š°Fall & Winter 2023: Down the rabbit hole and out again
Iām on a couch doing some delayed 2022 reflections. Heās celebratory but Iām a touch pensive. Iāve worked so hard all year but somehow going sideways, diagonal ways, and squiggly ways to nowhere in particular. Things I didnāt even know could be hard felt impossible. Activities I used to care about stopped feeling important to me. Subjects Iād dismissed as froufrou nonsense loomed as urgent matters while things I thought were important to me just stopped mattering.
JP is shocked I feel this way. He thinks itās not humanly possible to have done more. I feel like I went through a lot of trouble to go in a giant circle this year. Iām happy with that though.
Froggy:
We survived his first sick season at daycare, which was brutal. He was a sick little frog for a whole month. Itās miserable to see him so uncomfortable. He got us sick too. Heās not sleeping well. Weāre getting woken up with him. Weāre not sleeping either. Thereās no backup care, so every hour of the day, we review who has the least important meeting that hour and they attempt to attend the meeting while watching a loud and grumpy froggy. We are all still sick and sleep deprived. JPās mom flew in for two weeks to save us. My parents were recalled to CA because their companies have mandated return to office, but they fly back up to relieve us for a few weeks too.
When the fog of war and sickness lifts, we have the worldās most delightful Froggy. A couple of my favorite memories from the holiday season:
My first deep conversation with him. Heās crawling backwards on the carpet. I joke: āAre you being an animal?ā He actually replies: āyeaā I ask āWhat animal are youā. To my shock, he replies: ācowā. I ask again just to confirm, āYouāre being a cow??ā and he says āMoo, mooo, mooo.ā Heās asked for practical desires like milk, or food, or songs but this is my first glimpse of his creative inner life. Itās also our first actual dialog where the conversation progresses. Everyone else is marveling convos with chat-gpt but Iām marveling about having a conversation with a small creature that came out of my belly.
He can count (in base 3): He has learned 1, 2, 3 but 4 is still too advanced. If thereās a picture with 6 animals, he counts them up 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 and then looks back up at me very pleased with himself. Ahh if only I could include a record of his cute little froggy baby lisp - wwwwun, toooo, tweeeee.
We are starting to get some very very small ROI out of him. He likes to be helpful. At his great grandmaās house, he put away all our shoes for us. He also loves to vacuum (a gift from his uncle Adrian) and invites us to vacuum with him at all hours. Froggy also runs a courier service on the little motorbike he got from uncle Chris and will shuttle sufficiently small objects in the basket between the front door and the living room.
Letters and advanced fish!! We have re-enrolled him in Nonna Vicky daycare. At Nonna Vicky daycare, he has learned to recognize a good half of the alphabet and even a handful of words. He was gifted a fish puzzle game and some ABC books and knows about octopus, squids, sharks, crabs, and even narwhales.
Froggy dances!!!! We have started to teach Felix some dances to childrenās songs. He is heart-meltingly cute in them. He shakes his little froggy butt to Christmas music. We march around like ants all over the house. He doesnāt march properly if itās just 1 adult and him as an ant - he only marches if the whole family marches with him.
Froggyās pretty great and weāre at the stage where thereās fun and social life back again. Somedays, I am keenly reminded of my boring suburban motherhood-ness when friends invite me to parties that pregame at 9pm (I did drop in for an hour!!) Other days, weāre romping through the zoo with all my friends and Felix in tow and Iām really happy to enjoy being with people I love from all parts of my life.
Health
I was plagued by health nuisances for most of 2022. No real health problems, just waves of pesky inconveniences: a soreness in my lower right shoulder, crackling sounds in my neck after every marathon coding session, tenderness in my knee on a short jog, a round of covid that had me sleeping 12 hours a day for 3 weeks, and followed by months of mediocre sleep where I never feel truly rested even if Iām sleeping 12 hours a day. (Also, donāt get me started on the appearance of my first forehead wrinklesā¦) I didnāt realize I could have so many problems while being āhealthyā. After working pretty damn hard on things, Iām very thankful to be right where I started roughly 18 months ago with my body in normal working order. The strange thing is, Iām not sure if I did anything to cause these problems ā it might just be a combination of getting older and WFH. My other hypothesis is that I lost a huge amount of core strength I took for granted during my postpartum recovery.
For the soreness and cracking neck: The solution was core work and small muscle resistance band exercises. I thought I was strong because I was benching, squatting, and deadlifting a good amount of weight and completely neglected all the tiny muscles. This meant that I was compensating in weird ways all over my body.
I concluded that massage is not very effective?? I am a HUGE fan of massages so Iām super sad about this. To me, massage feels good in the moment but takes a long time and the tightness comes back in a few hours. 1 hour of massage has less effect on me than 10 minutes of targeted stretching. I still enjoy a good massage but I donāt reach for it as a solution after a long day glued to the computer or a big gym session.
Reference pain was often far from the āsourceā that needs to be stretched out. My sore should actually came from a tight neck. My lower back, a tight glute. A huge amount of the value I got from the PT was being told higher likelihood places to seek root cause solutions for soreness.
Fixing sleep was life-changing!!! (and I was able to do it thanks to sleep tracking) My sleep didnāt seem obviously bad ā I fell asleep easily and slept through the night. The problem was I needed 10-12 hours of sleep to feel rested. Sometimes even that wasnāt enough. Itās not practical to have a child and a job and sleep 12+ hours. I started sleep tracking after JPās mom mentioned this was strange. It turns out I was only getting 30-40 minutes of deep sleep a night despite being asleep the whole time. The thing I noticed in the data was that I got 5-10 minutes of deep sleep early in the night and it became 30+ minutes in the cycles closer to the morning. This was strange because people get more deep sleep in the first cycles and less in later cycles. After seeing this data, I was able to figure out that I wasnāt able to hit deep sleep until the later cycles because caffeine was staying in my system. I was only drinking a cup in the AM but it was too much. The other thing that made a difference was going for a 15-minute run each day.
Mental state: Running, stretching, and very light workouts did way more for me than meditation, journaling, or lifting heavy weights. I had gloomy days last year where it felt like more things were going sideways than forward. I reached for journalism, meditation, and intense workouts as the āclassicā mental health best practices and close friends swore by these. I spent months meditating my way through headspace, calm, and waking up ā I thought it was at least preventive like maybe Iād be in an even worse mood if I wasnāt doing these things. When I started doing regular PT exercises for the shoulder issues mentioned above and running for the sleep issues, I noticed a giant step function in my mood before and after exercises ā AHHH THIS is what an effective solution feels like!! I donāt enjoy running or stretching more than meditation or lifting heavy weights so I found it especially interesting that those were what worked for my mental state.
Work
When I think about my own internal narrative of my life and itās this beautiful happy arc of progress. The 5 years I spent at Stripe were some of the smoothest sailings. It was a bit of a shock that this starting a company thing proved to be hard. I was playing my favorite game on the easiest setting. I thought I changed it to moderate difficulty, only to realize Iāve irreversibly set it on evil nightmare ninja mode!!! I went from steamrolling bosses to having the tiny rats in the dungeon one-hit me.
This has made me re-remember the other times in my life when I was being one-hit by rats. Suddenly, I remember entire years when everything was baffling, difficult, and confusing. There were years in school when I tried so hard to be a good student and C and even Dās kept rolling in (to the shock of my parents who were stellar students their whole lives). Professional years where I couldnāt code myself out of a cardboard box. Only to be followed by years where great code shot out of my fingers effortlessly but I couldnāt get my company to give me any opportunities to build great things.
Being defeated by rats all those years donāt make me cringe. Itās calming. I did the best that I could as the person I was going into the challenge. The challenge was something I really wanted so I had to deal with it. I wasnāt the right person for the problem Iād set out to conquer. It took being walloped over and over by these metaphorical rats to make me into the person that could solve the problem.
Itās comforting to remember this has happened before. I feel like if I just stay in the game, Iāll eventually grow into the person I need to be for this next phase.
P.S. I used to share these via social media. Iāve found that the last couple havenāt really been shown on peopleās feeds. (Maybe I need to start making these as a short form video??) If youād like to get every blog post, feel free to subscribe below.