I’m home. The grass is cut. (I did it. Today.)

A few weeks ago, I posted that I was scared of the future and could not find the right word for the feeling. The next morning, in New York, a sign in a coffee shop basically wrote back to me. I drafted a post about it that afternoon. I had less than 24 hours before I left for France with my entire family, and I never finished publishing the thing. I am finishing it now.

Sorry for being so anxious earlier, I had no idea everything was going to be fine.

That’s what the sign said. I still have the photo on my phone. There’s a reason it’s still there.

The 24 Hours

I came home from New York and had less than a day before I left again. The house was messier than I wanted to leave it. The grass needed cutting. There were five hundred small things I would have done if I had a week instead of a day.

I had a day. So I packed.

The house, it turns out, is still standing. The grass got mowed. But none of that is the part I keep thinking about.

The Trip(s)

The trips were good.

The AI training portion in New York that came first was great. I got to know the marketers from every Automattic property. They’re good people. I’m excited to keep testing the things we learned.

France was its own thing. The kids were good on the plane. They were not good in the airport. They were bored. I felt guilty about it, the way you do, knowing the guilt isn’t really fixing anything.

When I asked Holden, my four-year-old, what his favorite part of France was, he said, “the part of getting the fan.”

The fan is one of those ones that folds out, wooden and fabric. It has “I ❤ Marseille” stamped across it. We paid maybe three dollars for it. He has loved this fan more than the Notre-Dame, more than the chocolate croissants, more than Les Petits Trains de Marseille, more than anything else we put in front of him for a week.

When I asked him why, he answered with the certainty only a four-year-old has:

“It cools me down.”

When I asked my two-year-old what her favorite part was, she didn’t answer. She is currently pissed off about something else and is not interested in giving me an interview. We can come back to her.

The Review

Holden had his fan. The two-year-old had her grievances. I had a shitty review.

We rented an Airbnb in Marseille. I told the host going in that I was bringing three small children — a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a nine-month-old. I knew what we were going to need. We bought our own cleaning supplies on day one. I wiped things down. I did not let the kids eat on the couch. I went to bed every night the way you go to bed when you have spent the day kneeling on a foreign floor with a baby wipe.

We still got a bad review.

The host said there were crumbs. She said there were fingerprints on the TV. She said we did not take out the garbage, except she also said that she had never told us where the garbage went. I am, apparently, a mind reader who failed at mind-reading.

I am not going to pretend it didn’t get to me. It did. I tried as hard as a person can try, with three small children, in a stranger’s home, in a foreign country. And one person decided that wasn’t enough.

I think this is exactly why I have the anxiety I have. Because no matter how hard I try, there is always going to be someone, a host, a stranger, sometimes the version of me in my own head, who decides I did not do enough.

What the Sign Was Actually Saying

Which is how I ended up rereading the sign on my phone, at my kitchen table, after the kids were finally asleep.

I had been reading it as a blanket promise. Everything was going to be fine.

I think I was reading it wrong.

Fine isn’t the same as everyone being pleased with me. Fine isn’t the same as no one writing a shitty review. Fine is: the house is still standing. The grass is cut. The kids are home, healthy, and currently waking up from naps that lasted all day (thanks, jet lag!). Fine is the four-year-old in the back seat of the car the whole way home, clutching a three-dollar wooden fan he loves more than the Marseille Notre-Dame.

Fine is what I have. The bad review isn’t part of fine. It’s just somebody else’s anxiety, handed to me, and labeled as my failure.

The Fan

Which brings me back to Holden.

I am a fixer. I am a try hard. I am the one tracking down my colleagues missing phone, looking up the Apple Watch inventory at the nearest store for his wife, and staying up late picking up a space so the host won’t be mad. I don’t know how to put the fixing down.

I should probably get a fan.

Not literally. (Well, maybe also literally — it is starting to get hot.) Whatever the fan is, for me. The thing I pick up when I am too hot, when the day is too much, when someone has decided I failed at something I did the best I could do.

I think mine might already be a few things.

The photo on my phone is one. The grass I cut this morning, before anyone was awake, is another. So is sitting here at the kitchen table writing this down, with the kids are getting ready for sleep (despite having just woken up) and the dishwasher running. None of them are a three-dollar wooden fan from Marseille. But each one cools me down a little.

I’m going to take Holden’s lead and keep them. The photo stays on my phone. The grass gets cut on the first day home. Writing it down stays a thing I do. I’m going to try to be okay with the fact that I did my best — and that it was enough for the people in my house, and somebody else’s opinion is not the size of the world.

The two-year-old is still pissed off. The list isn’t empty. There will always be a list.

But the house is still standing. The grass is cut. And somewhere in this house tonight there will be a four-year-old, asleep, with a fan on the pillow next to him.

I’m starting to think that’s the whole point.