We didn’t go anywhere over the holidays and had a nice Christmas at home. It’s possible that I’m incapable of taking a vacation at all, but this is particularly true when on a stay-cation. Other than Christmas day itself, I was coding on a normal schedule for most of the week.

My daughter (4.5) was around most of the week too, often with the normal babysitter that comes for my younger son. So all week, our house had me coding, my wife editing, and her hanging out with the babysitter. She even brought us lunch like it was restaurant including a fork wrapped up in a napkin.

On January 1st, I also took the day completely off and asked her what she wanted to play. “Not now, I’m working,” she said. She was “playing work,” which involved writing out a dense set of letters on white sheets of paper.

“There is a lot to do and I have to work, even on family days.”

And she went back to scribbling like crazy. This all says something about me as a person and a parent. I’m not sure exactly what, but it’s probably not good.

It hurts because I actually think I’m doing a pretty good job. I leave early (by engineer-at-startup standards) to have dinner and hang out with her and only work again after she is asleep. I’m not sure I could have more “balance” anyway. To me, the term suggests a healthy ratio between what you are forced to do because of work and the things of “normal life.” I might be intrinsically unbalanced, but I feel lucky that my normal life has a lot of things that I love doing which centers mostly around building things for people. For better or worse, I’m thinking about this stuff all the time, anyway.

It likely comes with my being so visibly inaccessible all week. Regardless, I didn’t have any profound realizations at that moment or anything. Instead, I decided to plant a behavioral seed for later.

“I understand. I’ll let you get to it. Let me know when you can play.”