Not a Wasted Word

My work bestie is pregnant. She’s 15 weeks now, so I am moving out of my (private) anxiety that things will be okay (never goes away does it?) and into, holy shit! She’s going to have a baby. Talking to her about everything pregnancy related makes me realize how LONG ago it was that I was pregnant, especially for the first time. This summer she will have a newborn and I will have a sixteen year old. That is crazy.

The 12yo is growing up VERY FAST. He’s now taller than me. His feet are bigger than mine. His body looks more like a man’s than a boy’s. He even has the shadows of facial hair on his upper lip (that is truly killing me). I randomly came across a photo of the 15yo from her first day of 6th grade and she looked MUCH younger when she started middle school. She is nine months younger when she starts a grade than her brother (her birthday is June, and his is October), so it makes sense that she looked younger at the start of 6th grade than he looks now, but even taking that into consideration, the differences are striking. The 12yo is just growing up really fast. He’s my “baby” except he’s really not at all anymore.

Speaking of which, my dad sent me a Reel that shared two parenting stats. Evidently by the time your kid is 12 years old, you’ve spent 75% of the time with them that you are going to spend. And that after they turn 18 (I guess assuming they move out at this point), you only get, cumulatively, one more year with them. Now who knows where these stats come from, and how accurate they are generally (or for my family specifically), but even if I will see my kids a lot more than those stats suggest, I haven’t really thought much about how finite my time with them actually is. It’s sobering!

Also related, the 15yo is a sophomore this year. She’s taking her first AP test in a few months. She’s talking about the AP classes she’s going to take next year. She’s talking about looking at colleges next year. If she does go straight to a four year college, she only has 2.5 years left at home. We hang out a lot right now, so it will be a massive shift for me when she does leave. I’m definitely counting the years we have left with her at home.

My mom turned 74 yesterday and my father-in-law turns 80 on Wednesday. He is 5-6 year older than any of the other grandparents, so it’s not like they are all about to turn 80 but still. I’ve noticed my parents’ aging so much more in the past five years than at any point before. They are getting older and I think more and more about the next stage in our relationship, where I’m taking care of them. This is on my mind as I face more and more physical and health related challenges caused by my own aging. Maybe it’s true what they say, that 44 is a “super aging” year, because I really do feel so much older now than I did when I was in my early 40s.

To lighten the mood a bit… my mom planted some succulent cuttings when the city put this tree in front of our house. They totally overtook the small plot pretty fast, but this winter they started growing flower shoots, because we’ve gotten so much rain. I took this picture on December 20th, to show my mom the shoots.

I think I wanted to write this post because I’m more aware now than I’ve ever been before of how quickly time is passing and how little time I have left with my kids. That is why I want to be more intentional with my time moving forward, and why I am determined not to abandon my goal making entirely (though moving it back to the spring solstice or summer might be the right move). 😉

So here is the post where I declare that so far, 2026 has been giving… failure. I really have, for the past two weeks, felt like I have been failing. It’s not a great way to feel! It’s also pretty much an entirely self-imposed feeling, which means I should really take responsibility for my feelings of failure, which is kind of just another way of… failing, right?

But seriously, I’m frustrated with myself for all the the things I WANT to do, that are not getting done. Why can I not get my shit together? This is not how I want to start the year.

I do think the one thing I am better at is perspective. Which means that I don’t let this kind of stuff bother me as much. Which is good! Not meeting self-imposed goals is a fine thing to cut myself slack over! Spiraling about it is probably not going to help.

And yet… if I’m better at giving myself a pass, it’s harder to generate the urgency that drums up the stress that eventually spurs action.

I’m trying to look on the bright side. One silver lining is that failing to meet goals before I have even publicly articulated them is prompting me to reassess those goals. Why did I make them in the first place? What was their greater purpose? Is that still something I want to strive for? If I’m already failing at these goals can I change them to make them more manageable? Is the greater aim attainable via some other path? I don’t have all the answers to these yet, but asking these questions is a valuable exercise.

Goal setting and planning are NOT strengths of mine. My ADHD mind does not embrace either. It is not to say that I don’t accomplish enough. I clearly have systems in place that allow me to function at a level that many would consider “high.” I feel like Rachel in Wales described it perfectly in her recent post.

I’ve long realized that one of the problems with my current way of managing the million spinning plates is that it is highly dependant on my own steady state of productivity and emotional resilience. I am good at dropping balls and picking up balls and tossing balls and keeping things moving in the right direction while remembering that we need to add tunafish to the grocery order and also it’s library day tomorrow…

I have to admit, I felt so very, very seen reading that.

I am good at accomplishing what is immediately in front of me. I’m good at looking about a week out and having a game plan for the coming days. Longer term planning, not so much. Lofty, multi-step goals? Fuggetaboutit. I am a reactive planner for the most part. I don’t do long term. I definitely don’t do lofty.

And honestly, as I’ve ponder what some longer term goals might be I’ve wondered if I lack… ambition? All my work goals so far are streamlining processes that will make next year easier. Ditto many of my personal goals. The few loftier goals I considered are the ones I’m abjectly failing so far. Will making those goals just be setting myself up for more failure? (See questions posed in paragraph five: silver linings).

These are not new thoughts for me. I’ve had them before. There is a reason I stopped even pretending to think up new years resolutions. It helps that I’m a teacher so my real new year starts in August. But there were years when I rode the resolutions wave of new years energy of those around me. My lack of inspiration (ambition?) led me to stop doing even that.

But I do think my life would be better if I approached it with more intention. I hate the idea of “decision through indecision,” when you make a choice basically by failing to make any choice at all. When you choose your path because you didn’t take the time to consider what other paths might be possible. I’m doing that now. And if allows for the very real possibility that in five or ten years I will lament where I end up because of all that indecision, by letting the current of my life push me down one river, without taking into account all the tributaries that might lead elsewhere.

All that to say, I don’t want to give up. Even though it’s January 14th and I still haven’t posted my 2025 recap, let alone articulated any of my 2026 goals yet. And the 16th is my mom’s birthday and I haven’t solidified plans with her, let alone bought her a gift. (One of my goals is to show up for my parents’ special days without my old, unhelpful, baggage).

This is me, a week after my crash out, and no closer to marking off tasks that have been languishing on my to-do lists for over two weeks now, declaring to myself, and the few people who read this blog – THANK YOU! – that I am not giving up! Maybe the 2025 recap will go up in February. Maybe the 2026 goals will be finalized in March. But I will keep trying!

I will keep holding myself accountable, even if it means giving myself opportunities to fail.

{Wow, I honestly didn’t think this post would end like this, but I’m pleasantly surprised…}

Going back to work this past week I felt pretty decent. I didn’t even have the end of break scaries! I really did feel ready to go back after two weeks of relative down time.

As the days wore on I started to feel overwhelmed. By Wednesday I felt like there was a weight pushing down on me, mentally and emotionally. By Thursday I was kind of spiraling and by Friday evening I officially “crashed out,” as my 15yo would say. I even wrote half of a Five on Friday post yesterday that I titled, Burning up upon re-entry. Mellow dramatic much?

Today, on the bus ride home from the dojo, I was reading an article about the insanity that is the second year of Trump 2.0 and I realized that part of my spiral and subsequent crash out was due, in part, to the desperate nature of the news lately, to the terror Trump’s administration is wreaking both at home and abroad. Just recognizing that the recent news stories were affecting me deeply helped calm my nerves a little. It also helped me identify other things that feel out of control lately in my own life.

I hurt my shoulder on Tuesday, or better said I aggravated a previous injury (my AC joint). I’m not sure how I reinjured it, I don’t think it was a specific moment but more of an overuse injury. I went to the dojo on Wednesday, assuming I could avoid making it worse but I did the opposite and it really hurt on Thursday. I was mad at myself both for causing the injury in the first place, and not giving it time to heal.

My perioral dermatitis has been flaring for over two months now. I’ve done a lot of research and the big recommendation is to avoid triggers. Well, I don’t wear make up and I’ve stopped using my normal face wash and only use Cetaphil now. But I can’t stop using fluoridated toothpaste (my teeth are HORRIBLE and will immediately fall out of my mouth if I’m not fortifying them with fluoride) so… I guess I’m screwed? I do think the sun is a big trigger (but so is sunscreen, so I see many floppy hats in my future) and also the wind (or cold air, or maybe even the changes in air temperature you get in the winter when there is heat running inside). So basically, I cannot fully avoid my triggers maybe having a red scaly rash around my mouth and nose is just what I have to look forward to for half the year. I did email my doctor requesting a new prescription topical treatment, but I don’t have a lot of hope that it will help.

{And yes, I know it is vain of me to be so bummed out by my skin. But I am vain! And I am aware enough of the constant, steady changes in my skin everywhere else to know I don’t have many years left before I’m going to hate my skin for a whole new host of reasons, and I think that makes me especially bitter that I’m missing out on these last years I have left of 40 year-old skin. Again it’s vain, and I own that.}

Maybe the biggest of the stressors making things feel out of control, are some symptoms that remind me A LOT of how I felt before my thyroid condition was treated. I’ve had some troubling GI issues, which mirror what I was dealing with in March almost exactly, and I’ve also felt insatiable, which was how I felt when my metabolism was running amok. I did recently reduce my thyroid medication (at my doctor’s direction), but only from 2 to 1.5 pills daily. And my heart rate does not suggest an overactive thyroid so I’m not sure what is going on. I think mostly I just feel like I felt when I was sick, and it’s causing me a very mild PTSD-like stress response, especially since I know that later this year I’ll be stopping my medication entirely to see if I’m in remission and if I’m not I’ll have to make hard choices about how to take out my thyroid completely. And this will cause more fluctuations in weight and those are hard for me. I have a history of disordered eating and these weight fluctuations require a lot of my mental and emotional energy to work through. I don’t love admitting that at 45, but it’s absolutely true.

{I hope to write about all this more, because I do think about it quite a bit and some of my insights are probably worth sharing… but that feels like fodder for another post.}

I do think I identified an important cycle, which is that I feel really hungry and then I make poor food choices and then those poor food choices cause GI distress. So this week I’m going to identify options I think will be less catastrophic for my intestinal health and see if I can at least rid myself of one of these troublesome issues. (I really think refined sugar and I do not get along. Which is honestly not horrible because I crave savory foods more, but when I eat more sugar I want more sugar and then I eat more sugar and so on, and then my system breaks down and I feel miserable. So yeah, now that the holidays are over I hope it will be a lot easier for me avoid sugar moving forward).

So yeah, I’m dealing with an injury, and and unsure how much rest I should be requiring of myself, or what kinds of exercise will promote healing instead of hindering it. My face looks like a red, blotchy mess and wearing make up to cover it will make it worse. And I’m dealing with some health issues that mirror a previous low point in my health and the subsequent diagnosis of an autoimmune disease I’ll be managing for life, so yeah. Oh, and our country is a dumpster fire that is intent on killing its citizens with impunity and spreading its dumpster fire self to the rest of the world. I think I can give myself a little grace for my recent crash out.