Testing times: eyes, maternity leave, and hearing your own failings
Adjusting to new routines with two kids, feedback at work boosts motivation, and the chaos of taking a child for an eye test.
I’m writing this later than usual – apologies to those of you expecting their weekly hit of Man Feelings on Friday. It’s been a busy week!
Changes: turn and face the strange
Lots has changed in our household: my partner Maddy went back to work this week after a year of maternity leave. Our daughter Robin, eleven months old yesterday, started nursery this week too.
This meant adjusting all our routines: we now have to get two kids to two different places at two different times every morning. Previously we were able to get away with being casual about this when only one kid needed to go somewhere (and it was to his school a few hundred metres from our house), but we had to assemble spreadsheets, pre-plan outfits and wake up an hour earlier than usual to make the new regime work out.
I’ve had the easier end of the deal as I mainly work from home, so don’t have to commute anywhere with a kid. Maddy, by contrast, has had to struggle with the twin challenges of leaving our daughter in the care of strangers for the day, while simultaneously settling back into her old job and remembering how to be a professional again.
I struggled at times with her maternity leave, if I’m honest. I try to spend as much time as I can with my kids and be an active and engaged parent, but Maddy has just spent the best part of a year caring for Robin full-time, whereas I’ve been doing evenings and weekends. I frequently felt like I wasn’t bonding enough with Robin or pulling my weight, even when I knew I was doing everything I could realistically do.
Likewise it’s hard on a relationship when you’re both living different lives: I’d finish work after a difficult day managing a team, supporting people through their problems, listening to lots of discussions and weighing in on things that concerned me. By the time I finished, I’d frequently want to sit in a dark, quiet room for an hour and decompress. Maddy, by contrast, would be gasping for adult conversation and wanting to hand over the children she’d been caring for all day and be a grown-up again.
Living like this for a year was hard at times, even having been through it before. I won’t deny feeling a thrill of excitement when she left the house for work on the first day – finally we’d be having similar days again and would be arriving home on similar wavelengths with similar needs again. It’s been a hectic week and we’re still figuring out the rhythms of the new routine, but I feel pretty good about where things are going.
The power of feedback
Also this week was the dreaded performance review period at work. I manage half a dozen people and have been busy trying to give them fair and supportive reviews, with useful feedback and praise in equal measures to keep them motivated and challenged. I also had my own performance review, which managed to have the effect of turning around my negative feelings about work and my role.
This isn’t a humblebrag: my boss gave me some praise for things I’d done well this year, but she also—fairly—called out things I’d not done so well with, and areas I need to focus on improving before I can progress. After the review ended I pored over the “360 feedback” she shared with me from colleagues and found myself feeling increasingly warm about my job again.
Not because everybody was praising me – but because we’d finally put things out in the open. Here were direct, evidence-led pieces of feedback about things that were frustrating and worrying me, laid bare on a piece of paper (well, a Google Doc). I felt relieved to see them there, and motivated and excited to get started with improving on those things.
I realised the next day that I thrive on feedback — good and bad. I rarely get any in my day-to-day work, and one of the challenges of a software management role is the lack of a frequent colleague-led feedback loop on your work. It was only after getting some of this data, though, that I realised just how absent it is from my role – and how much it motivates me. I’m now wondering what other “unknown knowns” there are which are inadvertently causing me stress and anxiety, but could be cured with just a couple of sentences of clarity.
Mini-feels this week
I can’t see clearly now
My son’s school was closed for a day this week because it was a polling station for Thursday’s UK local elections. I took the day off work to take care of him, and decided to squeeze in an eye test before the crazy golf place I was taking him to opened.
I do not recommend undertaking an eye test while your five year-old child sits directly below the screen where they display the letters you need to read out, loudly pointing out the ones you got wrong and demonstrating how easy it is for him to read them. Likewise, trying to focus on the different focal positions the optometrist points to as he scans your eyes becomes significantly more challenging when you’re trying to keep one eye on your wandering child who is currently about to press something on the eye test computer.
Links to the man feeling web
A new feature this week: links to things I’ve read/watched online this week which relate—vaguely—to “man feelings”:
Ask Reddit: “Men, who do you confide in 100%?“ – a thread with fairly predictable answers (“Nobody.”) but interesting all the same.
The Guardian: “From doomscrolling to sex: being a boy in 2024” – a slightly heartening counterpiece to all the articles describing how awful teenage boys (and their lives) are.
YouTube: John Lennon and George Harrison rehearsing in 1971 – I’d never seen this before, but it’s footage of the two ex-Beatles recording for a John Lennon solo album. The start, where John is playing a new piece to the three-years-younger George, is absolutely heartwarming: he’s uncertain, and clearly looking for support from his former bandmate.