Aiming for a "Good Enough" Week

and some Sunday Suggestions

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Every weekend, no matter what else we have going on, I do the following things in order to not lose my ever loving ADHD having mind keep myself organized:

• update our family calendar

• do my paper planner for the coming week

• meal plan dinners and figure out portable food needs for various games and practices, then see if someone needs to grocery shop accordingly

• clean up my work calendar, making sure I’ve added in travel time for off-site meetings. If I’m super ambitious, I might also do an hour of work emails on Sunday night to try to start the work week as close to inbox zero as possible

When I’ve done all these things, I generally feel like I’ve just taken a deep breath. I feel settled, ready even. It usually helps keep the Sunday scaries at bay and gives me a soothing feeling of being in control of my universe, at least on paper.

(The fact that I will inevitably put more on my to-do list than is humanly possible and will ALWAYS overestimate how much writing I can do is beside the point. When it comes to the concept of time, I am nothing if not a pathological optimist/completely time blind)

When I did my various organizing tasks this weekend it became very obvious, very quickly that this coming week is going to be one of those “perfect is the enemy of good” weeks when it comes to things like family dinners, getting household stuff done, and not spending money.

This week my daughter has four days of track practice while my son has two club soccer games, two high school volleyball games, one volleyball practice, and one soccer practice. His Monday night game is a 55 minute drive from our house and starts at 7:45pm, so we’ll be lucky if we’re home by 11pm. His volleyball games are all away games, because of course they are. I’m assuming he’ll have to do some homework in the car or miss a few hours of sleep to stay on top of it all. In addition to my normal work stuff, I’ve got two conferences to attend, one where I’m giving the opening remarks and one where I’m giving the keynote. I’m looking forward to both events (I love public speaking) AND I still have to actually write my remarks/finish my slide deck. I’ve also got to prep for a high school soccer booster club meeting, the consequence of accidentally becoming president last year, and knock out four hours of mandatory club soccer volunteering.

It’s a busy season of life for us and while I occasionally find myself looking desperately at the calendar for any days that still have a blank space, the truth is that I also love it. I’m keenly aware of the ticking of the clock where my son’s high school sports career is concerned and that, in a year from now, there won’t be anymore school sidelines for me to cheer from and I will grieve that loss. I’d rather be busy than bored and there is zero chance of boredom this week.

It’s also the kind of week where I’ll probably remind myself multiple times that perfect is the enemy of good and that everyone getting fed is more important than how and where that happens. There’s probably going to be late night McDonald’s on the way home from soccer and concession stand hot dogs for dinner multiple nights this week. My grocery trip for the week was a Costco run guided by finding good car snacks, stocking up on the sports drink my son likes (on sale for $4 off this week! The Costco gods were smiling upon me!) and dinner options that my daughter can easily make for herself. I hope most of us get in a vegetable most of the days the week, but I’m going to keep my expectations nice and low about that too.

Sometimes I think the ability to keep my expectations realistically low about stuff like this is one of the real gifts of having older kids. I remember how, when they were little, things like what I was feeding them, how much sleep they were getting and whether they were getting enough quality time from me felt critical, like every fistful of fast food French fries they ate in their booster seat was going to somehow lower their eventual ACT score or something.

There’s a wonderful feeling of freedom that comes with having teenagers and realizing that they are neither the sum of all my mistakes nor the result of every purchase of overpriced organic strawberries and days of rigid adherence to nap schedules.

This will be a good enough week.

***

Now, on to some stuff I was into this week!

• May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, so here is a nice little round of books by AAPI authors, care of my favorite local independent bookstore!

• I talked about the Met Gala last week and thought this was a really helpful explainer to what Black Dandyism is and why it matters

• Watched and enjoyed Black Bag - a movie about spies that’s really a movie about marriage

• I love track and field, so was interested and discouraged by this look at the “dirtiest race in Olympic history”

• This is sincerely the best peanut butter I’ve ever had. It tastes like a Payday bar - salty, sweet, very crunchy. Small batch made from a local restaurant but ships nationally.

• A moving conversation about grief

• Apparently this is house is “ranked the 2nd most haunted home in New England and 9th in the U.S.!” but I kind of love it. I’m a sucker for built-ins and hardwood floors.

• This is hilariously accurate

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• This made me laugh (also? The shame of misspelling something so badly that autocorrect/spell check becomes the shrug emoji is real)

• This made my son fall off the couch laughing

• How did I not know there was a TV adaptation of the Judy Blume novel Forever coming soon?? Forever was one of my all-time “sneak read this at the library so my mom doesn’t find out” books, though I still cringe that the boy character named his penis “Ralph”