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What I\u2019ve been doing recently is that I have decided that between the time in which #2 goes to bed which I\u2019m really hoping is closer to 11 pm and not 12 am, and no later than 1:00 am, that is declared me time.\u00a0 <\/span>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\u2019s become the only time in the world I\u2019m granting myself to actually do some fucking writing.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n However, the bad news is that so far, it\u2019s often times the time in which I\u2019m in not the best of head spaces when I finally sit down in my office and have two fucking seconds where I\u2019m not handcuffed to a child or doing something that pertains to the kids.\u00a0 <\/span>But on the flip side, I frankly think my writing is sometimes better when there\u2019s a little (or a lot of) anger behind it, because fewer truths come out than when raging on the keyboard.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t lose yourself or your personal identity to being just a parent.<\/span><\/p>\n Thinking back to all the times I\u2019ve heard or been told such a bullshit suggestion, I\u2019m inclined to believe that these people either don\u2019t have kids, or weren\u2019t in similar circumstances in which I\u2019m 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Needless to say, I\u2019m not \u201closing myself,\u201d because I\u2019m already fucking long past the state lines of where my general life has been left behind and lost.\u00a0 <\/span>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\u2019s 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\u2019m so pissed and resentful at my lack of personal time that I\u2019m hate-staying up until 1:00 am.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n For lack of a better term, I have no help.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 <\/span>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\u2019s what parents do, but I have taken the first shift of child care, every single day since last March, when #1 showed up.\u00a0 <\/span>I wouldn\u2019t even know what to do if I could sleep until 8 am.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019d probably wake up at like 7:50 in cold sweats because I\u2019d be concerned that I overslept on my kids.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t trust daycares because people still can\u2019t vaccinate their kids and kids are still getting sick at an alarming rate even today.\u00a0 <\/span>But those four hours really only covers four of the 19 hours of the day that I\u2019m awake, and she\u2019s really only responsible for #1, and asking anyone to cover both of my kids is too much, even for me, often times.<\/span><\/p>\n My family is all up in Virginia so they can\u2019t help, mythical wife\u2019s 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\u2019re not already there, and we have no other family (read: free) child care available to us locally.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 <\/span>Because when you have none of such support available, I can assure that it\u2019s tremendously worse, and makes me question all sorts of things in life in general.<\/span><\/p>\n The amount of time in which I have to do double duty on both sub-two year old children is more often than I\u2019d like to do, because mythical wife works educator hours which often have her up long before the sun rises and she\u2019s exhausted when she gets home, or the scheduled pumping which removes her from the equation of being able to reliably watch children.<\/span><\/p>\n I try not to think too much when my emotional state begins to sour, because the reality is that it\u2019s 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\u2019ll 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.<\/span><\/p>\n I love my children, and I love my wife, until the day I die, and I\u2019ll love them from whatever afterlife spiritual bullshit there might be afterward.\u00a0 <\/span>There are plenty of moments where I stop and look at all of them and feel the most warm love there could possibly be.\u00a0 <\/span>But in this current juncture of the journey through parenthood of two kids under age two, is fucking rough, and I\u2019m constantly in this exasperated state, where I wake up in the morning and my The Sims<\/i> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n My family deserves so much better than this state of me, but days like today, I just can\u2019t find the strength to deliver.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019m not at risk of losing myself, I\u2019ve long past the point where I already have, and I genuinely can\u2019t imagine when I\u2019ll be able to come back.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What I\u2019ve been doing recently is that I have decided that between the time in which #2 goes to bed which I\u2019m really hoping is closer to 11 pm and not 12 am, and no later than 1:00 am, that is declared me time.\u00a0 Time in which I will not be job searching, not researching … Continue reading 2 Under 2: How can I lose myself when I\u2019m already lost (#067)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,193,192,105],"class_list":["post-48187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-angst","tag-dad","tag-kids","tag-rage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48189,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48187\/revisions\/48189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}