And then there was the calendar. I had been, before January, a person with a relatively uncomplicated calendar. Work, occasional dinner plans, Priya every couple of weeks, the quarterly gym commitment I maintain with irregular success. I did not need to track a school enrichment schedule, two pediatrician follow-up windows, a dentist appointment, the day the class was doing picture retakes, or when the library books were due back.
I became a person with a very complicated calendar. I downloaded an app that I had resisted downloading for years, the kind with color coding and reminder windows. Owen was blue. School was green. Brooke’s calls and visits were purple, because they were significant and I didn’t want to accidentally double-book them with anything else. My work was gray, because my work felt like the background during this period in a way that had never been true before.
I made the calendar work. But the cognitive overhead of maintaining it was its own kind of cost, the kind that doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet but that I felt in my shoulders every Sunday evening when I sat down to map out the week.
When the kids went back to their alternating schedule in June, I didn’t delete the app. I kept it, and I still use it for the planned Wednesday evenings and the occasional weekend day. But my calendar is mostly gray again now, which I didn’t realize I’d missed until it was back.
## Owen’s Version of Events, As I Understand It