Battling the Raccoons
I want very much to be posting more on this blog, but I’m not a very good raccoon.
Some of the biggest and meanest raccoons in the world live in my garage. To be more accurate, they don’t actually live in the garage. They live in the walls of it. In a baffling fit of throwing good money after bad, the previous owners of my house decided to cover the wooden walls of the detached garage with vinyl siding. The raccoons, not to be put off by the depressing gray shade of the siding, found that they could burrow between the siding and the wooden walls, creating a nice, cozy abode for themselves. So far as I can tell, they only emerge from their comfortable subsidized housing to prowl the neighbourhood for tasty food waste.
Since Toronto has a municipal food waste collection program, almost every house in my neighbourhood has a green bin somewhere outside the house, expressly designed for food and organic waste –which includes diapers, by the way, in my house and many of those around me. And the raccoons love nothing better than to make sport of trying to pry them open. The latches on the green bins were not in any way designed to defeat raccoons, and those who fail to attach an aftermarket strap or lock run the risk of seeing a week’s worth of rotten veggies and meat scraps on the driveway in the morning. Like most people, I learned this the hard way.
So you’ll appreciate that I am no fan of raccoons. But the biggest raccoon of all lives right in my house, and he is me.
“Raccoon moms,” or in my case, “raccoon dads,” are an increasingly pervasive creature across North America these days, a hybrid of stay-at-home parent and home-based business person. We’ve become raccoons because long after full days of changing diapers, flipping grilled cheese sandwiches and shuttling kids here and there, we’re huddled by lamplight on our blogs, newsletters, emailing and invoicing. As our spouses get a good night’s sleep, we become increasingly nocturnal, and our eyes darken and hollow in their sockets, like our namesakes. We eat junk food.
My ADHD coaching practice is relatively new, and I’m eager to grow it. But I have to balance it with 2-3 days a week of stay-at-home parenting with my toddler daughter and her two older brothers. Needless to say, my days are pretty full, and at night, finally, my house is quiet enough for my addled ADHD brain to think in. I spent many years at university burning the midnight oil. Joining the ranks of the raccoons is tempting.
But I strive to practise what I coach my ADHD clients around - lots of rest, not too much “screen time,” especially late in the evening, not burning the candle at both ends. And I’m at my best when I can harness what Ned Hallowell calls my “morning brightness,” with coffee, the paper, and a run or bike ride before I sit down to work. Working late — really late — makes these things much harder to do.
So I’ve set some firm raccooning guidelines for myself, recognizing that they may impose real limits on my work:
- Spending “adult time” in the evening with my wife is critical. I love her, I cherish my marriage, and nothing is more important to me than her and my kids. She often goes to bed early, but if she doesn’t, I’m not working into the night.
- I don’t work past 11:00 p.m., no matter what. The alarm goes off at 5:45.
- I accept that I do not post on this blog as often as I would like. That’s OK — I don’t have a cigar-chomping editor breathing down my neck.
- I look very hard for other opportunities to get my work done — moments in the day to write up an invoice, send a couple of emails. This is challenging for my ADHD mind - I find it tough to compartmentalize tasks and transition in and out of them.
As long as the turmoil in the economy continues, I think we can expect to see more raccoons. Having jumped or been pushed from the conventional workforce, they will look to at-home businesses as a means of maintaining a sense of professional fulfillment and income. What they haven’t considered is the toll it will take on their lives.
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