Kids resolve to break our resolutions

I'm losing the morning. Every day.

It’s the last weekend of the year and our Christmas tree is down. It’s a little sad to put away decorations so soon, but it’s also going to be nice to not have that to-do item hovering for the next three weeks.

1. Life hacks don’t work for parents

I’m thinking about 2025 and feeling triggered by an article on how to accomplish one of my new year’s resolutions: reading more.

Matthew Walther wrote about how he reads 100 pages per day in The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal. He’s made a long-term commitment to reading books, and he offers practical tips for those of us (like me) who wish to read more.

Walther’s tips center on how to mix more reading into your regularly scheduled day, such as:

• "I start my own reading after I finish looking at the headlines and answering (or more realistically neglecting) correspondence. This is sometimes but not always when I read my heavy book, following my first cup of coffee and my first cigarette of the day. This slot is open until 9:00 A.M. or so, depending upon what time I have risen and what other tasks present themselves. It involves no more than twenty or twenty-five pages, usually with some note-taking.”

• “My second large-ish chunk of reading usually comes around lunchtime. Even a quick lunch—standing in line to grab a sandwich, microwaving leftovers in a break room—usually affords an opportunity for reading ten or fifteen pages.”

The heart of Walther’s message is this:

One of the most common misconceptions—I almost said “excuses”—that one hears from people who say they wish they read more is that reading must be done for an hour or more without interruption. When I talk about time slots, I am not saying that one should count on being able to read for long stretches during the requisite period; I am simply suggesting that it is one of the possible times at which, upon examination, one span of time previously given over to other things is likely to be available.

This resonates with me. As I consider my failure to read more books, I must grapple with the ways I waste time doing other things (such as, I dunno, writing a discretionary weekly newsletter because it seemed like a good idea on one random Sunday evening).

I like several of Walther’s suggestions. It’s certainly true that I could take time spent zoning out, such as scrolling social media or half-watching a boring Thursday Night Football game, and devote it to reading.

But, as I read Walther’s piece, part of me also was screaming: “WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WITH KIDS!?!?!?!” My reading volume has plummeted during the five and a half years since my first child was born, and I assume I’m not alone in that.

Walther speaks to my maniacal inner dialogue in his 23rd paragraph:

It occurs to me that in anticipation of possible objections, I should address a few words to my readers who are parents, especially of small children, as I am. Assuming that you wake up before your children do (which is not always the case, e.g., with newborns) you are probably in more or less the same situation as the childless or empty-nesters in the early morning. While kids are very good at monopolizing our time, they very rarely leave us in a situation in which we haven’t got even ten or so minutes to ourselves at a stretch, especially early in the morning. Which is to say, enough time to read about five pages—five percent of the way there! (The best thing about the hundred pages strategy is that the math associated with it is necessarily simple.)

I am thrilled for Walther that he is winning the mornings. That is not my experience.

While my 19-month-old daughter is a phenomenal sleeper, my 5-year-old son operates as an unsolicited alarm clock at least 80% of all mornings. Not only does he wake us up most days, but also he takes any attempt to out-early-bird him as an infringement upon his right to be up first.

One problem with trying to get a head start on my son is that we live in an old house with creaky floors. A bigger problem is that our son has the hearing of a wolf and sleeps with the preparedness of a night watchman.

I’ve tried getting up as early as 5 a.m. to use our home gym, read or catch up on work. I ninja my way down the hall and past his bedroom door toward the stairs. I know where to land the balls of each foot to remain nearly inaudible, a process that includes placing both hands on the wall for leverage while making a precise turn down our L-shaped stairs in order to avoid, 1. making noise; 2. falling to my death.

I’ve gotten really, really good at this.

Sometimes it even seems like I’ve won. But, then, 10 minutes into a workout, I’ll be startled into a near-scream by my son, saying, “Daddy, I’m hungry.”

I’ve mostly given up on mornings.

I do participate in a Bible study that requires me to leave the house around 5:40 a.m. on one weekday morning every other week. This has the benefit of escape — “bye, son, gotta go!” I say as I bolt out the door — but the drawback of leaving my wife to face the consequences of my conspicuous departure. I’ve been relatively successful at attending these gatherings at the expense much guilt.

This is, of course, just a season in life. Some day, my kids will be older and I’ll recover my agency to use mornings for purposes other than toasting waffles or pouring milk.

For now, though, parenting makes it feel nearly impossible to pursue goals outside of, well, parenting.

Take exercise. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, improving my fitness has probably been my greatest area of self-improvement in recent years. But, even as I make long-term progress, I go through long periods of treading water.

I was constantly sick between January and April last year, for example, because our baby was new to daycare and brought home every virus. I barely exercised during that period. As her immune system improved, so did my capacity for working out. I’ve finished the year strong at exercise … but not so much at reading or my other perennial unfulfilled resolutions.

Am I using parenting as an excuse? Yeah, probably. As Walther points out, there are practical ways to take control of time at the margins to focus on value-added activities. I’m not doing that as well as I could be.

But it also feels like it takes every bit of energy to focus on doing one thing well — and, even with that one thing, only temporarily. I tend to oscillate between priorities until around November when I realize, huh, I didn’t make much progress on anything.

I want to read 100 pages a day. I want to improve my running and add a new focus on weight training. I want to be more biblically literate. I want to pray more. I want to say yes to more social invitations and get better at asking other grownups to hang out.

I’ll resolve to do those things, and more, in 2025 while being kind to myself when when I inevitably fail.

2. Stop reading books you don’t like

Photo by Hans-Jürgen Weinhardt on Unsplash

Axios’ Shane Savitsky writes about a slightly different goal: how to read 100 books in 2025.

Here’s a tip from him that I need to internalize: “Life's too short for a book you don't like. Don't let the sunk cost fallacy mire you in a read you can't stand. If you're not feeling it, toss it.”

I often waste weeks, or months, trying to plow through a book I don’t enjoy. That’s pretty dumb.

3. What I wrote

Nothing.

4. What I read

Photo by Wim van 't Einde on Unsplash

I actually finished two books this week!

• The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  • This is a minor point in the scheme of things, but one wild thing I’d never thought about before is how there’s only about 100 years between Martin Luther posting his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and English separatists settling in America. It’s hard to fathom just how much, and how quickly, the reformation reordered the world.

• The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

  • I’ve now read both of Silver’s books in the past few weeks. As a professional pundit, I want to get better at making responsible predictions, and this book offered helpful frameworks for how to do it.

5. My favorite book this year

Since I unintentionally made this a Book Issue, I’ll end with my favorite book I read this year: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta.

It actually published in December 2023, but that might as well have been 2024. It’s really an essential book for understanding how cultural Christianity merged with Republican politics.

It also made me think a lot about a prescient 2005 book, The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church, by Greg Boyd.

I started this newsletter with an admission that I don’t actually read all that much, so take my book thoughts with heaps of salt. Thank you for reading this!