{"id":48902,"date":"2022-08-24T10:49:50","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T15:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=48902"},"modified":"2022-08-24T10:49:50","modified_gmt":"2022-08-24T15:49:50","slug":"dad-brog-095-an-unsustainable-pace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=48902","title":{"rendered":"Dad Brog (#095): An unsustainable pace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"border-image alignnone wp-image-48903 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/IMG_6039.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"560\" height=\"268\" srcset=\"https:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/IMG_6039.jpg 560w, https:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/IMG_6039-300x144.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 560px) 100vw, 560px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">I write because I can\u2019t really talk to anyone anymore.\u00a0 My wife doesn\u2019t need to hear any of these diatribes, and frankly I really don\u2019t think anyone can relate, as ludicrous as it sounds to single myself out as a special little snowflake in a world of several billion.\u00a0 And if anyone can, I don\u2019t know them so it might as well not be anyone.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">My family that are all parents and have multiple kids, the age gap between us all is practically an entire generation.\u00a0 Of all my parenting friends, almost none of them have more than one kid.\u00a0 The ones that do, their kids are spaced out in age way greater than mine.\u00a0 And there\u2019s nobody else I know with two kids born during coronavirus-era as close apart as mine.\u00a0 I\u2019m not trying to say that my problems are greater than anyone else\u2019s like some sadistic internet pissing contest, but COVID really is this difficulty multiplier that stands at the end of every factoid, ready to make everything worse than it might have been for anyone else who didn\u2019t have to deal with things during a pandemic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">But I have been living my life at a fairly unsustainable pace for a while now, as far as keeping my shit together goes.\u00a0 I try really, really hard on a daily basis to do such, and I have good days, but I definitely am the first to admit that I have some bad ones too, where it just feels like a lot of shit just piles up all at once, and I\u2019m left standing there while my kids are screaming, clocks are ticking, I\u2019m late for school drop off which makes me later for work, and there\u2019s no end in sight.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">I\u2019m 99% sure my eldest is sick again.\u00a0 There\u2019s a small chance that she just never recovered from the cold she had a week ago, but the frequency in which she\u2019s sneezing and her nose is runny again leads me to believe that she\u2019s just plain fucking sick again, which means some more fuckface parents of the kids in my daughter\u2019s school are continually sending their kids to school with plagues.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">The problem with that, aside from their selfish and inconsiderate behavior that I can only hope for some divine retribution for, is that when #1 gets sick, it\u2019s basically a death sentence for #2 that she is going to get sick 2-3 days later.\u00a0 And then my sitter will nope out because they don\u2019t want to get sick which means I\u2019ll have to call in sick because mythical wife\u2019s career is rigid and can\u2019t call in at the drop of a hat, which makes me look even flakier and unreliable, and I have to deal with days of dad double duty, and working after hours.\u00a0 And then it\u2019s back into the toilet bowl of despair of how much life can suck because of the actions of other people.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">Days like today, I\u2019m just burnt out.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been on baby duty for what feels like an endless length of time, due to the fact that we had two kids in such rapid succession.\u00a0 #2 is always wanting to be near big sis, and moving them apart is like trying to keep magnets apart, based on how she will rubber band back to wherever #1 is, accelerating the inevitability of transmission.\u00a0 #1 is frustrated and fussy because she\u2019s sneezing like crazy and her nose is running like a faucet and doesn\u2019t understand why I have to try and isolate her on the other side of the room but can\u2019t trust her with markers or Play-Doh, and I just want to jump off a bridge.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">I haven\u2019t had a break in a long time.\u00a0 A day in which I can wake up on my own without any alarms or dog or kids, no long-ass car rides to retrieve kids, or anything that\u2019s remotely time sensitive.\u00a0 A single day where I can wake up as not a dad, have a day where I can leisurely do the shit I want to do without any clocks looming over my head, and have the ability to sit and stare at a wall if I wanted to.\u00a0 There have been some mini-breaks, some afternoons or evenings without the kids, but I\u2019m still having to do one of the above tasks on them regardless.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">I just can\u2019t recharge or unwind, and haven\u2019t been able to for well over a year now, and I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s really unhealthy or uncommon, or if I\u2019m just being a melodramatic parent who needs to be made aware that there are millions of dads in similar boats that I just don\u2019t know personally.\u00a0 But today is definitely one of those days where just enough bullshit has been added to my bags to drag me under and leave me feeling drowning again.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I write because I can\u2019t really talk to anyone anymore.\u00a0 My wife doesn\u2019t need to hear any of these diatribes, and frankly I really don\u2019t think anyone can relate, as ludicrous as it sounds to single myself out as a special little snowflake in a world of several billion.\u00a0 And if anyone can, I don\u2019t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=48902\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Dad Brog (#095): An unsustainable pace<\/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":[36,193,45,192,52,146],"class_list":["post-48902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-angst","tag-dad","tag-fail","tag-kids","tag-owned","tag-triggered"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48902","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=48902"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48904,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48902\/revisions\/48904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}