Usually, after a week or so, my internal brogging meter starts panicking if I haven’t taken the time to write anything. After two weeks, I get anxious that I haven’t written anything other than a mundane email at work, and nothing for my own gratification. And anything beyond that is just pure chaos in my head, and I begin to descend down this rabbit hole of thinking if I don’t write anything soon, I’ll fall into this pit of never writing again.
Obviously that’s ludicrous thinking, and I can start back up whenever I feel like it, but the overlying factor is that when the day is over, I simply need time to write. Topics aren’t necessarily the issue, I’ve got a small queue of things that I found to be thought-provoking to want to blab on about for a little bit, but unfortunately the need for time didn’t necessarily sync up.
So instead of trying to write backwards and backfill a queue of mostly inconsequential topics, I figured I’d just start off with writing for little else than the sake of catching up, because this isn’t necessarily going to be one topic I touch on, and I’ve definitely got a lot on my mind these days that I think wouldn’t hurt to put into writing for me to reflect back on in the future.
First and foremost, let’s talk about my impending journey into upcoming fatherhood. Obviously, I haven’t really written a lot about this, but it’s not because I don’t care, but it’s mostly because it’s a tremendous amount for me to process, and I don’t always know how to express myself when it comes to it. I think things are a little bit clearer now these days, but over the last few months, it’s always been more of a “when” kind of thing, but as the expected due date has dwindled from months to weeks, we’re at the point where mythical wife explained to her parents that we’re in the stage where our kid can actually show up any time now, regardless of the fact that we’re still a little around six weeks away.
That notion, kind of got my blood pumping, and suddenly it doesn’t feel like I have enough time left to do all the things around the house that we both know will probably never get done once the baby arrives. On account of this, I’ve been working pretty much non-stop when I’m at home, doing painting, minor repairs, and more painting, to get the house to a stage where we’ll be content to let it sit for many years before we feel the need to freshen things up later on.
Needless to say, I fucking hate painting with a passion. It’s about the worst activity in the world for homeowners, and it always makes me want to pay someone to do it for me, but I know that the estimates for the labor will often times be around 10x more than it would cost for the paint and for me to do it myself, and because I’m Asian and cheap, I end up doing it myself no matter how much I revile it. I’ve decided that in the future, painting, will be the most adequate form of discipline I can apply to my kid if she ever becomes a bratty teen that steps out of line.
Getting back to the emotions and thoughts of impending fatherhood however, I can say with great clarity that I’m looking forward to it tremendously. I feel ready to be a parent, and I look forward to the ultimate challenge of being a good father to my kid. No matter how many people talk about sleepless nights, the crying, bodily fluids and the endless parade of diapers, they don’t scare me in the least bit, and I may be naïve in the face of how much my life is going to be changing, but I’m really excited and looking forward to becoming a dad.
Over the last few months my perspective of the world has changed tremendously when it comes to how I look at children and parents of said children. I see crying babies and slow-moving toddlers with more curiosity and astonishment, when I used to meet such with annoyance before the impending arrival of my own. Comics and stories of people being parents and growing families break me down like nothing else. Even seeing a Pampers commercial the other night gave me the sniffles.
Typically, I don’t believe people really change much in their lives, personality-wise; but I’ve been amending that that is not without some extraordinary circumstances. I think children and becoming parents have the capability to create change, and the way I look at the world a lot of the time seems different and I’m thinking that it’s not a temporary thing.
Speaking of change, I often don’t write a lot about my work, because it’s really not that interesting. But over the last few months, to get straight to the point, work has sucked pretty hardcore. There have been a lot of transitions in personnel over this time, and things were often in a state of disarray as everyone still around was trying to get their footing and seeing who was going to absorb what new responsibilities and what new processes to integrate to try and make of this brave new world.
On top of it all, my entire department slid down this steep hill known as a production schedule, and mostly on account of the transition of leadership, did the entire team as a collective, go down this whole, and we’ve been spending the better part of the last few months trying to dig ourselves out of it. It’s been extremely stressful on a regular basis, and I’ve found myself regularly being at work for longer hours, and working almost non-stop on a regular basis with barely any time in between meetings, conference calls, or any other tasks that suck my time and sanity on a daily basis.
My superior(s) in this time have been demonstrating a severe inability to be leaders, exacerbating my general daily unhappiness. Myself and my counterpart(s) routinely get blamed for our team’s struggles to keep up with the schedule that’s perpetually in a deficit, and I’m in this constant struggle of dealing with leadership that wants me to step up as a leader and be empowered to make decisions but when I make independent decisions, I get admonished for not checking in with them first.
The narrative surrounding all sorts of daily decisions, meetings and directives change sporadically and without notice, and I’ve been forced to begin taking detailed meeting notes and spending time writing up recaps in order to, popular corporate speak, CYA, so that I can protect myself from whenever bullshit changes occur.
Needless to say, I’ve been extremely unhappy with my job as of late, and I’ve actually begun thinking of potential exit strategies. I know the questionable timing of this what with a baby on the way, but when the day is over, I still do have to put some degree of my happiness and mental wellbeing on priority, because if I’m constantly fried, frustrated and unhappy, this is definitely no way to be welcoming my child into the world.
As mythical wife has stated, this is really a time in which I should be excited and happy about welcoming our baby, but my job is really cockblocking me from the joy I should be having. When I started with this company, I often said that there would only be one other company that I would leave this place for, because it really is a fantastic company that I respect and support, even in spite of my general unhappiness. But much like my changing perspectives on the doorstep of fatherhood, circumstances have changed. If my job is making me miserable, maybe some change is necessary, even if it means leaving the company outright.
Overall, this is where I stand with my life currently. As much as I never want to stop writing, the reality is that coming very soon is going to be something very important that will in all likelihood impede my ability to write as often as I want to. Who knows, maybe it’ll not affect me at all, and I’ll be able to write scathing social commentary or wrestler eulogies as if nothing had changed at all. But for what it’s worth, I feel a little unencumbered by being able to get this much off my brain for the time being, and as much as I’d like to proclaim, back to your regularly schedule, I can’t make that promise.
