The order to read this desk in, if you just found it

This desk has one method, the split week: the kids' row over Mom's row, five days, with the cells where both need you marked as collisions. Everything else on the site is a way of emptying those cells. So the path starts with the drawing and ends with you, because you are the one resource in the plan that never gets scheduled.

1. Draw the week before you fix anything

   Read how to balance work, kids and an elderly parent first. It takes twenty minutes and one sheet of paper. You will come out of it with two or three circled afternoons instead of a general sense of drowning, and a circled afternoon is something another person can take. The example grid on the front page shows what a finished one looks like.

2. Name the window that keeps breaking

   For most families it is late afternoon on a school day. The 3pm to 7pm problem explains why that stretch is the one that fails and the three usual ways it gets covered. If your collision is a single event, a game on the same day as her appointment, go to the game and the appointment instead.

3. Talk to the job with facts, not apologies

   Read the FMLA page before you walk into HR. It keeps to what the Department of Labor publishes, including who qualifies and the fact that leave can come in pieces when medically necessary. Then read how working moms take care of aging parents, which covers the other sources of hours, because federal leave alone will not stretch across a school year of afternoons.

4. Tell the kids the true thing

   Teenagers notice the calendar before you explain it. Start with my teenager is angry that I'm always at Grandma's. Then which jobs are fair for a teenager and the three columns of jobs. If Grandma or Grandpa is near the end, the age-by-age scripts are there for the conversation nobody wants to start.

5. Count Mom's side honestly

   How much time caring for a parent takes shows how to count your own hours instead of borrowing a national figure. If treatment days are part of the week, the chemo and practice page maps one hour by hour. The west county map puts the school calendars next to the elder care doors, and local help has every number, checked.

6. If the house is about to change

   Moving her in is a bigger decision than it looks at 11pm. The room, the rules and the exit plan is worth reading before anyone rents a truck. If the strain has already reached your marriage, that page starts with the calendar, not with blame.

7. Check on the woman doing all of it

   Last, and not least: is this burnout, or am I just tired, is it too much, how to actually cope and the guilt that runs both ways. None of them diagnose anything. They do tell you when a tired week has become a reason to see your own doctor.

If you only have ten minutes tonight

Do step one on the back of an envelope, circle one afternoon, and text one person a specific day and time. That is a better night's work than reading every page. If the circled afternoon needs someone at Mom's house and there is nobody to text, the one paid placement on this site, New Plan Care Solutions, is labelled on the front page, and you can call or text (314) 405-0887. It is a client of the publisher and pays for that spot; none of the reading path above was written around it.

Everything factual on these pages links to its source in the sentence where it appears, and the whole list, with dates, is on the sources page. How the desk decides what to print is on how we write.