Even though it’s still summer break for mythical wife and kids, I’ve still been waking up at the same sequence of alarms used throughout the school year, with the first going off at a horrific time that leads with a 5.
Part of it has to do with still dealing with some lingering jetlag from returning from Asia; I’ve been hitting hard walls of fatigue at around 1 pm daily, and by 10 pm, I’m yawning uncontrollably, but I’m fighting it to one, keep myself on track for the kids’ nightly bathroom breaks, and to hopefully get back to my old bed habits.
But also because waking up at the ass-crack of dawn gives me a few hours in the morning of quiet peace; it’s not different from the time in which I regularly awoke during the school year, except now I don’t have to wake any kids up, so that time in which I had been making and serving breakfast for #1, taking a break to Duolingo before #2’s wake-up time, and then repeating with #2 before I headed off to work, I’ve just been keeping entirely to myself, doing my Duolingo with a morning cup of coffee, and then I’ve got this chunk of time of really nothing to do lately before I feel the need to start breakfast, and I’ve actually been utilizing it to do some writing over the last week or so.
Parenting has taught me that no routine lasts forever, and I should be grateful for this oddly un-parenting-like period of calm, and I’ve actually caught up with some of the topics I wanted to write about to where the only thing left to write about is the period of calm itself.
Even work has been uncharacteristically calm, also almost spookily, because my company has had a lot of turnover this fiscal year, and all of the internal clients in which my position supports went gangbusters on frontloading the year to where we’re almost at a point of doing nothing but pre-planning for 2027, barely at the halfway point in 2026. Frankly, I don’t like how calm it is at the office, because I’ve witnessed more layoffs at this employer over the last two years than I did at six years at my prior, which makes me feel like we’re like a WWE/TKO ecosystem of employment instability, and my biggest daily anxiety is wondering if my name is ever going to show up on the bean-counters’ ledgers as being viewed as expendable and placed on the chopping block.
This is the world we live in, or at least I live in, where calm and quiet is met with paranoia and concern for the future. What I wouldn’t give to be independently wealthy and to not have to worry about this kind of bullshit.
Next school year, both girls will be in elementary school, and will effectively be on the same schedule, which means instead of needing to be on dad-mode effectively twice a morning before I go to work, I’ll only have to do it once, and then I’ll suddenly have nothing to do until it’s time to go to work.
Going back to sleep isn’t an option, because to me, it just doesn’t seem like it’s enough time to let myself fall back asleep only to be jarred awake by another alarm, before needing to go through the trouble of waking back up again before heading into the office. More realistically, I can see myself heading out to the office earlier, with the possibility of hitting the gym before general working hours begin because I anticipate it being calm and empty, but then that will remove the 60-75 min reprieve I give myself in the middle of the day to workout, which means I’ll ultimately net work more on a daily basis but this is about as first-world problem as they come.
Or, I can keep that time to give myself like a calm hour at home, and do basically what I’ve been doing this past week, and dick around on my phone and laptop in relative peace, possibly write, and then head to the office, closer to my usual routine.
Who really knows, although I think I already know how I’m going to treat the scenario when it arrives. But the point remains that gaining any measure of peace, quiet and calm is always jarring and feels awkward, because parenting conditions me to be on edge and anticipating kid-related things at all times, so when things do get to actually slow down, it almost feels alien and wrong.
