A 3pm Dinner Will (Prob?) Not Save Us
Unpacking the tunnel vision and stealth diet culture of Dr. Becky’s viral parenting hack.
One Quick Thing: This week marks the one year anniversary of when I shared my divorce story with you, and was overwhelmed by your loving, supportive response. Just wanted to thank you—I’ve turned back to your comments so many times in the past year!—and say how much I value you being part of the Burnt Toast community. There are now over 60,000 of you!! And Corinne and I talk all the time about how smart, funny, and generous y’all are. You have made this one of the few truly good spaces on the Internet.💜
Friends, September hit my household hard this year. As I wrote a few weeks ago, we’ve been adjusting to earlier wake ups for middle school, staggered school schedules, new afterschool activities and an oddly persistent dead mouse smell. Plus *gestures around at our collective/general ambient terror of school shootings, climate change, what if Trump wins again.* Big transitions always bring up all the big feelings, and whew, some feelings have been SIGNIFICANT IN SIZE around here.
So like any high-achieving eldest daughter/single mom, I’ve been responding to the stress by controlling what I can control. Two weeks ago, I sat down with a pile of post-it notes to map out how, exactly, to fit our weekly newsletter production schedule into the work hours I have available this year due to school and joint custody schedules. (Yes, pictured above, no I don’t know why this method works so well for me but it does.)
I’ve also been meticulously Google Calendaring our life. I’ve started meal planning a bit more again (FYI it is 100 percent still meal planning if you plan to order sushi). I’ve gotten back on my load a day laundry bullshit. And I’ve surrendered the need to know or care which specials my kids have on which days of their new six day rotation. Those library books will find their way to and from our home under their own steam, like feathers floating on a breeze. I release them to the universe.
But I will tell you what I am not doing to make our back to school season easier: I am not serving dinner at 3 or 4pm.
No matter how sure Dr. Becky is that this will change everything.
