Today was a mashed potato day.
We have mashed potato days from time to time. A mashed potato day is one where there’s a word stuck in John’s head, and no matter how hard he tries, he just can’t get it out.
Today, we were driving to a doctor’s appointment when John started writing down “mashed potatoes.”
No context. Just mashed potatoes.
Did he want mashed potatoes? Was he thinking about Thanksgiving? Did his brain feel like mashed potatoes?
I had absolutely no idea.
No matter what questions I asked, he just kept writing down mashed potatoes. As you can imagine, this made for a very fun car ride.
When we finally got to the doctor’s office, he started writing again.
Mashed potato. Baked potato. Sweet potato. Marshmallow potato. Mashed potato.
Then he underlined mashed potato.
And finally, I got it.
He wasn’t asking for mashed potatoes. He was trying to tell me that he’d been struggling to remember the word mashed.
Then he wrote down two days.
Two days.
For two days, he’d been carrying this word around in his head, unable to retrieve it, and now he was trying to explain that frustration to me. Except even communicating that he couldn’t communicate was difficult.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be inside his head. To know exactly what you want to say and not be able to say it.
And some days, that frustration turns into a really tough emotional time for both of us.
Some days are just mashed potato days.
Getting Back Out Into the World
But mashed potato days aren’t every day. And when I look at where we were almost four months ago, there’s so much progress.
John is growing his independence.
He’s driving again.
Last week, he went to breakfast with his brother by himself. He went to the dump and got a dump sticker by himself. He went to Dunkin’ Donuts and brought home nags of coffee and muffins!
He’s been running errands, going shopping, and even took Nonnie and Franklin hiking on the rail trail.
These are things that might sound completely ordinary to most people. But for us, they’re huge.
Of course, sometimes these adventures don’t go exactly as planned.
Take the rail trail…
John took the dogs for a nice, long four-mile walk. Unfortunately, there was a bike race happening at the same time, so he had to keep stepping off the trail to let cyclists pass.
He didn’t think much of it.
But when he got home, both dogs were covered in burrs.
And Franklin.
Poor, poor, ding-dong Franklin.
Franklin’s beautiful, long Cavalier ears were so tangled with sticky burrs that they looked like a kid who’d gotten gum stuck in their hair.
I was frustrated. I was tired. And I wasn’t about to spend hours trying to untangle those ears.
So I chopped them off.
Puppy cut by Momma.
And Momma is NOT a hairdresser.
But you know what? Hair grows back. Franklin still looks cute. And John took the dogs on a four-mile hike, navigated a bike race, and brought everyone home safely.
That’s what matters.
The CVS Adventure
John had such a good day on Tuesday.
He’d bagged tarp after tarp of leaves from the yard, weeded under our cherry trees, and cleaned out the area around the chimney in preparation for a new fence.
He was getting things done. Being independent. Taking care of our home.
And then came CVS and Target.
John went out to pick up prescriptions and do some shopping. When he got to CVS, only one prescription was ready. Another had been sent to a different location, and the pharmacist told him to come back in ten minutes.
Except there was also supposed to be a prescription for me, and that one wasn’t even there.
But how was John supposed to explain that?
By the time he got home, I was overwhelmed with work and frustrated that we didn’t have all the prescriptions.
I started asking questions, trying to piece together what had happened.
And all John could do was write down two different CVS addresses.
Over and over again.
I was screaming. He was screaming.
And the next thing you know, we’re both crying and hugging, and I’m apologizing.
Hours later, after my evening meetings were finally over, I climbed into bed.
John started writing again.
Citizens Bank card lost.
He underlined it.
And slowly, we pieced together the rest of the story.
We’re currently managing our finances through my bank account so we can keep track of everything. When John went to buy Tide, he accidentally used his own ATM card instead of mine. He kept entering my PIN, not his.
Eventually, he figured out what was happening. But then he panicked because he thought he’d lost my Citizens Bank card.
He couldn’t finish his shopping. He thought he’d lost my card. And he couldn’t explain any of it.
So he came home, already upset with himself.
And walked straight into an overwhelmed, frustrated me.
He’d been trying to tell me what happened all along. I just hadn’t understood.
And the irony?
I was the last person who’d had the card. For all we knew, I could have been the one who lost it.
I keep thinking about how much frustration John must carry around every single day.
He knows what he wants to say. He knows what happened. He knows exactly what he’s trying to explain.
But the words won’t cooperate.
And sometimes, neither do I.
I was so focused on getting answers that I didn’t give him the time he needed to find them. I didn’t stop to recognize how upset he already was. I didn’t reassure him that it was okay, that we would figure it out, that none of this was his fault.
Instead, I got angry.
And that’s the part that breaks my heart.
Because before any of this happened, he’d had such a good day. He’d worked hard in the yard, taken care of things around the house, and gone out on his own to run errands.
He’d accomplished so much.
And somehow, by the end of the day, all either of us could see was what had gone wrong.
I’m learning that sometimes the most important thing I can give John isn’t help finding the right words. It’s the patience to let him find them, and the reassurance that when he can’t, everything is still okay.
Learning to Let Go
John isn’t the only one learning new skills these days.
I’m learning patience.
I’m learning when I need to step in and when I need to let him figure things out.
Sometimes I need to make the call to CVS and sort out the prescriptions.
Other times, I need to let him go to breakfast with his brother and trust that he’ll figure out where to park, how to pay, and how to navigate whatever comes up.
I’m learning that I can’t control every situation.
And that’s okay.
Sometimes things aren’t going to go perfectly.
And that’s okay, too.
Hair grows back. Puppies still look cute.
And when things are really, really hard, sometimes we cry.
That happens a lot, too.
We’re learning to push through those moments together, even when they’re messy and frustrating and neither of us handles them particularly well.
Meanwhile, the World Kept Turning
The other big change in our lives is that I’ve returned to work after three months away.
And let me tell you, it’s weird.
Time stopped for me three months ago. But for everyone else, three months went by.
While I was navigating hospitals, rehabilitation, therapy appointments, and trying to figure out what our new life was going to look like, work kept moving forward.
Projects came and went. Decisions were made. People left. People on my own team left.
And then I came back.
Right in time for pre-holiday peak.
For those of you who have never worked in e-commerce, let me explain.
The holiday shopping season is our Super Bowl. A significant portion of the year’s revenue comes in during those few weeks, and the last thing anyone wants is for something to break on the website while people are shopping.
So we have something called a deployment freeze. Essentially, we stop making significant changes to the website before Black Friday to reduce the risk of anything going wrong.
Sounds reasonable, right?
Except the three weeks leading up to code freeze are absolute chaos.
Imagine standing on a subway train that’s constantly lurching sharply left and right. Everyone is holding on, trying to keep their balance, while being thrown from one side to the other.
That’s what pre-holiday peak feels like.
A new project comes in. Priorities shift. Something that was important yesterday suddenly isn’t as important as something that showed up this morning.
Everyone is trying to get one last thing done before the freeze.
And there I was, jumping back onto that subway train after three months away.
An Arranged Marriage
To make things even more interesting, I returned to a new engineering manager.
For those outside the technology world, a product manager and an engineering manager work very closely together. We’re essentially attached at the hip.
It’s a little like an arranged marriage.
Normally, the product manager would be involved in interviewing and selecting their engineering partner. But I was out, so the company had to make its best guess.
My new engineering manager is very smart and has a lot of experience. But we’re still learning each other’s working styles, figuring out how to collaborate, and getting aligned on our strategy.
And that adds another layer of change.
While I was away, the team had also lost an engineering manager, another engineer had quit, and another went on paternity leave.
The team had understandably shifted into more of a maintenance and engineering-focused mode.
So I came back trying to understand what had been done, what hadn’t been done, what projects had been put on hold, and why.
I was updating roadmaps, explaining priorities, providing historical context, and trying to get both of us up to speed.
And all of that takes energy.
Emotional energy.
Energy I barely had left.
Finding My Rhythm
Those first two weeks back were really, really, really frigging hard.
I had to figure out how to build a workday around our new life.
- I get up early so I can spend time doing homework with John. That’s my number one priority, and it always will be.
- I protect an hour in the afternoon to walk the dogs. That’s my second priority, and it’s not going anywhere.
And somewhere in between, I need to do my job.
We still have doctor’s appointments. We still have therapy. I still have late meetings that mean I don’t fall asleep until much later than I’d like.
And I was trying to find a rhythm that made all of that work.
But this week, something shifted.
I finally feel like I’ve found my footing.
I’m back in the middle of things. I’m kicking off projects, making decisions, bringing people together, and doing the work I love.
My passion for my job has been reignited.
And I’ve made some decisions about how I’m going to manage my time.
I’m only going to work Tuesday and Thursday nights. Those evening hours are far too precious to me now. I want to spend them with John.
I’m also learning that when a decision gets made at work and I’m not completely comfortable with it, sometimes I can just let it go.
It’s not the end of the world.
As John used to remind me:
“There is no such thing as a T-shirt emergency.”
He was right.
Learning Where to Draw the Line
Another thing I’m learning is where to draw my boundaries, especially at work.
My therapist gave me some advice recently.
She told me that I don’t have to share everything that’s going on in my head or at home with my coworkers.
This is completely foreign to me.
I’m a natural sharer. I’m transparent. I’ve always believed that being open is part of being genuine.
But during those first two weeks back, a few people made comments.
“Oh, I know how hard this must be with everything you have going on at home.”
“Wow, you’re doing so well considering everything you’ve been through and all the changes.”
I know those comments are probably coming from a good place.
But they’re uncomfortable.
Because when I come to work, I’m showing up with all of myself.
I’m kicking off projects. I’m making decisions. I’m bringing people together. I’m solving problems.
I’m throwing everything I have into my job, just like I always have.
And I’m one hell of a worker.
My passion has been reignited, and I’m genuinely excited about the work I’m doing.
But there’s this perception that because my personal life has changed so dramatically, it must somehow be affecting my ability to do my job.
And that perception is outside my control.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume that what’s happening at home is affecting my work without any actual evidence that it is.
Now, I realize there’s a bit of irony here.
I’m sitting here writing a deeply personal blog, sharing some of the most intimate moments of our lives with whoever happens to be reading it.
But there’s a difference.
This is my space. I’m choosing what to share and when to share it.
When I’m at work, I’m working.
And I’m learning that I don’t owe everyone an explanation of what’s happening at home.
So when people ask how things are going, I don’t necessarily share as much anymore.
They don’t need to know every detail.
What they need to know is how I’m doing at work.
That’s a boundary I’m learning to draw.
And like everything else these days, it’s a work in progress.
Almost Four Months Later
In just over a week, it will be four months since John’s stroke.
And I am nothing like the person I was four months ago.
Everything has changed.
How we communicate. How our days unfold. The people we spend time with and what we do when we’re together.
What really matters.
I don’t take John making dinner for me for granted anymore.
I don’t take the little things for granted.
There are so many more hugs, more kisses, and more “I love you”s than there were four months ago.
And I’m not saying this life is a blessing.
It’s not.
And no, I don’t believe everything happens for a reason.
I wouldn’t wish what happened to John on anyone. And if I could go back and change that day, I would do it in a heartbeat.
But we’re holding on to each other tighter.
He’s my best friend. And we’re figuring this out together.
Some days, work is going to be overwhelming.
Some days, John will have a word stuck in his head, and it will be a mashed potato day.
Some days, we’ll cry.
Some days, we’ll laugh.
And some days, we’ll do both.
… Sometimes the dogs will come home covered in burrs.
But hair grows back.
… And something that bothers me at work today? Probably won’t bother me tomorrow.
I’m learning to let those things go.
I’m learning to be patient.
And most of all, I’m learning to appreciate the little things.
Even on the mashed potato days.
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