Because I’m a neurotic baseball nerd who has a hard-on for nice round numbers, I was always keenly aware of the fact that I was creeping closer to a nice round milestone number of 100 dad brogs, most of which are bitchy, ragey, or coming from a place of frustration. In my head, I’ve written this post several different times now, but as is the norm for the life of a parent of kids as young as mine, there was never the opportunity to write this until a lot of the feelings in which I’m mentally writing, have already long passed.
This isn’t to say that I don’t love my children, quite the contrary, I love my children and my famiry and would do anything in the world for them, but it’s more of the unyielding truth of just how difficult raising kids is, especially in the circumstances I’ve been under, with two born during a pandemic and being on a path that has never really been explored except by those in similar boats currently charting them as we go.
There’s no sugar-coating it: parenting is hard. Parenting two that are just 16 months apart is even harder. I’ve completely lost the ability to feel any shred of empathy for anyone who proclaims their lives are difficult and they have no kids, because I frankly can’t imagine anyone’s life being as hard without kids as someone with them. In fact, I’ve even turned my nose up at those with just one child, because at this point, I think one kid is a walk in the park, and that I could raise a single child with my eyes closed with the experience I’ve accumulated.
At no point during my journey as a dad, have things ever been easy. When it was just #1, we had several months of having to deal with an apnea monitor, on top of not knowing what we were doing as new parents. But once we began to feel that we were getting into a groove and that her sleep schedule was affording us time to begin feeling like human beings again, our world was rocked by the discovery that mythical wife was pregnant and #2 was on the way.
And then #2 arrived, and in spite of all the preparation and thinking we got this, based on all the experience we accumulated from our first go-around, #2 was all sorts of different than her sister, in terms of temperament, sleeping habits, and the presence of colic. And with their being two kids now, the inevitability of double duty came into play, and let me tell you that there have been fewer points in my life that I have felt so helplessly inadequate as a father, parent, human being, than when I’m constantly falling on my face as a single person watching two kids.
Since then, my daughters have been living up to the tag team dynamic that I’ve given them championship blets for, because since the staffing up of my famiry, they’ve been systematically taking turns, tagging in and out, at which one of them is the difficult kid at any given time; naturally not ignoring any opportunities to get some double-team, tandem offense of both of them being difficult at the same time. #2’s colic was a devastating time where nothing I did felt like it was right. #1’s increasing curiosity and the development of defiance and the ability to say the word NO bubbled up as #2’s newborn vices began cooling down. They’d take turn at being picky eaters, and seldom would eat well at the same time. #1 started getting sick every single month since the start of 2022 due to our shitty nannies or sending her to daycare, and without missing a beat, when she gets sick, #2 gets sick 3-4 days later and it’s even worse on her because she’s younger and has a lesser developed immune system. Everyone loves to say that it’s just them growing their immune systems, but I’d rather other parents just stop being selfish fucks and sending sick kids to school all the god damn time.
My current ragers right now is that first, both of my girls are being picky shits about eating, and no matter how much effort I spend cooking them things that I think they’ll like, or have demonstrated liking in the past, they hate everything I make, and dinners and meals have been breath-holding events where I’ve been bubbling over with frustration and defeat. I’ve been dreading mealtimes lately, and even now I’m wondering what the fuck I can make in the morning, and if they’ll eat it or demoralize me again by refusing it.
And #1 is living up to the reputation of the terrible twos by being the indecisive bipolar toddler that the title was developed for. Just about every single thing results in a fight, and over the last few months, I’ve had to listen to some of the most shrieking, screaming and nuclear meltdowns in history. Mythical wife tries explaining to me that these are textbook power struggles, and tries to coach me methods of approaching my child to try and negate the conflicts but the reality is that I’m around the kids more than she is and I don’t always have the capacity to strategize every single scenario where a fight is likely to occur.
Furthermore, #1 just got in trouble at school earlier in the week, for biting another child. Ironically, behavior like this didn’t start until she started going to school and being exposed to other children, where she’s clearly picking up behaviors from them, but at this point, they’re already learned, and all we can do is try to adjust and recondition better alternative behavior.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, then why does it feel like the no-two-days-are-ever-the-same nature of parenting occasionally drives me insane? I know that the results of the each day are always going to be different, and yet I’ve so often struggled to retain my sanity when the shit has hit the fan the hardest.
Granted, a lot of these hardest days were at points throughout the last two-plus years when my job was at its shittiest on top of the rigors of parenting, and the stress of child care was often and endless. Currently, my different job is less shit, and my household now has an au pair, which I’m sure to eventually write about in a future dad brog, so those stressors are hopefully more of a thing of the past than they were.
I still feel like I could use a legitimate break and that it would do me some tremendous good, because for like 99% of every day since March of 2020, I have been the person waking up to do first shift of parenting every single morning with almost no break, and as much as I love my kids and my famiry, I do think that I need to get a real break from such responsibilities, so that I can actually recharge a little bit.
Anyway, things learned from one hundred bitchy dad brog posts:
- Teething sucks
- Colic sucks
- There is nothing sharper on the planet than an infant’s jagged fingernails
- Dads have their own forms of post-partum depression
- It’s okay to get mad
- Whenever you think you’ve got a handle on something, it will change
- No amount of preparation will protect you from failing at parenting, a lot
- You will never, have any time for yourself.
In all honesty, there have been numerous times where I’ve stopped and wondered how much easier life would’ve been like had I not had children. The advent of social media, and simply having friends and famiry in your lives doesn’t help see what grass looks like in other peoples’ yards. Seeing people go on trips and vacations, or even as simple as going out to a new restaurant in town. The things they’re creating with the wealth of free time that they have, or just being able to indulge in every single show that comes out within the first week of drop.
I’d be lying, badly, if I didn’t say that I wasn’t a little envious of the freedoms that come to those without children, but at the same time, I’ve also come to the realization that a lot of the pleasures and things that I think would make me happy, would only really do such for fleeting moments of time, and are probably things that nobody but me would remember past a week.
A little while ago, I had to go pick up #1 from daycare early, because I had a work conflict, so it was either pull my child from school early, or get my child from school late and literally pay a penalty cost by the minute that would make the WCW Hotline seem like a bargain in comparison. Needless to say, I was salty over having to leave work to get my child, and inside my own head about how much life is hard being a parent.
I waited outside, because daycare is responsible and takes exposure seriously which I respect, and watched as my daughter emerged from her classroom with one of the teachers. She had a very confused look on her face, and it was obvious she could tell something was out of the ordinary, being the only kid being pulled from class. But then she saw me outside the window, and suddenly began running towards the door, with a big smile on her face at seeing dad waiting for her.
We drove home singing the name game to every single word she could think of.
Whenever I come home from an office day, after I walk in through the door, #2 is usually already on her way over to me crawling, but almost walking, because she wants to greet me as soon as I come in. She gets fussy if I don’t pick her up immediately. Probably by Christmas, she’ll be on her feet and running, and I might be hating life again having to chase around two mobile children, but those emotions are still but temporary.
There is nothing in existence that can replace the heart-melting sensation of seeing such honest and innocent happiness on the face of your own kids.
I might spend an inordinate amount of my limited time using my brog to vent frustrations, but in the grand spectrum of things, my brog is still but just a slice of my every day life, regardless of how important it is to me. There are still plenty of hours and minutes of every day in which I can’t take notes or the time to describe my emotions, and tons of words and thoughts that swirl through my head that never see the light of keyboard. And let us not forget one of the constant tropes of the internet, that it’s always easier to complain than it is to praise, and I am no exception to such behaviors.
So although it might seem like I’m a shitty dad who completely hates parenting, yes, I have my moments where I’m over a lot of undesirable behavior, but I want everyone to know that kids were always part of the plan in my life, and I knew exactly what I was signing up for when they arrived. In spite of one hundred dad brogs in which most of them seem critical in nature, there’s not a minute that goes by where I don’t love my kids more than anything else in existence, and there is absolutely nothing I wouldn’t do for them.
One hundred brogs won’t change that, and neither will the next hundred, and the hundred after that. I wonder how many I’ll get to when my kids get to the age where they might learn that their dad is a big nerd who’s kept an online diary for over 20-30 years?
