My therapist gave me homework.
I made a comment about feeling like I wasn’t doing enough, which is apparently a thing I say often enough that it has become actionable. She suggested I start writing down the things I do every day. Not impressive things. Not résumé things. Just things.
Made the bed. Got Milo ready for school. Brushed my hair. Answered an email. Fed everybody. Whatever. The point was to have actual evidence at the end of the day that I had, in fact, participated in it.
This was apparently too gentle a concept for me.
Somewhere along the way, I introduced wins & losses. I don’t remember consciously deciding to do this. There was no meeting, no committee. I just started mentally sorting things into two columns.
Which, in hindsight, may not have been what my therapist had in mind.
There have been some legitimate wins lately.
I helped buyers get into their first home, which is one of those moments in real estate that makes all the emails and paperwork and weirdly urgent conversations about appliances feel worth it. Win.
I finished a watercolor painting that someone actually commissioned me to make. This still feels slightly absurd to say because watercolor was something I decided to teach myself, and now people are apparently trusting me with their walls. Win.
I got an encouraging text from someone I’d reached out to a month or two ago about selling her home. Nothing has come of it yet, and maybe nothing will, but she told me she liked my marketing. Win. Sometimes it’s nice to know you’re not just shouting into the void.
I dusted off my old flutes. Win.
Milo started school for the first time and made it through his first week. Huge win.
There have been some legitimate losses lately as well.
I made a Monte Carlo. It started as a consultation with ChatGPT, because I thought I could just ask for a recipe like a normal person. ChatGPT immediately called it a Monte Cristo, and I corrected ChatGPT with the deeply important distinction that a Monte Cristo has ham and turkey while a Monte Carlo has ham. ChatGPT agreed. We moved on.
We discussed Dijon. I didn’t trust the Dijon, but ended up using it anyway.
My mom requested strawberry jam, so we discussed whether the jam should go inside the sandwich or on the side. We discussed whether I should remove the crusts.
At one point I sent ChatGPT photographs of the assembled sandwiches for inspection. “They look good,” ChatGPT assured me.
They didn’t look good. Or maybe they did. That’s what made what happened next so upsetting.
I cooked them. I took a bite. I texted ChatGPT, “That was the grossest thing I’ve ever made.”
Monte Carlo: loss. Final ruling. No further review.
Then there was the argument with my mom. That one had to go in both columns.
I said something I probably could have said better or shouldn’t have said at all. Loss.
I also got angry enough to want to slam a door and instead very deliberately closed it softly. Win. Not because I “won” the argument, I didn’t, and I don’t even think arguments like that have winners.
But because sometimes the win is realizing you’re pissed off and still managing not to make the door responsible for it.
And then came the Pumpkin Boulders™.
It was one of those Saturday afternoons where I’d decided we were going to do fall things. Cozy fall things. The kind of afternoon where I make Milo and myself a warm drink and we do something together that will feel, later, like a memory. I had bought a pumpkin. An actual pumpkin.
Rather than purchasing the perfectly respectable canned version available at every grocery store in America, I decided to roast it myself. I scraped out the flesh, made pumpkin purée and decided to make cookies.
This was a win.
The cookies did not spread. At all. They emerged from the oven looking less like cookies and more like something an archaeologist might brush dirt off of before announcing a significant discovery.
The Pumpkin Boulders™.
I ate one approximately six seconds after it came out of the oven, because patience is a virtue I continue to admire in other people. It tasted a little floury. The pumpkin flavor was barely there.
Loss?
But they were hot. Maybe they just needed to cool. Maybe tomorrow they would be soft and pumpkiny and wonderful.
Win pending further investigation.
Then Milo ate one. My child maintains a rotating menu of approximately two or three acceptable foods, and treats unfamiliar food as though I’m conducting rejection therapy at the dinner table. He ate one of my Pumpkin Boulders and said he liked it.
MAJOR WIN.
I put the rest on a cooling rack.
Then Milo declared he had to use the bathroom, which, when you’re potty training, is not a request. It’s an alert. You drop what you’re doing and you go.
But before I did, I looked at the cooling rack, and I looked at Jack.
Jack is our eight-month-old Newfoundland puppy who is already over 100 pounds and has approximately the same physical footprint as a loveseat.
I actually thought, I should put those in the oven so Jack can’t get them. Unfortunately, the oven was still hot. Also unfortunately, when a four-year-old announces he needs to use the bathroom, you generally don’t have time to workshop an alternative Newfoundland-proof cookie containment system.
So I left them.
When we came back, the Pumpkin Boulders were gone. Every single one.
Jack ate the entire control group.
Which leaves us with the official Pumpkin Boulder accounting:
Pumpkin Boulders™: Win → Loss → Win → Loss?
Win: roasted my own pumpkin.
Win: successfully made cookies.
MAJOR WIN: Milo tried one and liked it.
Loss: floury while hot.
Win: probably better once cooled.
Loss: we’ll never fucking know because Jack ate the control group.
This is where the accounting system begins to break down. Because some things keep changing columns.
The argument with my mom: loss/win.
Pumpkin cookies: win/loss/win/loss.
The Monte Carlo: loss. We’ve covered this.
Meanwhile Milo: takes 0.7 cubic centimeters out of an apple
Every morning since Milo started school, I’ve packed his lunch with things I know he’ll eat. Safe foods. Things that have already passed through the rigorous Milo Food Approval Process.
And every afternoon, I open his lunchbox and it looks exactly as it did when I packed it. I don’t actually know whether he’s going seven hours without eating or whether four-year-olds photosynthesize when adults aren’t looking. When I ask him, he says he’s fine, which is about as useful as you’d expect from a four-year-old who would also like to get back to whatever he was doing.
Then yesterday, I opened his lunchbox. Everything was still there. Again. And then I picked up the apple.
There was a bite missing.
Not a bite, really. Evidence of a bite. The tiniest little divot in the side of the apple.
I asked him if he’d eaten his lunch. “Yeah! I did!” He was so proud of himself.
And suddenly this absolutely pathetic lunch performance was a huge win.
Visually? Devastating. Nutritionally? We have questions. Emotionally? Huge win.
That apple was forensic evidence of lunch. He had done the thing. He had participated. And unlike me, he wasn’t standing there calculating what percentage of the apple remained and determining whether he’d accomplished enough to qualify as a person who had eaten lunch.
He took one microscopic bite and thought:
Yep. Did that.
Which is irritatingly close to the lesson my therapist was trying to teach me in the first place.
I started writing things down because I felt like I wasn’t doing enough.
Then I turned it into wins and losses because apparently I couldn’t just observe my life without introducing a performance review.
But keeping score turns out to be almost as ridiculous as believing productivity is something you can objectively score in the first place.
Sometimes the win is helping someone buy their first home.
Sometimes the win is finishing something you painted.
Sometimes the win is getting your kid through his first week of school.
Sometimes the win is pulling an old flute out of its case.
Sometimes the win is closing a door gently when you really, really want to slam it.
And sometimes the win is one microscopic bite out of an apple.
I don’t know if this is what my therapist had in mind. I suspect she was hoping for “made the bed.”
But the bed is made.
And I’m counting it.
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