I'm Putting My Effort Into Saying Yes

Yesterday I took my kids to the park because my wife had a migraine and needed a break. The part I want to remember is that I definitely did not want to go. I was stressed, I was only a few days into new medication, life felt loud, it had been rainy earlier, my head was full of ideas and updates I wanted to work on, and I wanted to spend time working on the flowers in the yard. Everything in me had a perfectly reasonable list of reasons to stay home.

But I've noticed something during these first few days on the new medicine: I have been saying yes more. Can we go here? Yes. Can we go to the park? Yes. Can we go to the arcade? Yes. Not every request gets to become a yes, obviously, and I'm not trying to break the bank every time somebody wants to do something, but the automatic answer doesn't seem to be no just because doing it feels uncomfortable to me.

That feels like a bigger change than it probably sounds like from the outside. Yesterday I didn't suddenly become relaxed, carefree or excited to drop everything and head to the park. I still had the stress. I still had the thoughts running through my head, the things I wanted to accomplish and the feeling that there were a hundred other places my attention could go. The difference was that I went anyway.

I've been thinking about the money side of this too, even though a lot of the things my kids ask to do don't cost anything. If I save twenty dollars by not taking them to the arcade one afternoon, what exactly will that twenty dollars mean to me when they're twenty years old? Obviously money matters and there have to be limits, but I doubt I'm going to sit there years from now feeling grateful that I protected every random twenty-dollar bill from becoming an afternoon with my kids.

I think I'll remember the time instead.

There is going to be a Saturday someday when my kids aren't asking me to push them on the swings. They won't be standing by the door asking if we can go somewhere, and I won't have two little people interrupting whatever project I convinced myself was urgent that afternoon. I'll probably have all the quiet I kept thinking I needed, and there is a decent chance I would give damn near anything to hear one of those interruptions again.

None of this means the new medication has magically fixed me, and I'm still figuring out what these first days on it actually mean. I am dealing with uncomfortable feelings and emotions internally, and I don't want to turn a handful of days into some sweeping medical conclusion. What I can document is the behavior I've noticed: even when part of me doesn't want to do something, especially something for my kids, I've been getting through that discomfort and saying yes more often.

That matters to me because my anxiety, PTSD, trauma and overwhelming thoughts are mine. My kids shouldn't grow up believing that the boundaries of their childhood were determined by what their dad could emotionally tolerate on a particular afternoon. I don't want their memory to be that we just didn't do things because Daddy was stressed, overwhelmed or had too much going on in his head.

I also don't need to pretend that saying yes is always easy. Sometimes I may be at the park physically while part of my brain is still thinking about the yard, work, an idea, something unfinished or the next thing I want to build. Maybe part of this is learning that being present doesn't require waiting until my brain becomes perfectly quiet first, because if that's the requirement I could miss a hell of a lot of their childhood waiting for the right day.

Yesterday wasn't the right day. It had rained. My wife felt awful. I was stressed. I had things I wanted to do, and going to the park was nowhere near the top of my list.

So I took my kids to the park.

I'm only a few days into this medication, and I have no idea yet what the longer story will be. I don't want to predict it or give the medication credit for things I can't possibly know yet. But right now I can see one small change clearly enough to write it down: I'm putting effort into saying yes, even while my own brain is giving me reasons not to.

Years from now, I don't think I'll care what project I could have finished yesterday afternoon. I think I'll care that when my kids asked me to go somewhere with them, I went.