Lowering The Bar

An update on my kids, my writing, summer, work, and my ongoing inability to stick to a niche

Hi everyone,

Thank you so much for all the love, support, and thoughtful messages after my last post.

It was honestly a terrifying, exhilarating rush to send.

For the past 2.5 years, I've stayed very quiet about being Jewish, Israeli-American, and what it has felt like to watch a brutal, complicated conflict that directly affects my family get reduced to slogans, false certainties, and simplistic narratives.

The whole conversation feels impossibly charged. The consequences feel high stakes. And the internet, as we all know, is not exactly a thriving ecosystem for nuance.

So pressing publish felt equal parts relieving, empowering, nerve-wracking, and exposing.

But I’m so glad I did it.

For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I’m endlessly replaying arguments in my head or carrying around things left unsaid. I said what I wanted to say. I stand by everything I wrote. I stood up for my story, my family’s story, and the humanity, history, context, and complexity that has been missing (willfully or not) from so many conversations I see online.

The response has been meaningful and deeply gratifying. It has also left me with a bit of a vulnerability hangover, which honestly makes complete sense.

This past week, I sat down several times to write my Analog Adventure Club dispatch for May and just couldn’t do it.

The funny thing is that I actually had things to share. I started two new art journaling techniques! I DNF’d six books! I listened to a ton of old-but-new-again-to-me music! I’m finally getting my kids a DVD player for summer! Riveting stuff, I know!

But every time I tried to force myself to write the newsletter, I hit a wall of resistance and nothing came.

I've always used this space, and really my Substack as a whole, as a place to practice my values, make sense of what I'm thinking, and give myself permission to follow my curiosity wherever it leads. While I appreciate accountability and consistency, I value listening to my inner compass even more. I trust the ebb and flow of creativity and expression. (I trust the ebb and flow of literally everything, tbh). I don’t believe in forcing things that don’t want to come.

The moment I gave myself the permission to skip the May newsletter, I felt the weight lift. And almost immediately, I wanted to write something else instead.

So here we are.

It’s finally June.

forever obsessed with Julie Blackmon’s photography

The weather has been quite gorgeous lately. I’ve been outside in the sunshine most days, which is usually a pretty reliable barometer for my happiness. And yet, underneath all that beachside springtime sun, there’s been an undercurrent of stress and frustration.

My toddler has never been a good sleeper. At almost 2.5 years old, he still wakes throughout the night and needs my help settling back down. He doesn’t nap consistently—sometimes twenty minutes, sometimes two hours, no one ever really knows. He still nurses, still sleeps the night right next to me, and my patience is wearing thin. All of these things will shift eventually, I know that. I lived it with my older son. But I also know it will take effort I just can’t seem to muster at the moment. I’m too tired and too touched out to try!

I often joke that he is literally perfect in every way except sleep, so we’ll keep him. And it really is true. He’s an absolute doll in every other way. Easygoing, happy to be wherever he is, just temperamentally stoked on life.

He’s so deliciously chunky, with the biggest round belly and this determined little arm-pumping strut as he stomps around his world. When we went to the aquarium last week, he introduced himself to all the ocean animals: “Hi crab, I’m…” Every morning he stops to check on the ant hills outside our house to see if his ‘fwends’ are there. He waves to every neighborhood dog, points out his favorite flowers, and seems genuinely delighted to be alive.

He loves being tickled so much that he ends up panting and breathless from laughing, and the second you stop he pleads, “a-den, a-den!” until you start all over again.

He is just such a joyful, silly, affectionate little boy. A total angel.

But yeah, he does not sleep. And I am tired.

My eight-year-old, meanwhile, is thriving in so many ways. He’s growing into this clever, capable, funny, cool, wildly interesting kid with a thousand friends and a thousand interests and the kind of steel trap memory that holds onto everything—layers of historical facts and random details all stacked together like he’s constantly assembling the world’s puzzle (which I guess he is!).

Emotionally, though, he’s right in that in-between space where he can do so much, and do it so well, just not consistently yet.

He’s playing baseball and absolutely loves it. He’s really talented, he works hard, he cares deeply.. maybe a little too much.

He’s always been a sweet, sensitive soul, and that hasn’t changed. Almost without fail, after every game, something tiny will trip him into a complete spiral: tears, yelling, frustration, then the crash afterward when he can’t quite turn it around, followed by the shame and embarrassment that comes in behind it all. It’s a lot of feeling all at once. And it’s never really about the thing that just happened. It’s the pressure of it all—the intensity of caring, the ups and downs of the game, the effort of holding it together until he feels safe enough with us for everything to spill out, even if it comes out wild and sideways.

We talk it through. We practice strategies. We support him. And then we do it all again the next time, because this is the work. This is the actual work of raising children: helping them build skills they don’t yet have and teaching them how to navigate disappointment, pressure, mistakes, uncertainty, relationships, all of it.

It’s beautiful work. And it’s really, really hard.

Meanwhile, I haven’t had a full, uninterrupted conversation with my husband in days. The laundry is never done. After over two years of no full-time work, money feels frustratingly tight. No matter how much I declutter, I’m still tripping over stuff. It consistently blows my mind how much effort it takes for my house to remain... still messy.

My own needs and wants seem to land at the bottom of the list over and over again.

And yet I keep thinking we’re about to turn a corner.

Once it’s stopped being freezing outside.

Once my toddler is a little less dependent on me.

Once I make a little more money.

Once I have a little more time and space and freedom and and and...

And in some big ways, we actually are turning corners.

It’s almost summer, my family’s favorite season. My husband is home. We have no real schedule. We can spend entire days outside chasing all the sensory pleasures the season has to offer: the tight squeeze of saltwater drying on skin, the sweet juice of a peach running down our chins, the smell of the barbecue in the yard, the sound of waves and sprinklers and kids playing with fireflies until the sun goes down.

And this fall, another big change is coming.

I’ll be returning to work full-time as a head teacher at an adorable, well-loved neighborhood preschool. My younger son will be there too, just down the hall in another classroom. It’s only a handful of blocks from our house. We’ll walk there after dropping my older son at the bus stop, and we’ll be out just in time to meet him after school.

Honestly, it’s exactly how I imagined it when I would daydream about this next stage of our lives.

The extra income will help tremendously. I’m excited to spend my days outside of the house, collaborating with other adults, doing something I genuinely love and know I’m good at: teaching young kids and supporting their families. The work itself is meaningful and rewarding, and my toddler is more than ready for the stimulation, friendships, and adventure of a school environment.

There is so much about this next chapter that feels right.

But by now I’ve lived enough life to know that even the best, right things arrive tangled up with other things too.

I’m not naive to the ways our lives will change with two working parents.

Laundry will no longer get folded at noon on a random Tuesday.

I won’t be able to volunteer as class parent in my older son’s classroom the way I have this year, helping with crafts, playing games, and getting those little glimpses into his big-kid world.

There will be fewer lazy mornings at the playground, fewer spontaneous library trips, fewer days spent fully in pajamas because nobody has anywhere they absolutely need to be.

And the invisible logistics of family life- sick days, doctor appointments, school calendars- will require a lot more planning and negotiating than they do right now.

These years at home with my toddler have stretched me to my limits in a hundred different ways. They’ve also given me something I may never have again: long stretches of unstructured time with my children, and also with myself.

This whole writing project exists because of that time.

The essays, the newsletters, the notes, the endless walks, the journals filled to the brim. The afternoons spent chasing ideas down rabbit holes just because I felt like it, because I could, because there was space.

And I already know I’ll miss it while I’m still living it.

The other night my husband and I were sitting in the backyard talking about all of it—the sleep deprivation, the meltdowns, the endless logistics, the fact that we barely have enough uninterrupted time to finish a conversation like... ever.

And I realized that the main thing keeping me sane these days is that I’ve stopped asking my days to be easy before I’m allowed to enjoy them.

I’ve lowered the bar for what counts as a good day.

Not in a depressing way, and not in a flighty “just be grateful” woo-woo way, but in a grounded, practical way.

The kind that says: yes, this is hard. And also.

Yes, I barely slept again, but I got to hold my baby close and help him fall back asleep in the sweetest way. And I know, from living through this once before, that this won’t last forever, and one day I’ll miss it.

Yes, my kid sobbed for twenty minutes because we asked him to shut the car door after his baseball game, but he also asked for a hug to calm himself down and was eventually able to talk it all through after a few deep breaths with me.

Yes, the laundry is overflowing and the sink is full of dirty dishes again, but it’s sunny outside and the flowers are blooming and I can smell honeysuckle through the open window.

Yes, I feel stretched thin, and all I want is a new haircut and a full day wandering thrift stores alone or with a friend. But today I got to drink my coffee outside with my feet in the grass. I got to listen to a few favorite songs. I got to read a few pages of a book I’m loving. I got to draw and create and write in stolen pockets of calm.

I get to watch my kids grow up and become exactly who they are, in all their adorable, frustrating, awe-inspiring complexity.

The older I get, the more I think happiness has less to do with eliminating the hard things and more to do with noticing the good things that are happening alongside them.

Right now, this season is both beautiful and exhausting, and I suspect that’s true for many of us.

So if you’re also in a stretch where you’re waiting to turn a corner, where life feels simultaneously wonderful and overwhelming, this is your reminder that you don’t need to solve everything first.

Maybe today you just need to notice the sunshine.

As for this space, I’m not entirely sure what this summer and then returning to full-time teaching this fall, will mean for my writing here. My guess is that the rhythm and/or volume will change.

There’s also a part of me that feels like something has shifted open. That now that I’ve opened the door I just don’t think I can close it back up again and go back to being quite so quiet about things so important to me. I think I have a perspective and an experience that doesn’t always show up in the conversations I see happening around me. And while my last piece came out of a very immediate, reactive place, I also feel like there’s more there. More to explore slowly, over time, in less urgent ways.

I don’t entirely know what that will look like yet.

But I’ve learned not to force what doesn’t want to come, and to say yes to what does.

So I’ll keep showing up here however feels right.

And I’m deeply grateful to everyone who keeps reading along the way.

xx Danielle 👋☀️