Today, I sent my kids to bed without having eaten anything.  I gave them dinner and they flat out refused to even try a single bite of it, despite having tried it the night prior and finding it somewhat satisfactory to where I didn’t feel like a complete failure of a parent.  But today, they took one look at the food presented to them, voiced their displeasure, and refused to eat it.

So I cleaned it up, and they didn’t eat a thing for the remainder of their day.  #1 started trolling around in the kitchen phishing for something to eat, and told me she was hungry, but I calmly explained to her that she did not eat dinner when it was presented to her, that this was a tough lesson to not disrespect the food that I do present to her, even with possible incentives of dessert if they eat well enough.

It kills my soul to deny them food when they’re hungry, but at the same time, I think about the maddening frustration I feel when they turn their noses up at the meals I make for them like defiant little shits.  So today I decided to stay strong and stick with my decision, and they went to bed, probably hungry.

Despite the fact that mythical wife told me to not get so stressed about food refusal, it’s easy for her to say considering I do the vast majority of cooking for the kids, and it’s hard to not take it personally being someone who puts a lot of effort into trying to provide homemade meals for my children, and also abhors the idea of wasting food.  It frustrates me tremendously, and I know this is something that many parents go through otherwise there wouldn’t be books like the above, but it still climbs the ranks of shit my kids do to drive me crazy.

But it’s not just food defiance lately that’s been frustrating daily, it’s just the defiance in general that sometimes gets me upset when it compounds repeatedly throughout a day.  I’m already overworked and handle the lion’s share of parenting, and when things get to a point where I could really use a timeout but can’t because I’m on double duty because I don’t have enough help, my days tend to go to ruin and my head goes into some dark places sometimes.

It goes without saying that I could use a break, but circumstances haven’t necessarily made such a possibility, so I just exist here festering and getting worse when things go poorly.  My fuses get shorter, and I lose my cool faster and I just want a break but it feels like everyone else around me seems to get them except for me, and I feel like I’m taken for granted again and feeling shitty about it.

Like I’m so locked into being in dad mode, that I feel like the me that existed before kids is completely dead, or at least dormant to the point of not knowing how to bring it back.  Whenever I do have a little bit of time to not be a dad, it’s always not enough time to where I can deprogram myself from being concerned about doing dad things, and I just end up squandering it and know I squandered it, which propagates the downward spiral of falling back into states of depression.

But seriously, if I were suddenly able to have a stretch where I didn’t have to worry about my kids, worry about my house descending further into chaos, worry about their meals, their care or anything else, I don’t know the fuck I’d do.  I have no hobbies anymore, I have no interest in video games, reading books is harder for me to do these days because I’m in such a general sleep deficit that no matter how interesting a book is, I still get tired by the act of it that I can’t really accomplish any productive reading anymore. 

Traveling is expensive and I’m always too cognizant of bills and expenses that I just don’t want to go into debt for just my own indulgences.  I don’t want to pretend to be a foodie again because I’m well past 40 now, and eating anything makes me feel like I’m gaining 8 lbs a meal and that I’ll look bad in my clothes.

So basically all I ever do with any free time is watch television or write in a brog nobody on earth reads because I don’t have the time to do anything more substantial in my life right now, and I’m basically in the mother of hold patterns until my kids are old enough to be self-sufficient and I’m trying my hardest on a regular basis to not keep falling into pits of despair.

Or maybe I’ve just had a bad day.  Either way, I could use a break, a real one, but I don’t see that happening any time soon, either.