Asking all my life.
It’s that time of year! I do Movember every year for their support of mental health. Let’s be honest Men don’t speak up, and we should.
This year, is a bit different than normal if you want to watch the dailies:
As always, please donate here.
Movember 2024 is around the corner and it’s time to look back and plan this years reverse mo route.
But what’s this!? I forgot to post a 2023 recap. I must have been uprooting my life to move the whole family to a new city or something. 😜
I have to remind myself I’m a parent with ADHD. I considered myself mildly ADHD. For over 40 years my alternative coping strategies mostly worked.
Then my first child. Then the second. That’s when my struggles tipped.
I’ve been thinking about my biggest hurtles lately trying to find ways to cope. This isn’t a post to fix ’em, more a post to share the struggle.
My first realization of the new world demand was holding my new born daughter while my 3yr old son was slowly falling backwards off a swing. Having to make that split second decision not to drop the baby while my son dropped onto the wood chipped ground. Did I make my decision based knowing he would be safe on softish ground, or was I frozen?
Now at 5yr and 2yr it’s always a battle for who gets your attention, with all the banging screaming and repetition that comes with that.
How do I pick, who do I pick, what should I pick, if any? I think I’ve come to the conclusion for me it’s the idea of sensory indecision. So many inputs coming at me, plus the inputs inside my head, it becomes overloaded. To much. And it it a paralysis of sorts.
When the kids are at school I get to sink into the work day. One of the other hardest times for me is 4pm – when I say “Oh crap, time to get the kids!”
I never give myself the right heads up, or ramp down. I always forget.
Over the course of the next few hours I go through the motions. Trying to listen, to start planning dinners with my partner, walking kiddos around the neighbourhood knocking on doors to play with friends. But in my head, I haven’t switched gears.
I’m still thinking about work. Problems still running around in the noggin that need a solution.
When someone brought up the term “context switching,” I thought “Ah Ha! That’s what it’s called”.
Remember those kids vying for attention? Yah, they don’t care about context switching.
Add to that, they are experts and context switch mid sentence a thousand times a day; the dramatic emotional changes, the here-there running from place to place; the labyrinth of pre-logical minds. It’s a mine field of switches to keep up with. My mind ends up feeling dazed and confused like a rag doll smashing about holding onto the leash of a bear.
I’ve tested my will power enough to know I’ve got the chops to go cold turkey on most things, and if it weren’t for that, I doubt I would be able to come close to do this.
I’ve been able to ignore a lot of the impulses.
Through selflessness and love for my family I have been trying my best to stay snuggling on the couch, making their lunches, getting them dressed, going for walks, instead of tinkering or doing whatever that “other thing” is roaming in my mind.
I used to think that was a good idea. Why wouldn’t it be better to be with them instead? I’m starting to wonder and reconsider. I’ve been depriving myself, that voice, for too long.
Some of those thoughts and impulses were things, in hindsight, I loved. I miss them. Some of them I could only do in small doses. Some I needed big swatches of time. But either way, they have been left undone and slightly neglected.
“Maybe when they get older” my friends and I all say ( for many reasons ), “they’ll calm down, and you’ll get back to some balance”
“Maybe. Maybe.” I say.
But I don’t think that’s my answer. To wait 5 or so more years?
So what am I doing about it? This blog.
It’s one of those voices I’ve been ignoring. If it hasn’t been a work report, and to do lists, birthday invitation, or practising words with my son, it hasn’t happened. So, crack the knuckles and get cracking I go.
Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash
I think it’s safe to come back out? The kids are old enough; I’m crazy enough; now federated!
There’s just a few cobwebs to clear off here.
Last night I came to the realization that I was not in the drivers seat of my life anymore. I didn’t even know if I was in a car. If you prefer the analogy of the bull, there were no hands on anything. I had long been kicked off and covered in dust.
So from 2am onward – I reassessed. Old school, quietly with a pen and paper.
I actually haven’t really done that since our second was born. She’s now 3 ( in the blink of an eye ).
What’s been going on for the past 3 years?
So WordPress refreshed. Federated settings tweaked. Moved a couple older properties into this one. And I’m putting one key in front of the other. Creek crack, clickity clack…
I made a little shortcode so I could do something like this….
[ap_if length="800"]
[ap_title] - [ap_permalink]
[ap_excerpt length="800"]
[/ap_if]
[ap_if condition="lt" length="800"]
[ap_content]
[/ap_if]That way short posts don’t federate with all the fancy permalinks & titles. Long ones do.
Setting up a new mastodon home on cosocial. Follow me @ethernick@cosocial.ca
Yes, I approve this link as “me”. hachyderm.io/@ethernick
As one can tell, I show up once a year on this blog to shave my beard off. I had hope to share more. And I did for a while… just somewhere else.
A relatively new and young ( a 1.5 and 4.5 year old ) family has a tendency to do that. I come back here not to post so much as to look back at my archive. I might come back and write more, but you might need to wait 3 years, give or take.
In the meantime, I am still tinkering on pet projects.
If you haven’t been paying attention to Mastodon and the Fediverse, I recommend you do. Decentralized social media is cool. With the help of a a project called Shuttlecraft, I now to have my own plot of Federated digital land. Come by won’t you?
With Shuttlecraft came a re-introduction to Glitch. I was completely unaware what they were up to, and that’s a bad on my part. Because while the internet is opening new languages, as someone who want to put something on the net, I felt you had two choices: a webhost that is still kind of antiquated, which a limited support of antiquated services, and going all cloud all the time – which can get costly.
Then there is glitch. A webhost that’s kept up. Technical enough for developers getting into things like react & node.js, but not uber technical that you need to spin up cloud instances and install every Unix package and then configure your choice of webserver from scratch.
If you haven’t taken a look at ethernick.com in a while, swing by there too, won’t you?
Well, it looks like nap time is over, and I’ve got to get the little one. See you again in Movember.
