I  was close to settling on an option. Then Melanie went into labor late Saturday night. On the way to the hospital, I realized that none of my ideas were worth starting at this critical time. I know, you’re thinking, “And it took you how long to figure that out?”

If I tried to force my new routine on my situation, I would most likely just fail and cause myself, and my family, an unnecessary amount of stress. Instead, I need to recognize that this is a season for taking care of new babies and Theo and Melanie.

I might get some blog posts up, and I might not. Either way will be fine. I don’t need to complicate everything with a new 30 Day Challenge. My ideas will be there when the time is right. And I trust that you will be too.

Or, as Melanie just suggested, I could do the stand 30 Days of Taking Care of Twins Challenge. Although, you might not be able to play along at home. 

She has mentioned several times that the process is frustrating because they often do not treat her like a person, they treat her like a case. And she has suggested that she would never have felt that way, or been treated that way, by the midwives she had with Theo.

The main difference in the care given is that the midwives make it abundantly clear that they do in fact care. They listen and ask questions and encourage you to ask questions. They show compassion and offer encouragement.

To be fair, the doctors and nurses have generally given that overall impression too. But they have gatekeepers. They have a whole crew of receptionists and assistants and administrative staff who keep the place running smoothly. That running smoothly, however, is mostly for the benefit of the doctor at the cost of the patients.

I realize that I don’t have the behind the curtain perspective for most of this stuff, that there are best practices and reasons for many of the policies that are in place, all of which is likely overly complicated by insurance. But it is difficult to understand how the patient can be so far done on the priority list. Or at least have that as the dominant impression.

Mostly, it just reminds me to be empathetic, to remember the John Watson quote, “Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” And it makes me wish other people would remember it.

Theo, in typical form, said, “No, this truck,” and took one from the stroller to roll it down the slide before trekking back across the play area to repeat the entire process several times.

This can be tough for me to watch. I want to say, “No. There’s a better way. Maximize the efficiency of your trips and you’ll spend less time walking and more time sliding.” Or something like that. To me, there’s a goal–getting the trucks down the slide–and there are direct and roundabout ways of accomplishing that goal. Direct is better.

To Theo, there’s play. At one moment, it involves rolling a truck down the slide. At another, it involves climbing through the playground to retrieve another truck. One is not a higher priority than the other. One is not the endgame. As long as he is enjoying himself, he doesn’t care too much what amount of work is getting done. It isn’t about accomplishing anything for him.

I’ve gotten better about letting that go, allowing him to figure out his own method even when it is the slowest way I could possibly think of. In part, I do this because it is good for him to come up with his own problem solving process. In part, I do it because there often isn’t an actual problem to be solved. It’s just all experimenting and learning and playing.

Or, I should say that I’ve gotten better at letting that go with Theo. For myself, it is difficult for me to approach a problem without first considering, at least in some way, how it might best be accomplished. I want to eliminate waste, look for repetitive or unnecessary tasks. I think some of that is my personality and some is my (limited) background with programming. I’m a process guy, a systems guy.

This is sometimes to my advantage. By spending a little time thinking about the end result, and the steps needed to reach it, I can save myself some time or effort. I can speed up a process like washing the dishes by putting like things together, fitting as much as I can into the sink to maximizing soak time.

Other times, though, this planning and thinking part of the process actually just keeps me from taking any action. Worried that I might not have the best way, I run through more possibilities and end up taking longer than if I had just jumped in. Or, I exhaust all my energy thinking about what to do and ultimately don’t do anything at all.

Besides, the fastest way isn’t always the best. The most efficient process might not actually produce the results I want. This is particularly true when approaching a craft like writing.

Sometimes, our time is not best spent thinking about the quickest way to solve a problem. Sometimes, we should just be writing through it. We should allow the exploration to happen on the page rather than in our head. We should acknowledge that it is all part of the process. We might enjoy some parts more than others, but it is all writing, and we have to embrace it.

Otherwise, we might be so afraid of inefficiency that we’re scared to write multiple drafts. We might not want to cut unnecessary scenes because we already put in the time to write them. We might not be open to the possibility of changing a story’s point of view because that would mean lots of tedious rewriting.

Look, we all like watching the truck glide down an incline, picking up speed until it flips off the end of the slide and tumbles through the dirt. But retrieving the truck is part of the process too. So is walking to the park and stomping in the puddles along the curb.

The more we can embrace all of it, the better our chances of getting some terrific crashes at the bottom of the slide. And more importantly, the happier we’ll be when the truck doesn’t even make it to the bottom. Because that is part of it too.

It doesn’t matter so much if we are singing about trucks or trash or boogers or puppies. He is often happy to make up words and even sing along when the mood strikes.

I enjoy this time, especially because I know that I’m not that great at playing the guitar or singing. (They are both skills I plateaued a long time ago.) I could stress about my lack of ability or my tendency to sing off key or work my way into a lyrical corner. Instead, I play to my audience. Theo doesn’t know much about skill or talent yet. He just knows that we are having fun, and that is good enough for him.

Not that he’s the perfect audience for every situation. He wouldn’t be helpful if I wanted some critical feedback or advice about when to switch to the bridge. But he is ideal for reminding me that I enjoy playing the guitar and wouldn’t mind getting better at it.

Sometimes, that’s the audience you need, the one that lights up no matter what you write, the one that reminds you why you were attracted to writing in the first place. Other times, you need a more critical eye, or you need advice about where to send a story or an inquiry letter.

The key is to match your expectations to the audience, or vice versa.

Or, you might want to give your audience some guidance if possible. It can be painful to send a piece to a friend, expecting them to pat you on the back or praise your imagery only to get back a list of plot holes. It can be frustrating to have a workshop spend an hour discussing typos and dialogue tags when what you really want to know is whether or not your protagonist is likable.

You can’t always choose your audience, or direct how they will read your work, but you can keep it in mind. And you can temper your expectations when you know a little more about them. You might not want to submit your fantasy novel to a group who focuses on mystery stories, for example.

By paying attention to your audience, you can avoid frustration for you and for them.

Theo is still a toddler, though, so his positive feedback can turn negative in an instant. And his criticism usually sounds like, “I just wish you would stop playing the guitar. It hurts my ears.”

This is the other day.

“I don’t want to put the cookie cutters away. I want to leave them on the floor.”

“But if we leave them on the floor, we might step on them and hurt our feet.”

“I want to hurt my feet.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to have more room to play? That way we could run around the house without tripping over the cookie cutters.”

“I want to trip over them.”

And so on for as long as you want to have the conversation.

What I have discovered, though, is that sometimes you can get his body to act without his brain knowing about it. Instead of continuing the debate about whether or not to pick up the cookie cutters, I tried picking some up myself. Then I handed him a few. Without thinking about it, he dropped them in the bucket.

So, I gave him some more, and he did it again. Then I pointed out some on the ground that he could pick up, and we managed to get the job finished. This reminded me of Constructive Living, a mental health approach I recently heard about.

To be completely reductive, the basis of Constructive Living is to accept reality (our situation, our emotions, etc.), remain focused on purpose, and then do what needs doing. Rather than trying to get motivated to wash the dishes or do some exercise, you just wash the dishes or do some exercise. You don’t have to be happy about it, but you acknowledge your emotions, the fact that you don’t feel like doing the chore, and then you do it.

I’ve tinkered with this myself when it comes to getting things done around the house. It is actually pretty effective, and it gets easier with practice. It can apply to writing as well.

Sometimes, when I have a particular project I want to put off, one that I know I’ll have to work on eventually, I take the “just five minutes” approach. I tell myself that I’ll work on this specific writing task for five minutes, and if I’m sick of it after that, I’ll put it off a little longer. I can stand anything for five minutes, right?

Once I get to work on it, I start to get in a little rhythm, I see a little progress. I might not even realize when the five minutes is up (sometimes I set a timer) because I’m already getting into the right mindset for working on the project.

Or, I might really be sick of it after five or ten minutes. I might put it off again, but at least I have something to work with now. Even if I move on to something else, I’ll have those initial thoughts circulating and I won’t be returning to an empty page.

Other times I’ll try fifteen or thirty minutes. It really depends on the project and how much I want to avoid it. The point is that taking the action often leads to the motivation I was looking for in the first place. And even if it doesn’t, I’ve still been somewhat productive.

It works with Theo on occasion too. Sometimes, I don’t argue with him about whether or not he’s ready to go to bed. I just take him to his room. He says he’s not tired, but often falls asleep in less than five minutes.

Often, it isn’t really that he hates picking up toys. He just thinks he does. Or he is just being difficult for the sake of standing up for himself. Occasionally I can hand him some toys and gently lead him into to picking them up. Other times he throws them on the ground and decides to dump out every box, basket, bag, and backpack he can find.

So, I acknowledge how I feel about that and proceed with the clean up.

To my surprise, he agreed, so I grabbed a shovel and got to it. I excavated an elephant-sized hole, deep enough to cover it by several inches of sand. I told Theo this would be great, he would need to really dig down to find where it was hidden. What fun.

When I finished and gave the all-clear, I expected Theo to grab a shovel or rake and start moving some sand. Instead, he pawed at the ground making small furrows above, well above, the elephant. He did that for a few seconds before he stopped, looking defeated.

I handed him a rake and said that we could work together. We scraped away another half inch or two before Theo grabbed a truck and started moving it through the sand. I asked him if he wanted to find the elephant, and he said, “No. I’ll play with trucks.” I asked if he wanted me to help him find the elephant, and he said, “You can do it.”

That’s when I realized I had ruined his game.

I had made it too difficult, putting the reward so far away that it no longer felt attainable. The game was fun when the elephant could be found quickly, and quickly reburied. Rinse and repeat.  I’ve mentioned before that Theo appreciates repetition in his work (and his play). That’s his kind of fun. I had made it a challenge and snatched away the joy.

I remember that defeated look in my Intro to Creative Writing students. After I had asked them to write about something other than their high school or dorm room dramas. When I suggested that they try yet another draft of the scene they thought was perfect two drafts ago. Basically, when I took the fun out of the game by putting the goal too far out of their reach.

I’m sure I’ve had the same look too, or at least felt the same way about my own expectations. Sometimes we need to stretch ourselves, to have an objective that is outside our comfort zone. That is how we grow. But if it is so far out that it feels unreachable, we are more likely to give up, to move on to something else, instead of pushing ourselves forward.

A good teacher or coach knows our limits and when we can get more out of ourselves than we believed. They know we can dig a little deeper if we just try. Sometimes, we have to be that coach for ourselves. Sometimes, we have to look for that motivation from others.

Often, we need to set smaller goals, understanding that the major ones will come eventually. By establishing closer, quick wins, we continue moving forward when we can’t yet reach the larger, more impressive goal.

For Theo, there were too many other easy ways to have fun without wondering if he would ever find the elephant. He did eventually. I first had to move enough sand to uncover the top of it, but he didn’t seem to mind.

He’s been doing this more lately, pretending to crash while pushing his lawn mower in the backyard, pretending to fall while we race around the house. He does it mostly for entertainment, I think. Crashes are cool, an unexpected turn in the mostly mundane. But they are especially cool when they don’t hurt. This is what he is really after, even if he doesn’t know it.

Falling can be scary. Falling can hurt. It comes out of nowhere and takes you down. By pretend falling, Theo is able to normalize the experience, to gain a better understanding of what it is like to hit the ground. And he gets to do it on his own terms, slowly at first, bracing himself completely and lowering himself to the ground. Sometimes he even falls so gracefully that he can lean back on his hands, relaxed as if nothing special is going on.

This practice comes in handy when the real falls come. He doesn’t get as upset by them anymore. He can laugh off a fall, appreciate the surprise instead of being scared by it.

As with most failure, the expectation of it is usually worse than the actuality. The experience of failure can help us normalize it, help us realize that it doesn’t hurt as bad as it seems. We can learn to embrace failures when the risks are low, especially if we learn from them.

I probably don’t fail often enough in my life, which means I’m not taking enough chances. I’m not putting myself out there as much as I should because the possibility of failing is there. And it is scary. I need to do more practice falling.

Having said all that, Theo still sometimes has nasty spills. He gets his feet tangled going full speed or slips on the tile and hits the ground before he has time to get his hands out or brace himself. It is painful, and it is scary. And the only thing to do in that case is cry for a while and look for someone to provide reassurance and comfort.

That happens to us sometimes too.

I am struck by his acceptance of this repetition. I can’t decide yet if it’s just that everything is so new to him. Part of his activity is experimentation. He doesn’t have enough experience to know yet if this time will be different, if this time, the stuffed animal he throws in the air will just keep floating, like a bubble cast about on the breeze, rather than fall back to the ground as it has every other time he has tossed it. I know this is part of his process, but at times I think he also finds comfort in the iteration.

There is something serene about performing the same task over and over, without any immediate goal or intention. Like a zen garden. Some people find housework relaxing. Or mowing. That’s not my jam exactly, but I can see how they get there. Woodworking is probably more in my wheelhouse. Whittling. Taking an object and honing it, running it over with a knife or some other tool through a multitude of strokes. I think writing can be like that on occasion as well.

Not so much the idea generation and certainly not the editing, but the craft, the word play, when the sentences seem to meld together on their own and I cannot take much credit for the final product, those moments have a quality to them. Not a mindlessness exactly, but a disconnection. A feeling of letting the words pass over me or through me.

I like to believe this is Theo at play, exploring the new and embracing the familiar. I like to believe this is me at play too.

Often what happens is that my expectations do not match up with Theo’s. I suggest, quite logically as far as I’m concerned, that maybe we shouldn’t have a cupcake after dinner because we ate so much fruit with dinner. Or perhaps we don’t need to play on Dad’s phone since we just finished playing on the laptop. His response is probably crying or a more defiant way of expressing his frustration.

Just this evening, he and I went to the pharmacy to pick up something for Melanie and a few items we (I) forgot to get while grocery shopping yesterday. While there, we explored the aisles and spent an almost inappropriate amount of time perusing the Easter displays. Theo loves Easter eggs. He enjoys opening and closing them, storing toys in them, and finding surprises. They are toddler gold for the most part.

I tried to point him away from all the candy (there is so much candy) but ended up grabbing some plastic eggs and a few selections of small chocolate eggs and bunnies, which I didn’t really think he saw. He was focused on the eggs, ready to open them. He even asked if he could open them in the van, but I told him we should wait until we made it home.

Once we were back, he immediately took the eggs back to show Melanie. We opened the bag for him, and he dumped them on the floor. He then started to shake them, one by one, and open them. I realized he thought they would have some kind of surprise in them. I tried to ward off his disappointment by telling him that they were all empty.

He didn’t listen, though. Instead, he shook and opened every egg before looking at us with a disappointed, dejected face that only a kid can pull off. So, failure of communication one for me.

Then he said, “I want the little eggs,” and took off toward the kitchen.

At this point, I was pretty sure I was in for trouble. As I followed, I tried to explain that, “we’re not going to have the little eggs right now because we’re about to eat dinner.” But he wasn’t listening.

He found the little chocolate eggs and handed them to me, ready for me to open them. Again, I tried to explain that this wasn’t the plan. The chocolate eggs were for later. And then he really had a melt down. The full blown ear-splitting kind that took the next twenty minutes or so to move past.

That’s how it went for me, anyway. I’m sure his version feels much different. It probably feels like betrayal or dishonesty instead of patience and understanding.

My mistake was that I didn’t anticipate his expectations. I had my own vision for the future, and I failed to realize that his might be different. His reactions are sometimes extreme–because he’s hungry, because he’s tired, because he’s a toddler–but I can’t really fault him for being upset. I didn’t do a decent job of relaying my plan to him. I didn’t let him know that the eggs would all be empty or that the chocolate ones weren’t for immediate consumption.

This happens with adults too, especially with people who are close to us. We expect them to know how we’re feeling, what we’re thinking. We might sit alone in a room, just waiting for them to realize that we’re upset. It’s easy to see this as unfair from the outside, but it is also an easy trap to fall into.

I think we can create similar problems for our readers. We can expect them to read our minds, to know our characters as well as we do. Too often, I think we are so familiar with “don’t tell” mantra that we forget the “show” part.

Should we treat our reader like toddlers? Maybe. We should be patient with them and provide them all the information they need to make good decisions. But we shouldn’t do the work for them, even when they cry about it.

This won’t always keep everyone satisfied, but it is a good start.

And at least we rarely have to look into a readers teary eyes when we’ve let them down.

For Theo, almost all words are exciting and fresh. I can see the pleasure on his face as he sounds out a combination for the first time, the thrill of changing it into something else entirely or discovering that night doesn’t just rhyme with flight but also bite and kite.

It’s like he’s tasting a new food, trying out how a word feels in his mouth, deciding if it is pleasant or unpleasant.

I miss that discovery, the experience of a previously unknown sound or mashing together of syllables. It’s one reason I’m drawn to writing. But too often I manage to get stuck in my head, stuck on trying to explain an idea or convey complexity. I would do well to remember Theo’s fascination, his delight at saying Bartleby for the first time. Those surprises are still there if we make a point to look for them. As with so many lessons from Theo, this one is a reminder to not discount the power of play.

What words make you smile? Can you remember any that made an impact the first time you heard them?

Here are a few favorites off the top of my head: pulchritude, indigent, frivolous, parsnip, ogle.