I have Thursday guilt.

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I have Thursday guilt.

You see, I don’t “work” on Thursdays, at least not officially, not at the clinic.  In fact, I haven’t worked on Thursdays for many, many years.  And at the clinic, we’ve built our practitioner schedule around that; on that day, my treatment rooms are free for the taking by other staff.  Over the years, the clinic has grown into such a busy place that we’re bursting at the seams, and the reality is that we’re now at a point where I wouldn’t be able to work on Thursdays even if I wanted to, because my rooms are full with other practitioner’s patients.

When my daughter began full-time Kindergarten in 2016, joining her older brother in the all-day-school world, I envisioned lazy Thursdays of long runs and naps, hot coffee and newspapers.  Fast forward more than two years and I think I’ve taken a nap once.  Once in about 112 Thursdays.  Because the reality is, Thursdays are usually my busiest day of the week.  They’re the days that I get groceries, tidy the house, squeeze in appointments for myself, run errands, arrange coffee dates, and do all the things that my other days do not allow; they’re the days that I do life.

But inevitably, when a patient asks to book in on a Thursday, and I reply that “I don’t work Thursdays,” guilt nags at me.  I’m a people-pleaser, by nature or nurture, and it niggles at my brain when I can’t be all things to all people.  A character fault for sure, and one that I’m working on, but part of me wonders what they think when they hear that my work-week doesn’t include a traditional Thursday.  Now, logic will tell you (and me) that I work more evenings than the traditional work-week and more Saturdays than the traditional work-week, but logic doesn’t always win.  Logic will also point out that I have very carefully constructed my practice life to align with my values, and Thursdays off have given me the space to find balance for both myself and my family.  But again, logic can be easily strong-armed by guilt.

Is guilt a mom thing?  A female thing?  Or just a me thing?   Perhaps it’s a bit of all three, rolled up and exponentially powerful, a wasted emotion that has no positive value.

Do I work Thursdays?

I sure do.

(And even if I didn’t, that would be okay too.)

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Thank you for September.

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We’re approaching Thanksgiving, so this post is about giving thanks.  More specifically, it’s about giving thanks to my team at work, who do such a great job and who I’m so grateful to have.

We have had a crazy month at Burlington Sports & Spine Clinic.  As you may know, our clinic is a part of the Complete Concussion Management national network of clinics, and as such, baseline concussion testing has become a big part of what we do.  For the last several years, that’s meant that we schedule a couple of September weekends dedicated to conducting pre-season baseline tests of hockey teams.  This year, that meant three full two-day weekends, and well over 400 baseline tests performed.  We collect valuable data on each player to compare against, should the player become concussed in-season, and this allows us to make safer, more reliable return-to-play decisions.  It’s a great program, and we’re happy to be involved with it, but the logistics are demanding, and that’s where the thanks comes in.  Thank you to Emilia, who kept this ship sailing with late Friday nights and long days on Sundays.  Thank you to Dave, who organized and planned and made this all happen.  Thank you to Amber, Kristy, Mike, Damian, and Britnie, who keep the clinic running smoothly while all this “extra” takes place every September.

A big part of my job, and one of the things I enjoy the most, is talking with my patients.  And what I hear again and again, are work stories that make people happy versus work stories that make people unhappy.  Work is a big part of many of our lives, and I’m ever so thankful that I’ve found a crew to make workdays fun.  They say that you’re the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with, and in September, I was the sum of the people at Burlington Sports & Spine.  Thank you for that.

I won’t bore you with the details of the other side of my life in September: the teacher/football coach husband, the back-to-school rush of two young kids, the puppy, and let’s throw a half marathon in there (bad idea), but I will say I’m thankful for it all.  I’m thankful for the choices I’ve made to get me to this point in life, the opportunities I’ve been given, and the luck that’s come my way.

And as I look towards October, I’m thankful for an under-scheduled Thanksgiving weekend and for the chance to restore some balance and take a breath.

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A Parenting Hack: How One Hour has Changed my Week

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cartoon-1296854_960_720Mondays are hectic, no?  I always find Monday to be a bit of a whirlwind, especially if the weekend has been full of blissful, unstructured downtime.  I just had one of those weekends- a weekend of yard work and flag football, pop-over guests and walks downtown.  Those are the weekends that fill me up and remind me yet again that it’s the simple things that mean the most (The Disease of Being Busy, remember?).  So when the routines of a Monday come back into play, it takes my sensitive side a bit of time to catch up.

I’ve been lucky to have a career with flexibility, and the benefit of fitting in my work around my life, instead of the reverse.  My practice has changed and evolved as my family’s needs have changed and evolved, and it’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve gone back to working more of a full-time schedule.  For me, that means that for the past two years, Mondays look like this:

For a time, I didn’t do school pickup on Mondays.  I worked straight through, 11am-7pm, and would come home just in time to tuck in my young children.  With only a short time together before they went to school in the morning, I felt like I was missing out on way too much of their day; my heart always felt heavy on Monday nights.  Soon into that school year, after a few tears and a lot of soul-searching, my husband suggested that I modify my hours slightly to accommodate more family time.  Namely, making the school pickup and 10-minute walk home a part of my day.  Brilliant.  Such a simple solution, and yet it was a modification I couldn’t see when looking from the inside out.  It was the forest and the trees and all of the other cliche wisdom.

So I began blocking off an hour in the middle of my Monday (and was once again oh-so-thankful for the logistics of our neighbourhood), so that I could pick up my kids from school and walk them home before heading back for an afternoon at the clinic.  Our walks to and from school are without a doubt my most favourite parts of the day.  In those ten minutes, I rarely get a word in edgewise; they spill their guts, share their dreams, tell their stories.  We walk, we laugh, we talk, interrupted and carefree.  And this has completely changed my Monday, and therefore, my whole week.

A one-hour change.

That’s all it took.

Sometimes the simplest changes produce the biggest results.

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