Meadow - Posts tagged with family

Football passes with my son

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 04:04:12 GMT

Last week, my oldest son (3y/o) and I discovered that we both enjoy playing football passes (football soccer that is). We just stand at opposite sides of the living room and I gently kick the ball towards him, and he then not-so-gently kicks it back my way.

It's also light exercise so it's good for mood and in general for getting the blood flowing! Good stuff. It also requires very little effort on my side AND I can do it while holding my youngest in my arms. Only wins here. The only problem is that I'm terrible at kicking the ball and it often ends up going in unintended directions. My son once even told me "dad why are you so bad!" 😂 well, I am bad.

I was one of those kids that never played football during recess. The contact bothered me, but really the main thing that threw me off was that I didn't really understand how the whole thing worked when I was in the midst of it. Like, how do you know who to pass the ball to? Whenever I had the ball I would usually panic and just kick it anywhere, as long as it was away from me. I spent most of the game just avoiding the ball in the first place, but somehow it often made it's way towards me.

Add the fact that I was always the last one to be picked for teams during PE and of course you end up with my current aversion to playing football.

It's funny though because I was actually quite good at other team sports. During high-school I was in both the basketball and baseball teams, and I remember feeling quite good about my skill level¹. But more than anything, I felt like a valued part of the team.

There's also the fact that I've never been any good with my feet. My upper body coordination is quite good though. I juggle (balls and clubs) and in general enjoy skill games. But my feet... I either missed the chance when they were handing out lower body coordination or (more likely) I just needed some more time than the other kids and didn't manage to keep up with the skill curve of those around me.

So I'm glad that I actually get this second chance to practice with my son. My answer to his question yesterday, about why I'm so bad, was that we're going to have to learn together, and he seems to have taken it to heart. Sometimes he even gives me tips about how to kick!

In a recent now update I discussed how I was struggling to related to my son in a positive way. This is a step in a good direction I think.

As I was writing the above it occurred to me how often this happens to us. How often we're stuck being bad at something because we won't let ourselves improve.

Like, I might feel I'm bad at writing so I don't write, but I want to. Or maybe for you it can be the same but with drawing. Or running. Or playing a musical instrument. Or I've lately also read some people are terrified about publishing their code online for fear of being judged.

We often feel "it's too late for me to learn". But that's not true. If I can learn to do proper passes then you can learn anything if you just get out of your own way. I know that I at least need to stop impeding my own growth.

~ 🌱

If I'm allowed, I felt I was actually really good at baseball. The coach would often have me bat when all the bases were filled as I was a consistent home run. Yeah, I'm bragging. Sue me. At the same time, this sort of external validation helped me grow faster, and provided me the self-assurance to try new things. ↩

Feeling worthless and then touching love within myself

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 12:50:18 GMT

Yesterday, I took my father-in-law's car to a lube center at a mall where we had some other errands to run. The guy who attended me was nice, and he took about 30 minutes to check the car and explain all the things they needed to do, and how I should do them immediately. He gave me a huge list of recommended repairs, and the total cost was quite high, around $1k. I went into a slight panic since I really don't know anything about cars or whether what he said was true. I also had no idea if the price they gave me was appropriate.

This triggered my social anxiety to levels I hadn't experienced in a long while. I managed to ask the guy to give me 10 minutes and went to sit in the car. I called my wife, who was with my parents, and told her the whole story. In the end, we decided not to go ahead with any of the repairs at this lube center since it was too expensive. Besides, we needed to talk to my father-in-law first, and the kids were already tired—so we figured it was best to just go home.

I apologized to the guy. He was nice enough, but I could tell he was annoyed. I felt flustered about the whole thing and just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

I got in the car and, while reversing to finally leave, I didn't notice an obstacle in my way—one of those metal arms they use to lift cars for oil changes. I drove straight onto it with my front-left tire and immediately heard the hisshhh of high-pressure air escaping. I had punctured the tire. Well, not just punctured—it was completely ruined, with a huge gash on the side that meant I couldn’t just get it repaired. I needed to buy a new one.

I sat there for a second, breathing in and out. Then I looked outside the car and saw everyone in the store staring at me in disbelief. So, I opened the door, plastered a smile on my face, and and went to see how bad it was. Thankfully, the guy who had been helping me was super nice and changed the tire for me (which was fairly quick since they had one of those guns to tighten the bolts (impact wrenches)). Once the spare tire was on, I thanked everyone and got out of there as soon as I could, taking care not to hit anything else on the way.¹

Now, my social anxiety had escalated into a feeling of being a totally incompetent person. Incapable of anything. Worthless. Not just because of my lack of car-knowledge, or because I wasn't able to do normal adult stuff, or because I had just done something really stupid by not paying attention and gashing the tire. But also because my wife and kids were tired, and I had somehow let them down.

I knew these feelings of unworthiness well—I’ve been dealing with them most of my adult life. Usually, I manage to keep them under control, but the situation was just too much for me.

I called my wife, who had been waiting for me with the kids all the while, and explained what had happened while trying not to hit anything on my way out of the parking lot. She was kind enough, but not exactly trilled about that fact that we now had to go buy a new tire before we could go home.

The rest of the day wasn't so bad. The guy who changed the tire for us was very friendly. More than anything, we were just tired (no pun intended). As I distracted myself with other things, the feeling of worthlessness subsided a bit, but it did not go away entirely.

By the time we finished doing everything, it was already 6pm and both kids were exhausted. Our oldest fell asleep almost immediately once we started our ~1h drive back home. There was a lot of traffic so I had time to sit with my feelings.

After about 30min of observing them I started to feel an unexpected warmth of love spreading from my chest until it encompassed my whole body. If I reflected on it then it stopped, so I just let it be to see what would happen.

At this point I remembered a quote by Ram Dass (I think it's from his book Be Here Now) about his feelings of unworthiness and his guru. It went something like this:

Maharaji said to me, "Ram Dass, love everyone and tell the truth." And I looked at him and I said, "I can’t do that. I can’t love everyone." And he just laughed and laughed, because he saw right through me. He saw all the places where I held back my love, all the ways I judged others, and he loved me anyway.

At this thought I started feeling tears swell in my eyes. I realized how I put up this wall to protect me from situations like what had happened today, but this wall also keeps me from allowing others to love me, and (more importantly) from being able to love myself.

I wasn't full-blown crying, but it was a powerful experience. The wonderful thing is that now I feel there's a tiny tiny dent in my armor, where my heart is, and a tiny tiny light has been shining there since then. And, if I give my attention to it, I can feel it, I can feel it grow.

...

It's funny thinking about this in retrospect. At the time my day seemed so awful and I just wanted it to be done, to hide in my bed and hope that tomorrow would be a better day. The thing is that this strong experience of sadness was a necessary precondition for the realization of love that I later had in the car.

For better or for worse, only through suffering will growth come.

Now that I think about it, they seemed quite happy to see me go. I suspect they were worried that I might blame them for leaving the metal arm unfolded and try to demand some recompense. Maybe if I were someone else, I might have. But the truth is, it was as much my fault as theirs. ↩

My son only wants to hear stories and I feel like a TV

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 12:30:50 GMT

Lately, my son has been obsessed with asking us to tell him stories. At first, I eagerly jumped on every opportunity to do so, but now I just find it tiresome. At the same time, I can't really say no to him, right? After all, he's not doing anything wrong, and stories are healthy for his brain. Or are they?

Yesterday, I came to the conclusion that, in fact, it is fine for me to tell him no. After all, there can definitely be too much of a good thing. It can, I think, become a destructive behavior. But rather than telling him a plain no, I'll see if I can pivot the request by asking him to play along in coming up with a story. We used to do that a lot before—engaging in play with his toys and acting out a story together. When I'm the one telling a story, he's hardly participating, and his constant requests make me feel like a TV—one that doesn't have much time to rally its imagination and prepare the next tale.

Don't get me wrong. I love telling him stories. Some of the most magical and personal moments we've had together have been during storytelling. His eyes entirely affixed on my expressions (I like to act out characters), his slack jaw, his smile when there is comedy, his surprise and astonishment at the appropriate story beats. Sometimes he enjoys a story so much that he keeps on acting it out and talking about it for days on end! I really like when that happens because it gives me a chance to deepen the story; spin up more tales of the same characters or the same universe.

But, I think, in my current state as a storyteller I have trouble just conjuring one on demand, out of thin air, especially one after the other. I've noticed that, when I'm not inspired, what usually comes out is some slop¹ about a forest animal going to have dinner at another's animal house and forgetting to bring the teapot or some such. He seems to enjoy these as well, but I don't see the same emotion and wonder in his face that he gets with a real story, nor do I enjoy telling them as much.

Something else I've considered — and I think I will do — is stocking up on short tales for kids. Read them, digest them, and then tell them. I imagine most great storytellers² know a bunch of stories that they did not invent themselves, and they become masterful in their telling.

Not so long ago, for some reason I can't remember, I was reading about the path of the bard in Druidry. According to the site linked above³, a huge part of becoming a bard was memorizing and learning to recite stories:

In the first year, the student progressed from Principle Beginner (Ollaire) to Poet’s Attendant (Tamhan) to Apprentice Satirisist (Drisac). During this time they had to learn the basics of the bardic arts: grammar, twenty stories and the Ogham tree-alphabet.

Over the next four years, they learnt a further ten stories each year, a hundred ogham combinations, a dozen philosophy lessons, and an unspecified number of poems. They also studied dipthongal combinations, the Law of Privileges and the uses of grammar.

By their sixth year the student, if they had stayed the course, was called a Pillar (Cli) and would study a further forty-eight poems and twenty more stories. Over the following three years, they were termed a Noble Stream (Anruth) because ‘a stream of pleasing praise issues from him, and a stream of wealth to him’. During this time they learnt a further 95 tales, bringing their repertoire up to 175 stories. They studied prosody, glosses, prophetic invocation, the styles of poetic composition, specific poetic forms, and the place-name stories of Ireland.

The final three years of their training entitled them to become an Ollamh, or Doctor of Poetry. In their tenth year the student had studied further poetic forms and composition, in their eleventh year 100 poems, and in their twelfth year 120 orations and the four arts of poetry. He or she was now the Master or Mistress of 350 stories in all.

~ quoted from Bard | What is a Bard? | Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids

Ten stories a year! That isn't really that much if you think about it. Though I guess it depends on the length of the stories. I like to think a good chunk of this time was dedicated to learning to tell the stories rather than just memorizing their content. After all, the telling is what makes a story great.

Anyway... got off on a tangent there.

I think stories ARE important for both of us. They help create a sort of shared world, ideas, and values. The other day, after I refused to tell another story to my son. He asked me why and I surprised myself by answering something which I intuitively know to be true but have never realized:

Do you know where stories live? Once I tell them to you they go into your heart, and there they put down roots and grow like a tree throughout your whole body. In so doing they change you from within and help you grow. If I tell you too many stories in a row then they will all be pressed together with hardly any room! We need to respect them and give them the space they need to mature and enrich us.

(paraphrased)

I doubt he got the whole meaning of this, and he was probably confused about the idea of stories putting down roots like a tree. But it is true! Stories do change us from within and help us grow, and we need to give them the time and space they need to do this.

Mass consuming them⁴ kills their magic.

edit (2025-03-05): As fate would have it, he now asks me to tell him these stories! Yesterday he literally told me "Dad, can you tell me a story about the forest animals drinking tea". I guess what one person thinks is best, is not necessarily so for another. An important thing to keep in mind. ↩
In my head, the greatest of them all is Skarpi from Patrick Rothfuss' The Kingkiller Chronicle. ↩
I can't vouch for the accurateness of that link's content as I have little knowledge about it myself. ↩
For us adults the same thing happens. When you binge watch a show you don't give time for the individual episodes to grow within you. I won't even say anything about social media. ↩

I wasn't able to sing before having a son

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 16:40:00 GMT

I was never what you would considered a singer or even an outgoing person (not that the two are the same). When singing was involved I would usually remain silent, worrying that I would sound off key, or that I wouldn't know the words and people would notice, or any other myriad of possible scenarios which are common to those who worry endlessly about stuff. In some way, I perceived the act of singing as something very intimate and I never managed to break through that barrier I had imposed upon myself. That is, until I had a son, but it wasn't that easy.

After he was born, my wife used to sing to him all the time. She has beautiful voice, knows lots of songs, and is so confident in her ability that she doesn't really think about it. I, however, shied away from the act, as if a panel of judges would condemn me for my sub-par singing and banish me into the eternal void.

My wife used to get (a little bit) angry at me about this, telling me I should take the opportunity to sing to him now since before I knew it he would grow up and I would regret not having done it. And yet, I couldn't bring myself to do it, or at least not immediately. I, of course, knew of my problem and I wanted to be able to share singing time with him, especially because he seemed to enjoy it so much when my wife (or others) sang to him. So I started small, with what I knew I could comfortably do.

I've always been a musical person. I don't (didn't) sing, but I've always been good at playing instruments and picking up songs by ear. So I picked up a small Kalimba I had lying around, which my wife had gifted me for a past Christmas, and I set out to learn the tunes of some lullabies. I started with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and then moved on to some other ones, my wife would sing and I would accompany her with the tune.

Then I took another step. I ditched the crutch of the kalimba and starting humming the songs while we were getting ready for bed. Now that I think about it, this happened pretty much by itself once I got comfortable with the whole routine. I didn't think much about it at the time.

As he grew up more he started playing at singing songs, coming up with random words that followed the same melody. To my own surprise, I found myself inescapably drawn to his game, and before I knew it I was singing at the top of my lungs with him, coming up with silly songs, making him laugh, and in general having a good time. I think at this time my crutch was that specific melody, one I knew very well by this point and was comfortable riffing on.

Fast forward some months and now I don't feel any hesitation singing to my son, be it in public or in private. Actually, it's one of our favorite games, and we're even starting to introduce new melodies, new words, and even dancing (another thing which I've always considered myself incapable of doing)!

Why am I writing all of this you might ask? Well, this is a reflection on the fact that all creative endeavors, all activities that require you to make something, will call for you to put a piece of yourself out there for all to see, and that can be uncomfortable. The trick, when you feel self-conscious about starting, is to start small.

You often hear people say "take baby steps", but seldom we take this advise. Instead we think that starting small is not a good way to improve, so we bite out too much and invariably end up dropping whatever it is we're doing. In the process end up demotivated and thinking we're just incapable of doing it. Instead, it's better to start doing small things which are slightly uncomfortable, but that you trust you can do, and over time you'll see your own confidence, and capabilities grow.

I imagine it a bit like starting to wear glasses. If you've ever gone from no-glasses to glasses (and you're not one of those rare people great self-esteem) then you know how the first few days (or weeks) can be a little uncomfortable, being self-conscious. But then you get used to it, you just stop thinking about it. It's a little bit like that.

~ 🌿

On the blending of days

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 15:03:00 GMT

I think I've mentioned it before but I'm father to a loving almost-2-year old ball of lard with the energy of a nuclear reactor.

Many things have changed since I became a parent (including not wanting to be a parent to begin with), but the one that has impacted me the most is how fast things seem to be moving now. I know it's a cliche, people saying that time speeds up after you become a parent, but it's true.

On one side this is not necessarily bad. I'm definitely much (much) busier now than I was before, I now have enough free time to just do maybe one or two personal things I want to on a given day. On the surface it sounds bleak, but I'm lucky in that I actually enjoy spending time with my son. Playing with him, seeing him learn and grow (and seeing me learn to be a parent), have been one of the biggest joys of my life.

Being extra busy has also been a positive for my mental health in some ways. The fact that I have less free time also means I have less time to spend worrying about senseless stuff (my favorite hobby), less time to spend ruminating or imagining painful futures that are extremely unlikely to happen.

However, there's always something special going on lately, always something noteworthy. This, coupled with the strict schedule that my days seem to have, makes it so that my days appear to be blurring one into the other.

I feel that before, when there wasn't much happening in my life, I could use special events as markers, obelisks or island that I could look back on to measure the passage of time. But how can you measure time if you have a wall, just stretching out backwards until the horizon?

Earlier this week I was telling my son how well he was walking, and then realized that he's been walking ok for the past 6 months or so! I still feel like he started walking last month.

I imagine this blurring is greatly enhanced by the fact that, with a kid, things mostly happen in a continuous way. Every once in a while you do get new behaviors from one day to the next, but mostly things evolve slowly over a large span of time. For instance, my son has been babbling (what I think is mostly) nonsense for a while now, but how do you know when that nonsense stops being him just parroting words he hears, and starts being original thoughts? By the time you notice, you've already been hearing him express himself for a while without realizing what was happening.

Looking back I can see how this feeling, that things are just slipping through my mind, is a big inspiration for why I've been writing so much lately. Maybe I'm subconsciously trying to leave some kind of mark for my future self saying I was here, something I can look back on and see how things have changed.

You can't really put a kid on pause and then come back to them when you feel like it. They have their own peculiar way to summon attention, and I think we (as parents) are biologically wired to provide it. And this is good. I often find myself reevaluating my behaviors, admonishing myself when I do something I wouldn't like him to repeat, and in so doing I've realized I'm steadily, slowly, reinventing small parts of myself as I try to be the best role model I can be.

Sure, I don't always manage it, and sometimes it can't be helped, but it's definitely the best motivator I've had to try and grow as a person.

Reminds me of the popular cheesy quote that goes something like:

Try to be the person you want your children to grow into.

~ Take care 🌱

When a cold allows you to reevaluate the important things

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:57:00 GMT

It's funny how being sick changes your perspective on things. Many of my past goals and wants, all seem so vain when measured against the ever changing-ness of the body, of life in general.

Right now I'm down with a stomach virus, feeling like a giant hand is repeatedly rinsing my insides against a washing board.

...

Social status is pointless. It's worth nothing and doesn't help one in any way. It's a completely aleatory way of measuring relative value. I've written about this before in Hunting a Mammoth, but basically it boils down to the fact that we as humans evolved to be like this in an environment which is very different from the one we live in nowadays.

Money is another. It has its uses of course, but at the end of the day there're diminishing returns once you have enough to ensure you can eat and have appropriate lodgings.

Whenever I'm sick like this it's like removing some glasses that were clouding my vision. Sure, it's all a very unpleasant process but I think it is necessary, it gives me a chance to see myself from another perspective, to reevaluate who I am.

Right now I'm thinking how grateful I'm with my mother-in-law who just brought me honeyed chamomile. And with my wife who is taking care of our son to allow me some time to get better.

I'm grateful with the fact I have this activity, writing, to both entertain me as well as allow me to see myself more clearly, and to make note of the things that are important.

It's so easy to lose track of what is really important. We go after the next shiny thing in a neverending stream of shiny things. Always thinking that once we get THE THING we'll finally, blessedly, be happy. We think our struggle will finally be finished.

But that's not how things work. In most cases the happiness we get from the thing is extremely short lived. In all cases we quickly move on to something else, sometimes even before we've completely finished doing the original thing in the first place!

I remember growing up I would always hear adults and media saying things like a real man is a man with ambition, or those without ambition will amount to nothing in their lives. I have to admit I fell (and fall) for this trap, thinking I need to have some ambition to move me forward.

But if I were to die today, would I be regretting the fact that I wasn't able to get that promotion I was aiming towards, or finish that side project I was so excited about? No. Those things will likely not cross my mind at all. If I'm lucky I will find myself being grateful about the things that really mattered to me like family and the small joys one finds everywhere, maybe even the fact that I've tried (and perhaps in some measure accomplished) to make others feel happier.

In other words, I will be thinking about the important things.

All of this has been said many times before. Often by better people than I. Why is it so hard for us to stop blindly going after the shiny things? Why is it so hard to always be mindful about what's really important to us?

I think that a major culprit here is that we tell to each other what things should we collectively deem as valuable.

So maybe an idea would be to not only tell ourselves that X is something that's really important, something we deeply care about, but act in such a way that it's clear for others that this is the case. Often I find I smooth out my outward facing likes and dislikes, to fit in better with those around me. Sometimes it's more extreme, and I find I tell myself that I like something I really don't care much for.

In other words, we should be more authentic with ourselves and with each other. Be brave enough to let go of the vain pursuits that society imposes upon us, and instead allow ourselves to be who we really are.

~ Take care 🌱

Reviving lost connections

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 01:48:00 GMT

Today our house is full with family that came to stay for the holidays. It's nice having them here, a bit chaotic but there's a lot of love going around. After a while their stay starts being a bit uncomfortable, but for now all is good.

My son (~2 years old) is having lots of fun playing with his cousins, which is an extra bonus. I'm really happy that they get along so well. I wonder if it will stay like this forever (hopefully yes), or if it will be like it was for me and my cousins where we got along really well when we were kids but there came a point when we just stopped talking. I don't know anything about their current lives, and it has been years since I cared to check what they were up to. I guess the fault is on both parts.

To be fair with them (and with me) I did move far away when I was little. I'm talking about more than a 10 hours flight; another continent. Our parents did what they could to make us play when we went back to my original country, but they can only do so much. Eventually the baton passed to us, the new generation, and we just dropped it. That's what happens when you're living different lives I guess.

I know I could pursue a superficial relationship with them, like sending them funny gifs or whatnot on social media. The problem is that (1) I don't really use any social media, and (2) I'm not sure if this is better than any other kind of shallow connection like sending them a happy birthday message once a year.

I have a brother and he does keep up with most of our cousins through social media — mainly Instagram. As he tells it they don't really talk with words but instead just send each other funny stuff. I guess that is a good way to at least keep some sort of rapport with someone, at least create a channel that allows each one of you to tell the other person that you're thinking about them in a noncommittal way.

To this end I've tried (a couple of times) to get into the habit of using Instagram. I've told myself I can start small and send stuff to my closest friends, then build up to ones I haven't spoken to in a while, and eventually to childhood friends and my cousins. This works well for a couple of weeks but eventually I find my mental health suffers so I abandon my efforts.

I don't know if it happens for other people (I guess not for most) but after spending some time on any social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and even Mastodon) I end up feeling dirty, like my mind is heavy, my spirit somehow tainted by the experience. I make an effort of just following accounts that post nice and funny things, or poetry and art, but still it happens.

I think it has something to do with consuming lots of short-form content. Maybe the constant context switching is something I don't enjoy, and the uncomfortableness of it just builds up, and up, and up. And when I close the app I realize I feel bad, almost nauseous, sometimes I feel like I even hate myself for spending so much time on it (although hate might too strong of a word).

Who knows. It's also very likely that all of the above is not true at all and I'm just sub-consciously judging my actions because I'm comparing them against a gold standard which tells me that (corporate) social media is evil and should be avoided at all costs.

Anyway, sorry for the rant here. I think I'll make an effort to think some more on how to recover some of those lost connections I've let slip in my life. Hopefully I can find a middle-ground between being pen-pals and being intimate strangers on Instagram.

~ Take care 🌱

Meadow - Posts tagged with family

Football passes with my son

Footnotes

Feeling worthless and then touching love within myself

Footnotes

My son only wants to hear stories and I feel like a TV

Footnotes

I wasn't able to sing before having a son

On the blending of days

When a cold allows you to reevaluate the important things

Reviving lost connections