What I’ve been doing recently is that I have decided that between the time in which #2 goes to bed which I’m really hoping is closer to 11 pm and not 12 am, and no later than 1:00 am, that is declared me time. Time in which I will not be job searching, not researching potential cars, and I will not be doing absolutely anything at all unless it is self-serving solely for me, which is to say that it’s become the only time in the world I’m granting myself to actually do some fucking writing.
The good news is that it is providing me some time to actually do some writing, even if it is coming at the cost of the sleep that I most certainly would benefit from getting more of as well.
However, the bad news is that so far, it’s often times the time in which I’m in not the best of head spaces when I finally sit down in my office and have two fucking seconds where I’m not handcuffed to a child or doing something that pertains to the kids. But on the flip side, I frankly think my writing is sometimes better when there’s a little (or a lot of) anger behind it, because fewer truths come out than when raging on the keyboard.
One thing that was often suggested to me when I was becoming a new parent, was the importance of keeping hobbies and having time to unwind, so that you don’t lose yourself or your personal identity to being just a parent.
Thinking back to all the times I’ve heard or been told such a bullshit suggestion, I’m inclined to believe that these people either don’t have kids, or weren’t in similar circumstances in which I’m in, with two kids under the age of two, while both myself and mythical wife work full-time jobs and have no immediately available family or support system remotely close by to lend a helping hand, all while being in the middle of a fucking pandemic.
Needless to say, I’m not “losing myself,” because I’m already fucking long past the state lines of where my general life has been left behind and lost. I have absolutely zero time for myself, every single day of the week, and the only reprieves I have are maybe an hour every weekday, where there’s a small overlap where the nanny reprieves me of duty from #1, and #2 is still sleeping, and then the late night time at the end of the day in which I should be catching up on sleep but instead I’m so pissed and resentful at my lack of personal time that I’m hate-staying up until 1:00 am.
For lack of a better term, I have no help. I’ve woken up anywhere from 6:30-7:15 every single day since my first daughter was born without a single break, in order to adhere to her daily schedule. Even on the day after my COVID-19 vaccine and I was running a 104F fever, I was up and taking care of my child because that’s what parents do, but I have taken the first shift of child care, every single day since last March, when #1 showed up. I wouldn’t even know what to do if I could sleep until 8 am. I’d probably wake up at like 7:50 in cold sweats because I’d be concerned that I overslept on my kids.
We have a nanny, but we can really only afford to pay her for four hours a day because the cost of child care is ridiculous and we don’t trust daycares because people still can’t vaccinate their kids and kids are still getting sick at an alarming rate even today. But those four hours really only covers four of the 19 hours of the day that I’m awake, and she’s really only responsible for #1, and asking anyone to cover both of my kids is too much, even for me, often times.
My family is all up in Virginia so they can’t help, mythical wife’s family is somewhat closer, but that well can only be dipped into so often before we run the risk of burning them out if they’re not already there, and we have no other family (read: free) child care available to us locally.
Needless to say, I am well prepared to judge the fuck out of any similar-aged parents out there who have nearby family or reliable, free child care to come help out, if they have the audacity to proclaim how hard parenting is. Because when you have none of such support available, I can assure that it’s tremendously worse, and makes me question all sorts of things in life in general.
The amount of time in which I have to do double duty on both sub-two year old children is more often than I’d like to do, because mythical wife works educator hours which often have her up long before the sun rises and she’s exhausted when she gets home, or the scheduled pumping which removes her from the equation of being able to reliably watch children.
I try not to think too much when my emotional state begins to sour, because the reality is that it’s sometimes really depressing when I stop and think about the immediate future, and how it feels like nothing is really going to change that much for the better, and I legitimately cannot even hypothesize when it is that I’ll ever have another day in which I can sleep in, or not be on child duty, or can just simply fucking relax and not have any worries for once.
I love my children, and I love my wife, until the day I die, and I’ll love them from whatever afterlife spiritual bullshit there might be afterward. There are plenty of moments where I stop and look at all of them and feel the most warm love there could possibly be. But in this current juncture of the journey through parenthood of two kids under age two, is fucking rough, and I’m constantly in this exasperated state, where I wake up in the morning and my The Sims stress meter is already maxed out, which means anything bad that comes unexpected just continually pushes me over the edge, repeatedly, and I just want to curl up and sob sometimes.
My family deserves so much better than this state of me, but days like today, I just can’t find the strength to deliver. I’m not at risk of losing myself, I’ve long past the point where I already have, and I genuinely can’t imagine when I’ll be able to come back.
