What I Did Differently This Time

At the end of every summer I do a kind of audit.

Not formally — I don't sit at a desk with a document. I do it in the bath, or on the walk back from school drop-off, or in the ten minutes before sleep when the day is quiet enough to hear myself think. I review what happened. What was manageable, what was too much, what I could have handled differently.

This summer the audit is different, because I've been doing things differently.

What I did differently: I named things before they were problems. The summer plan, the childcare arrangements, the holiday logistics — I named them early and invited someone else into the naming. Not the managing. The naming. The seeing of what was coming and the claiming of portions of it.

What I did differently: I stopped pre-solving. When a problem arose that wasn't mine, I let it be a problem until the person who owned it solved it. This sounds obvious. It required, in practice, a profound resistance to my own instincts.

What I did differently: I asked for what I needed, specifically, rather than hoping it would be offered. This is harder than it sounds because what I need is often not a task but a shift in attention — and can you pay attention to this thing I've been paying attention to alone is a harder sentence to form than can you pick up milk.

What surprised me: how much changed when I stopped managing everything. Not the practical standard — that was fine. The way I felt in the house. Lighter. More there.