As much as I don’t like to admit it, I’ve been struggling lately in my life as a dad. I feel like my patience is at an all-time low and just about everything my kids are doing lately is just pissing me off, mostly on account of the colossal amounts of escalating defiance and just plain lack of listening that’s going on with my four and three year old daughters.
Everything from wake-up time, free play time, quiet time, and especially bedtime are these monumental conflicts where I feel my disposition dissolving all the time, and I just end up in a state of agitation, annoyance, anger or all the above. I don’t like it one bit, but I can’t deny the fact that I’m losing my cool over things at a very frequent clip, and I’m hoping that this is just a stage of life given the ages of my kids, and this will eventually pass and eventually emerge in a state of being that’s not as chaotic, not as frustrating, and not as resulting me being pissed off all the time.
Then again, the whole notion that challenging times will just pass doesn’t change the fact that time is passing, and then I struggle about that notion that I’m letting formative kid years of my children’s lives pass, while mostly in dour moods, which then makes me feel bad about that instead.
There’s actually a part of me that dreads the weekends lately, because there’s usually a lot of time in which I’m on dad duty alone with the kids, and I don’t always know what to do with them. And the difference is now from when they were 2 and 1 and 3 and 2, is a whole lot more mobility, a whole lot more freedom to roam in the house, and most prevalently, a whole lot more intelligent.
My kids are pretty smart, and are seemingly endlessly testing boundaries and limits, and doing just about everything that I’m please asking them to not do, they hardly ever listen, and I’m just left exasperated, fried and burned out on trying to figure out how to keep them occupied without having to resort to television, going outside because it’s been cold as fuck lately or something that results in a colossal mess that will make me want to slit my wrists.
Mornings have been challenging lately, because #1 has been deciding to wake up earlier than our routine generally is, and lots of mornings, she just bangs on the door and walls and makes a lot of racket that runs the risk of waking up her sister or others in the house. I’m usually not done with making breakfast, and I’m already aggravated at knowing there’s a clock over my head at needing to get shit done lest she tornadoes up her room, and that becomes one more task on my endless list of responsibilities.
There’s like a 75% chance that #2 will either: be pissed upon waking up and melt down. Be pissed at the top of the stairs and refuse to come downstairs and refuse to be carried downstairs, and then melt down. Be unhappy with what I’ve made for breakfast, refuse to eat and then melt down. Or any combination, if not all of the above. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even bother to try and console beyond an initial attempt because she won’t communicate why she’s upset, and I just give up and start reading books to #1 who rarely has an issue with breakfast.
But bedtimes, they have become a vastly different type of hell for me on the daily, and frankly have become my least favorite part of every single day as of late. You’d think that I’d be doing cartwheels at the idea of putting the kids down for the night, so I can enjoy my 1-2 hours of freedom. But the defiance, having to wrangle and chase down the kids, get them bathed, teeth brushed, dressed and prepped, even before we get into their rooms for bedtime stories. It’s like a last boss battle every single day, all for a payoff of the pithy 1-2 hours of freedom I get to have these days, and usually the first hour of my paltry me time is really spent decompressing as well as doing cleaning and prep-work for the next day, before I can really turn everything off and try and relax with what little time I’m afforded.
More than likely, I’m just at my burnout point again. I haven’t really had a real break from being on dad duty in a while; I know I had a kid-free weekend a month ago, but that was away from home, mostly sequestered inside a cabin as a blizzard ravaged the North Carolina mountains, and everyone got sick. We had to make several long drives before and after in short order, only to come home where everyone was sick, and frankly when a break is structured like that, it’s hardly a break at all.
But it just sucks. I don’t like where I’m at right now, with how perpetually pissed off I am, with parenting. My kids deserve better than angry dad all the time, and I wish parenting could just alleviate the pressure just a little bit off my throat to where it doesn’t feel like such an exasperating chore all the time, and more stuff I should be enjoying and relishing in spending time and watching my kids grow and develop.
