Present Participation

in lieu of Anticipation

I struggle to process the word “anticipate” as anything except having a negative connotation alongside “expectations” or “anxiety.” I’m eager to read others’ take on this word, as pondering it for weeks still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Though I tend to associate “anticipate” with unfortunate events that befall us, I’m also good at digging a little deeper to look for silver linings or purpose to those situations we didn’t anticipate… because what else can I do?¹

I’m finding so much of my family’s life path has quite little to do with what I anticipate, and everything to do with moments and outcomes that I never saw coming. To the point that I’m making an effort to plan less, anticipate never, and simply focus on broader desires and end goals while allowing the in-between to present itself to us in divine timing. When I read that out loud to Mal, she said, “Isn’t that ‘manifesting’?” Why yes, wise one, it is.

Micro-managing doesn’t serve us well. I’m trying to be intentional about staying in a state of present participation, and more importantly, not creating resistance with fear and overthinking how we are going to get from Point A to Point B. Right now point B seems unattainable and it’s too easy to get discouraged when goals feel so out of reach. Just focus on point B and let spirit guide me there.

This does not come naturally to my recovering type-A personality, derived from decades of micro-managing as a coping mechanism for a lifetime of anxiety and masking in unhealthy settings. It takes daily effort to resist (or apologize for not resisting) this urge to control my environment since Mal—my first-born—graced us with her everything-you-anticipated-about-parenting-ends-here temperament and healthcare needs.

Things to soothe my newborn that only made her highly-sensitive, colicky, (unknown) oral-tied distress worse or simply overstimulated her nervous system:

• Bathtime

• Massage

• Pacifiers

• Mobile

• Swaddling

• Swing

• Bouncy seat

• Car ride

• Sound machine

• “Shushing” sounds

• Stroller ride

But surely after a couple years of working out oral ties, food allergies, birth injuries, and genetic components, we knew how to handle our composites. I anticipated having another child would be smooth sailing and convinced my husband we had all the kinks worked out!

Enter Uma.

In summary, she brought all the same components to the table but more pronounced; laughed in the face of our preparation to nip oral ties in the bud—teaching us a lot about their inner workings—as her case was outside the box even for the subset we were in; and has continued to educate us through various health anomalies over the last nine years. So our family grows with dogs and planted fish tanks and caterpillars rather than more biped children. Though that hasn’t worked out to be any less complicated or costly, now that I think about it...

No one anticipated COVID, but as it unfolded, it quickly became our “before and after.” As individuals, as a marriage, as homeschoolers, as a family. Since February 12, 2020, it continues to impact our daily lives while many others have moved on. COVID exacerbated a tangled web of underlying health issues that impacted all four of us in different ways for years, but this is a glimpse of challenges we still face regularly: 👉 Ode to the PANS Window.

Waking up to a family full of varying capacities to function and needs that literally fluctuate with weather shifts, I’m not able to anticipate the next month, week or even day ahead. I have to adapt; accept the things I can’t change, change the things I can—which ultimately lands on adjusting my expectations. I came up with three basic homeschool plans relative to the level of functioning in the house, but this principle also applies to general life because it all kinda blends together for our lifestyle.

• Plan A is high functioning, all systems go

• Plan B uses alternatives to mechanics of reading/writing/mathing—leaning into the strengths still accessible when not fully functioning. Setting the bar a bit lower, this often includes oral school work, art, games, cooking, stop motion stories, crochet, puzzles, hiking, etc.

• Plan C stands for “cuddle,” i.e. survival mode—there is no bar. Documentaries, read-alouds with discussion, quiet time, nervous system regulation exercises, detox baths, etc.

For a long while our radius for adventure shrank until my health became more stable. My planner went out the window. The mess of lesson planning when expectations were unattainable created more work in re-planning every week of unfinished tasks than any work being done. Even bullet journaling style didn’t serve me well.

I learned that it made more sense to have access to resources, but only after the fact, write down what we accomplished rather than planning a future list of tasks. I tailor my planner to document general areas of study and my own tasks.

Brave Learning with Julie Bogart refers to this method as “planning from behind.” In the fall and winter months, we have more B days, and though we didn’t do math or writing, we still accomplished a lot—those experiences are worth documenting too. That 283-slide stop motion video Uma spent a couple hours on took extensive creativity, executive functioning, story planning, spatial awareness, and a host of other skills to put together. Mal working on her first crocheted sweater, linocut carving, baking muffins, and summarizing tax-deduction forms in Excel gets documented.

None of this go-with-the-flow lifestyle is what I envisioned when we decided to homeschool before even having kids. But it’s been my education to let go of the pretense of control by grounding myself in present participation in lieu of anticipation, allowing myself to grow along with my quirky, neurospicy family.

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Written by Aly Prades last year in Flow: Open to the Unexpected, I created this animation for her vision, and now I’m finding myself resonating so deeply with its message in January 2026 as I try to navigate changes that keep coming our way. Changes I couldn’t have anticipated. Changes that came like dominoes slowly arranged with distance between that barely allowed one to touch the next—often not even making sense in the moment. I value my creative community for how we support each other in so many ways beyond simple creative motivation.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs.
👉 Click here to view the next post in the series “Anticipate.”

1. Because I have 12-year and 9-year-old daughters at the time of this writing (currently known as Mal and Uma respectively), I can’t say, think or write “what else can I do” without singing it as Isabella from “Encanto.”