I may have accepted that life might be on hold, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t occasional bad days.
#2 is getting better in terms of us managing the colic and learning her tendencies, but one thing that hasn’t really changed is her sheer unwillingness to take naps and give us a break from time to time, and the fact that she still exists in three states: sleeping (overnight), eating, or screaming her head off, with the caveat being that the screaming is usually only remedied by having someone holding her 24/7 until she can be brought into another state, eventually
I’m on dad duty for so long that I have no time to do anything else. And when I say anything else, I mean do more work that I’d be able to do without having to have a baby in my arms, because I’m not fucking Goro from Mortal Kombat and have another pair of arms to be productive with. My house is a fucking disaster zone full of piles of things that adds to my general stress and anxiety because I’m typically a pretty tidy person and I prefer my home be such as well.
I hardly have time to upkeep personal hygiene and pretty much every shower that I’ve had in the last two months have typically been after midnight, where I’m sacrificing rest time in order to not feel completely unraveled.
I don’t have time to be a good dog owner, and since my dog is 16 and elderly, I have to keep him crated for the vast majority of the day solely because he will pee on everything under the sun if he’s left free to his own devices. I get mad when if and when he soils his dog beds, but it’s primarily frustration at the fact that I don’t even have time to even be able to take care of a dog’s base needs adequately enough.
I seldom have time to eat, and eat well, and everyone knows cooking at home is typically the key to improved eating habits, but who the fuck has time to cook much less eat it, without having to be hands-on with #2, so mythical wife and I subsist on an unhealthy amount of fast food because it’s all we can tolerate to indulge on when we’re already parked on E and need to eat while we can breathe.
Throughout the last few months, I’ve actually lost weight, I’m below my license weight which was fabricated to make me feel like not a fat fuck, but I’m actually below it now. However, I know that’s solely based on the fact that I literally haven’t lifted any weights since mid-March of 2020, and I’ve pretty much lost all muscle-mass that I’d cultivated in the decades before coronavirus, and I’m pissed at ‘Murica for not being able to do what it takes to eradicate the pandemic and how it will never end and short of me turning my garage into a gym, there’s no way I’m ever going to reclaim any muscle mass that I’ve lost at this rate, not to mention where the time would be, being a dad of 2 under 2 and all.
Let’s not even talk about hobbies and personal indulgences, and the sheer time I don’t have to be able to do any of those. One more thing I’d add to the list of unsolicited advice for new dads, would be to think of all the things you hope to accomplish in a day, and then count at day’s end just how many of them you didn’t get to. Hobbies, are probably at the top of the list, followed probably by anything you wanted to do that utilized arms not handcuffed to an infant. I’ve watched a lot of television over the last weeks, which isn’t the worst thing in the world and is something that I ordinarily would like to do, but the thing is I do it because it’s something I can do while holding an infant but when the day is over I’d rather be writing because that’s my passion hobby that I always want to be doing if I were ever to have free time where I wasn’t joined at the hip to my infant.
It’s not lost on me that the time I’m taking to write this could’ve been spent writing about anything else at all instead of another frustrated rambling of an overwhelmed dad, but as I often say, I want to remember everything, including the negative, about fatherhood, because it’s always important to be able to look back and learn from the past, even if they’re not always the most positive of things.
And unlike a lot of things where I have to write from memory and retroactively try to mentally get back to places, this is something that’s written fairly live and current, and I think it’s important to chronicle these emotions and frustrations and not let them simply evaporate until they bubble back up in the near future, and the words come out completely differently.
Weekends suck because I don’t have the free time that I have to pay for in order to do absolutely anything other than being a hands-on dad. Funny how that works out: free time, costing a fuck ton of money.
