things will eventually settle into a new normal. I know there will be many such transitions ahead, and I'm getting used to the process of leaving old normals behind and focusing on the next step.

I know the way my brain tends to behave when it's overloaded. My attention hiccups. I hang up my keys on a coat hook instead of the one near the door. My fingers stutter on the piano. I can't multitask. When that starts to get in my way, it's a good reminder to get more sleep and do fewer things. There are very few firm commitments in my life, and I appreciate the flexibility that my past self planned. There's room to wobble¹ without bringing everything crashing down.

I still notice my anxiety spike from time to time. My anxiety spills out as trying to either control too much, or (knowing that control is counterproductive) stepping back, possibly too much. It tends to latch onto A+'s schoolwork as the main thing it could possibly try to do something about. I feel partially responsible for helping her develop study skills and navigate the school system, but these things are mostly outside my control. It's good that it's not in my control. Then there's space for her to learn and grow, and for me to learn along with her.

Instead of trying to push futilely, it's better to step back, simplify, focus on getting myself sorted out, and build up from a solid base. Better to focus on connecting with rather than correcting A+, especially as she takes her own steps towards autonomy. It's okay for now to focus on making simple food, washing dishes,² combing out the tangles in hair and in thoughts. Maintenance.

Here's the core I'm falling back to for now:

• Sleep
• A good walk outside, maybe 30-60 minutes
• Making an effort to eat a variety of healthy food, picking up ideas from DASH/Mediterranean³
• Piano, maybe 20 minutes: low stakes, not intense, just enough to notice when my mind wanders or my breathing stops, and the ever so gradual improvement from familiarity;
• A little bit of exercise: doesn't have to be much, just enough to begin the habit (15-25 minutes)
• Writing and drawing to untangle my thoughts
• A little bit of fun for myself. Might be tinkering with Emacs, might be drawing. Simple lines and colours are nice.
• Giving myself permission to tell other people "That's not one of my priorities for now." There's only so much I can focus on at a time.
• The reminder that other people have their experiments too. It's not about me; how freeing! It's good to not let my anxiety (just my ego's occasional fears of not doing enough, not being enough) engulf what properly belongs to other people. Learning is mostly A+'s experiment, and I can see this time as collecting data for a baseline. I'm happy to help her when she wants my help. Let's find out what can she do when I'm not pushing.

It's important to me to start from where I am and work with what I've got. Where else could I be, and what else could I use? Only here, only this, and it's enough.

I'm working on embracing my limits. It would be unproductively egotistic to think I have to do this all on my own. It helps to unload my brain into my Org Mode / Denote text files, my sketches, and my index cards so I can see beyond the single dimension of thought. Some days, even that is difficult. It's okay for my brain to not feel cooperative all the time. Some days are more blah than others, and it's hard to shape enough of the thought-fog⁴ into a post or a diary entry. There's no point in grumping at myself over it. It's okay for those days to be rest days, "take it easy" days, "there's room for this too" days. Goodness knows I've had slow months, slow years.⁵ (And if that's good for me, why not extend the same grace to A+? She'll figure things out when she's ready.)

I'm practising asking other people for help and letting them actually do so. I know A+ benefits from a wider world, and I'm glad she can chat with her aunts and cousins. I can slowly experiment with finding tutors and enrichment activities for A+, maybe even starting out with classes for me sometimes. She's been going to 1-on-1 gymnastics class for three weeks now. I love seeing how she's slowly learning to check in with her body and catch her breath so that she has more energy and can work on her flips safely. I love the way she gets up and tries again.

I wonder what other teachers and peers I can help A+ find. Next week, A+ will join a small-group art class so that she can have fun with art outside the requirements of school. A friend of hers is in the same extracurricular class, and maybe the fun will get her over the initial hump of practising fine motor skills and tolerating the frustrating gap between taste and skill.⁶ I want playfulness to be the core of her experience with art, not the pressure my anxiety feels about getting her art homework done. Knowing what my anxiety whispers, I can keep that from leaking out to her. The goal is not to get things done; the goal is simply to have the opportunity to find joy. Someday, when she reaches for a pencil or a brush, I want that feeling to come with warmth, a smile, curiosity: what will we encounter on the page today?

As she learns to read and write and think more deeply, I want the same for her: not the compliance of "have I checked the boxes,⁷" but "where can these thoughts take me?" Can I find her role models who can share that ineffable joy or opportunities where she can discover it for herself? Can it take root deep within her, something to touch as she goes through her own challenges, something that grows as she grows?

A wider world could help me, too. How wonderful it is to deal with something that so many people have gone through, are going through, even if there are no universal answers. I'm checking out workbooks from the library, and it might be interesting to experiment with seeing a therapist. I have mild anxiety according to the screening tools, but it might still be handy to pay for the accountability and structured exploration of my thoughts. Consulting an intern therapist might be a more affordable starting point that can help me figure out if I need more qualified care. We don't have medical benefits, so I want to be thoughtful about how I use resources, and I want to push myself to try out more help so that I know what that could be like instead of trying to handle everything on my own. Like the way A+'s gymnastics teacher thinks about the next skill that might be in her zone of proximal development⁸ (not too easy, not too hard), maybe someone else can help me map out what nearby betters could be and how I might get there.

I know what it feels like when I can handle tough situations well: when I'm ready with a Band-aid or a hug, when I keep our basic needs sorted out so that we have a solid foundation to experiment on, when I get the hang of spelling new terms and organizing my hasty research into coherent understanding and ideas for things to try, when I can be warm and affectionate and appreciative and supportive.

I know what I hope A+ will feel: believed in, excited about her growing capabilities, supported when she wants help, open to things she might not know to ask about, able to straddle both wanting to be cuddled and wanting to be on her own. I want her to feel like she's the one figuring things out, so I want to get better at being a supporting character instead of letting my ego get in the way. (It's not a power struggle, it's not a moral judgment of me or of her, it's just life.)

When my anxiety wrings her hands, frets, whispers, worries that I'm not enough, I can think: ah, she is just trying to keep all of us safe, figure out how to make things better. I can use this imperative, this desire to try to help A+ live her best life. I know I don't want A+ to be driven by anxiety or controlled by conditional esteem.⁹ There'll be hard times for A+, like for everyone. I want her to be able to check in with herself, figure out what she needs, and feel her strength grow as she stretches. So I can work on getting better at that myself.

It's good to practise these things now, in this time that seems hard compared to the recent past but will seem easy compared to the future. Embrace the stress test while the stakes are low, so that I can reflexively use the skills when the stakes get higher, and so that A+ can take what she likes (kids are always watching) and use them as she figures out her own way.

Step by step. It's manageable. I can manage it. Could be interesting to see how we can make it slightly better. I'm not looking for answers. No one has them, and things change all the time. But the figuring out, that's the work of being human, isn't it?

This blog post was nudged by the October IndieWeb Carnival theme of ego.

• Physical limits
• Fragmented attention span
• Unpredictability
• Lack of momentum
• Things I learned
• Looking ahead
• Related posts

The door clicked shut. A+ had just shooed me out of her room, and she was already back at her desk waiting for her virtual grade 4 class to begin. She's got this. And all of a sudden, I had time for myself. I could have two focused-time chunks of a few hours each, straight, several days in a row. I've made it to the other side of the early parenting time crunch. I could start dusting off all those ideas that I've shoved into my notes for a long-imagined someday. That someday could be today.

Before I settle back into the world of being able to string two thoughts together, I wanted to reflect on this past almost-decade of voluntarily giving up my time autonomy. I don't know how much of my experience can translate to other people's lives. I've been so lucky in the choices we got to make. But I'd better write down my notes before I forget.

The weather's getting cooler. I probably have a couple of weeks more before the cherry tomatoes get too cold. A+ hasn't been interested in harvesting them lately, so I get to do the tomato-picking now. We have a little over a month until the usual first frost in Toronto. I moved the strawberries to pots during spring/summer so that I could keep them in a cage away from squirrels, but now it's time to put them in the ground. I'll see if I can still pick up some compost from the garden store so that I can amend the soil before I replant the strawberries. It's a good time for me to get some more lettuce and radishes going, too.

9 PM on a schoolday, time for me to nudge A+ off to bed. A+ is clicking through the Stardew Valley wiki, slurping up all sorts of trivia that she'll probably trickle into our conversations. There are two pieces of homework left to do, one with quite a few slides to complete. And drawing. She's not a big fan of drawing assignments. "My hand is tired," she says.

I try to be calm and supportive. I wobble. Could've done this earlier, I think. I manage to keep myself from saying it. I teeter, noticing myself mentally fast-forwarding decades ahead. Oh no, she's not going to get the hang of doing things that she finds boring, she won't develop study skills or executive control, she'll cram through all the classes she can coast in, and all of it will come crashing down in university when she might actually need to buckle down and study.

She's 9! She's a long way from university.

I'm learning to embrace my anxiety and appreciate how it tries to keep us all safe. This feeling makes sense. I want to help her avoid mistakes, especially when the feedback cycle is long and the results of choices will only be seen much later.

But anxiety gets in the way of parenting. If I let the fearful part of my brain take over, I'll inadvertently teach her that mistakes are catastrophic rather than just ordinary Tuesdays. I want to hold her steady, but the wobbles are how we learn.

It's somewhat manageable now, when we can talk about these things openly. A+ can laugh off my worries ("Mom, you're fretting again,") and W- can remind me to slow down when it runs away with me. He's usually pretty chill about all this. It'll be harder when the cognitive rewiring of puberty or menopause turn ordinary conversations into minefields right when the stakes get higher. The more I tighten my grip, the more star systems will slip through my fingers. (There I go again with catastrophizing.)

Besides, I want to help A+ avoid the paralysis of perfectionism or self-recrimination. I want her to be able to experiment, and to pick herself up and try again if things don't work out the first time around. To do that, I need to learn to change my perspective from being anxious about mistakes to seeing the opportunities for re-takes.

There are many things I can't teach A+. Some things can't fully be taught, they can only be learned, like how to balance the clay on the pottery wheel. Sometimes I don't even know what the right answer would be, like what kinds of tips work for her particular brain. Some things change over time and she'll need to change with them, like how to adapt to life's situations. She'll need to learn how to learn instead of relying on one fixed answer.

Fortunately, life comes with so many opportunities to practise. The Toronto public school calendar has 187 instructional days, so she gets plenty of chances to manage her homework and get feedback. The repetitive nature of things used to frustrate me when it came to my tasks (always more dishes to wash, always more clothes to fold), but it's good for learning, especially while the stakes are low. It's her experiment, I remind myself. About half the time, she doesn't even want my help. ("I can do it, Mom.") She's sensible enough to try things out on small experiments instead of scary ones: shopping at the grocery store on her own, not skydiving.

There's plenty of stuff for me to learn while she learns. When I get the urge to correct her work ("How does that line up with the rubric?") or nag her to get her work done, I tell myself:

• Is it really a problem? The teacher isn't expecting her to completely master all the skills, and the teacher is in a good place to give developmentally-appropriate feedback. I can let her experiment with how much work she wants to put into things, and she can see what that results in. Despite all my twitchiness about how she puts off her daily homework until 9 PM, she still manages to get things done. Judging from the frequent reminders her teacher gives the virtual class, she's probably ahead of the curve. So maybe it's not a problem.
• Whose problem is it? Something might not be my problem. It might not even be her problem. She reads during class time, for instance. Sometimes she misses something that can't be figured out from just the homework slide deck. Maybe that's partly her experimenting to find the right balance between attention and stimulation. Maybe that's also partly a consequence of how school is designed to go at the group's pace. Not entirely her problem.

The more I let go of the small stuff, the more experience she'll be able to draw on for the big stuff. I hope she'll get the hang of thinking of life as mostly series of little experiments, and to notice when there's a bigger choice that needs more thinking because it's more long-term. The more she decides, the more confidence we both develop in her decisions.

This reminds me of how kids learn how to bike. The popular approach uses training wheels to prevent falls. The idea is to gradually raise them as the kid improves, but I usually see kids pedaling along (perhaps slightly leaning over to one side) to match the slowness of parents' walking. It's hard to balance when you're going slow. But pedaling isn't the hard part. Balancing is, and you develop balance by balancing. Maybe that's a little like how I get tempted to rescue A+ from the results of some of her choices, but letting her try things is how to help her learn.

A+ learned how to bike using a balance bike instead of using training wheels. When she was two, she toddled along on a Strider, which was light enough for her to manage. Eventually she figured out coasting. She was proud of being able to do it on her own. Then we upgraded her to a Cleary Gecko freewheel bike, with proper hand-brakes and everything. After a few attempts with us holding her under her armpits, she was ready for us to steady her with a hand on her back, and then for us to be close, and then she was off on her own. She fell and skinned her knee many times, developing an appreciation of pants for protection and ice cream for comfort. The more she biked, the more she learned how to notice that feeling of being slightly off-balance, and the better she got at correcting it. Now we can bike on the streets together.

You can't learn how to bike if the training wheels are always on, or if someone's always holding you steady. It's okay to wobble and fall and get up. You learn that you can survive a skinned knee, and so you keep going.

Sometimes, when A+'s in the middle of a meltdown, I have to remind myself not to try to fix it in the moment. That doesn't work, anyway. Just take the loss and try again next time. Sometimes, once we've both calmed down, I ask A+ to imagine rewinding back to a situation so we can play it out a little differently. Sorry, I meant to say this, not that. Would that work better? Next time.

Not mistakes. Data. Just another step in the journey.

Getting better at getting better helps me, too. I've been practising piano, making steady progress through the Simply Piano app. I've been playing for about four months now. I took piano lessons as a kid, but not to any serious extent. Back then, I got bored with the simple exercises I had to do. Now I feel slow, snail-slow, but I can savour the way my mind is beginning to get the hang of things, knowing that it will take me many tries to get the hang of it. I'm starting to be able to look at the notes and remember the phrases, imagine what the next sequence will sound like before I play it, and notice how my hands move to make it happen.

When my fingers wobble on the keys, I slow down and try again. There's no point in berating myself. If my mind keeps hiccuping or my fingers keep stumbling, I can think: ah, is this because I'm tired, or because I want to do something else, or just because I'm learning and it takes time to get the hang of things? I'm getting better at figuring out when I should probably call it a day so that I don't practise mistakes into my muscle memory and when I might benefit from just slowing down the segment.

I still stumble through pieces I've successfully played before. Remembering is hard. But I'm getting better at being patient with myself, accepting that it's because I'm still in the middle of the journey. It's not a mistake that I should grump at myself about. It's just part of a re-take. This is what learning looks (and sounds) like. Of course it doesn't start out perfectly smooth.

Here's me learning Mozart's "Rondo alla Turca", with the app providing accompaniment in the background. It's not perfect, but it's progress.

We were at the playground. I ate the remaining crackers in the snack box because I thought A+ was done. Turns out she was saving them for later. She was very upset. I apologized and promised to ask next time, but she was too far gone to hear.

That was a tough moment. A+ was already emotionally off-balance because the playdate hadn't gone as well as it usually does. Discovering I had eaten the crackers she was looking forward to was the last straw. She dissolved into tears. I snuggled her and settled in for a long wait. I think: Where's the line between comforting her and coddling her? Does my anxiety teach her this is too hard to handle? We're not quite at the point of being able to shrug off mistakes. I remind myself that she'll learn what she's ready to learn.

Looking around while A+ drenched my left shoulder, I noticed a skateboarder on the park road. Maybe a man in his thirties? He was trying to jump his skateboard over a low concrete lane divider. He had been at it for a while before I noticed. Most times, he was able to clear the divider, but the skateboard slowed down too much on the other side and he had to jump off. On the seventh try that I saw, he landed back on the skateboard and rolled on for a bit. Success! He tried again and failed. Four more failures before his next success. One more attempt–another failure–and then he called it a day. I'm sure he'll be back at it.

A+ continued to cry. My phone buzzed, reminding me that we probably wanted to get going before the rain in the forecast. I carried her as I picked up our bags and put them in my bike. Eventually I needed to gradually ease her off me. She curled up in the bucket of my front-loader cargo bike, still crying. I tucked the towel around her like a blanket, buckled her bike into the tow-bag, and walked the bikes home. She fell asleep.

A wobble, a fall. But I'm sure we'll be back at it too. (And we did; the next day, she was happily playing with her friends again.)

It's hard to be in the moment. Sometimes the moment sucks. It's hard to be far ahead in the future. It makes decisions feel too big. Do-overs make things just the right size. If we can get good at shrugging off the inevitable failures and treating them as data so that we can sketch out ideas for the next experiment, I think that'd be pretty cool. Instead of "Oh no!" or even "Are you sure about that?" (what kid likes to be doubted?), I can lean towards, "Hmm, let's find out."

As predicted, we had another late-night homework situation. This time she had a headache and wanted to go to bed, homework unfinished. I was able to let go and just focus on snuggling her in. The next day, after morning routines and without any nagging, she did the homework and submitted it. Late, but done.

There'll be another bedtime homework session, I'm sure. I have to trust that even though I want to shortcut the learning for her, she's got this. She's figuring things out. If we stumble, that just helps us practice for next time, and there are so many opportunities to try again. The wobble is not the obstacle, it's the way.¹

This post is yet another take on the June IndieWeb Carnival theme of Take Two. Here are two other ones: Making and re-making: fabric is tuition and Thinking about time travel with the Emacs text editor, Org Mode, and backups.

Related reflections:

• Productive procrastination and parenting
• IndieWeb April 2025: Renewal