View from the Houseboats

In what is perhaps an overly apt metaphor, I discovered my computer will only charge when plugged into the most intense charger – anything else just slows the rate of battery drain.

Despite all the good news of the past few weeks, and no longer needing to search for houses, I am I am feeling the effects of an overstretched period and impending uncertainty. With an upcoming grant deadline for a project that’s been complicated to organize, I’ve been working on weekends and a second shift weekdays after Theo goes to bed. Many around me are working longer hours, especially among our short-staffed clinical teams. There are many times in our careers (lives) where our choices are limited. Yet perhaps because I don’t have patients, because I have control over my own schedule (at least, insofar as I decide what meetings to accept, what requests to re-arrange my life over), because of the upcoming changes to our lifespace…I’m realizing I’m nearing the edges of my capacity.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m fine – I just need to recover a bit and then right-size my workload (again). I’ve kept up with exercise, but reflection, meditating, and journaling have fallen by the wayside. In the evenings my brain, like Theo’s, is increasingly overtired and a little unglued. Thursday was a fairly unproductive day relative to many others this week, because I am simply tapped out. In the evening, when Theo became overwrought we talked about how sometimes are feelings are like tigers that go savage, and how we have to find ways to keep ourselves and others safe until the tiger can be wrangled. I tried to practice all the parenting (and palliative care) skills I’ve learned about getting to eye level, repeating what he said, letting there be long periods of quiet. Since he ate 4 eggs for breakfast and a second dinner after bath, I suspect he’s in a growth spurt, in addition to quietly processing upcoming changes.

Meanwhile, we are on the next phase of the learning curve about what happens after an offer is accepted on a house. Since many may be wondering, we close sometime April 30-May 2, and move sometime between May 10-15. Luckily our current landlord is able to be flexible with us. Every time I do something in our houseboat, I find myself trying to imagine where we will put things and what our life patterns might be like in the new house, with double the space and multiple floors. The things we’ll miss and the things we’re looking forward to.

Gratitude

• Roughly 4 hours of egg searches this weekend, between Theo and my mom setting up searches for Sam and I, or the adults and big kids re-hiding eggs for Theo and younger kids to keep searching for on the dock

• Finding lilacs at Trader Joes

• A delicious spring dinner and rainbow cake on Sunday

• The ordinary academic bravery of applying for a UCSF mentoring grant, even though I didn’t get it

• An impromptu outdoor work meeting with a friend

• Grandma Pearl (my mother’s mother), who died at age 96 nine years ago last week and inadvertently started me on this career path. She embodied a lifelong growth mindset, and her art is threaded throughout my house (and slide decks).

• An observation from a friend that resonated: that there are some griefs we weave into the fabric of our beings, and other griefs we leave on a shelf in a room to visit from time to time.

Interesting things on the internet

• Ed Yong’s latest in the Atlantic on COVID grief

• A podcast on managing up

• A double disadvantage for women in the hybrid workspace

• QualLab in Education Research at Ohio State

• NYT Lentil soup recipe sent by a friend

• Three Statistical Approaches for Assessment of Intervention Effects: A Primer for Practitioners

Posts from me in the last month:

• Celebrate every step

• Wrangling brain weasels

• Resilient grieving

• Unmoored from routine

• The analogy between grief and public health