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Sometimes, as I’m drinking coffee, I like to channel Peter Saarsgard on SNL, sipping his International Delights and saying, “I’m having one of the best breaks of my career. I cannot wait to tell my sister how good this break was.”

I always look forward to breaks and then never use them very well. I feel like I should use them to get stuff done, so I schedule tasks into every day and end up feeling stressed out by the time I return to work. That’s what I did this past summer.

And that’s what I was set to do this week, too. I had even jotted down tasks in my planner. Work on the photo project. Work on cleaning out the basement. Work on teaching the ChickieNob chess. (She suddenly wants to learn chess. I want to jump on that impulse.) I wrote down the tasks in pen.

But I felt tired looking at the planner, and I realized I had to do something different this time. I am spending every single day not accomplishing anything. I am sleeping in. I am reading with my pig. I am not accepting anything on my to-do list for any reason. I am going to go back to work recharged.

I am going to tell my sister about my awesome break.

Dear Prudence had a question this week from a man fed up with his wife’s attachment to a new stuffed animal following a stillbirth, a neonatal death, and a miscarriage. Yes, you are reading that correctly—three losses. He writes: “She never slept with a stuffed animal before. She doesn’t bring it in public or around anyone else, so it’s not embarrassing in that way—but I just think it’s childish and weird.”

He has asked her to get rid of it but admits: “She insists that for some reason she can’t even articulate that it brings her comfort and is a ‘baby that she’ll never have to bury’.”

Her response gutted me because I identified with it. Grief doesn’t always manifest as crying, and acknowledging that people express grief in a multitude of ways is the first step in comforting someone while they’re grieving.

Prudie put the question asker in his place when he said he threw out the stuffed animal, stating: “I hope this is an out-of-character moment of coldness for you, and not an indicator of your general approach to your wife’s suffering.”

And… yes… he is completely out of line. But that is why Prudie should have looped back to that original point: everyone grieves differently, and I think this man’s obsession with the stuffed animal is his way of expressing grief by fixating on something he thinks he should be able to control. He can’t control family building, so he goes for something else connected to it—his wife’s attachment to the stuffed animal. She holds onto a stuffed animal for comfort after the losses; he lashes out—even at loved ones—in anger after the losses. One person’s expression is only about herself. One person’s expression unfortunately affects the people around him.

I’m not excusing his behaviour. We need to own when our emotions impact people around us. But I am trying to extend a little of that understanding to him because he writes that he is in pain. And without knowing the inside of his brain, how can I possibly state what is coldness and what is a terrible manifestation of his grief? I’m choosing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

What do you think?

This year, at the start of January, I set a page-based reading goal for myself. 20,200 pages in 2020. This came out to 55.3 pages per day, which sounded pretty impossible. I’m always reading, but up until March, most weekends were spent running around and most weeknights were spent catching up on work, seeing friends, or attending meetings.

The pandemic changed all of that, and I hit my goal and kept reading.

As of December 1st (since I haven’t added up this month’s page count), I’ve read 20,732 pages. I counted pages by going onto Amazon after I finished the book and grabbing the hardcover page amount. Almost every book was in hardcover, so I felt this was the best way to get a fairly accurate count. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it meant that I read longer books because I wasn’t obsessed with hitting a book count. Instead, I chose what I wanted to read, regardless of how long it would take to get through because I knew it was all about the pages. In some ways, longer books were easier than shorter books because I didn’t need to learn a new set of characters or plotline. Even so, I also ended up reading more books overall this year. So it was a win-win.

It worked well, so I’m going to aim for 20210 pages in 2021.

This year, I’ve read 63 books so far. One was an audio book (so I didn’t add it to the page count). Ten were extra books I snuck in doing my #15Best thing, a mix of fiction and non-fiction.

All of my regular books were fiction.

My favourite things I’ve read this year:

• Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom (Leigh Bardugo)
• The Hand on the Wall (Maureen Johnson)
• The Sentence is Death (Anthony Horowitz)
• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Holly Jackson)
• A Deadly Inside Scoop (Abby Collette)
• The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett)
• Exciting Times (Naoise Dolan)
• Blue Ticket (Sophie Mackintosh)
• Seven Lies (Elizabeth Kay)
• The Lion’s Den (Katherine St. John)
• Boyfriend Material (Alexis Hall)
• So You Want to Talk About Race (Ijeoma Oluo)
• When No One Is Watching (Alyssa Cole)
• His and Hers (Alice Feeney)
• The Silver Arrow (Lev Grossman)
• Last Tang Standing (Lauren Ho)
• Piranesi (Susanna Clarke)
• That Time of Year (Marie NDiaye)

What is on your list of favourite reads this year? (Feel free to list movies or television shows if books are not your thing.)

I’ve turned the corner on my feelings about staying home—they’re always changing—and I’ve moved from anger at others to proud of myself for protecting my investment.

Once we get through the obvious, low-hanging fruit of people and fur-covered creatures I love, the thing I like best (beyond reading and playing match-3 games) is working. I really love to work. I love metrics and numbers, and my happiest days are when I’m working to make sense of data. I love love love to work.

The only thing I need in order to do my work—beyond a functioning computer, calculator, and the Internet—is my health. When I am healthy, I can work. If I’m not healthy, it makes doing work difficult. Taking care of my health by not taking risks, such as going out or seeing people during a pandemic, is worth its weight in gold. If I get sick, I not only have the medical bills, but I also may not be able to work: for either the short-term, or if we follow the news about the cognitive implications of COVID-19, the long-term.

There is no undo button. No rewind. If you get it, you get it. And there are things you can do to lessen your chances of getting it. I am doing those things.

This week, I’m not feeling bitter. I’m feeling grateful that I have the ability to stay home.

I am going to be 17,000 days old tomorrow on December 17.

I had never thought about enormous calculations of time like this until Lori mentioned her milestone number a few months back, I put my date in an age calculator and discovered that I was rounding on 17,000 days.

It is weird to think about 17,000 days. Days sometimes feel interchangeable. What did I do yesterday? The same thing I will likely do today and tomorrow. But I have had almost 17,000 of them, and very few have been during a pandemic, working this job, living in this home, married to this man, with these twins. So… no… upon reflection, they’re not interchangeable at all.

Birthdays are nice, but those milestones feel so tiny against a number like 17,000.