I haven’t really felt much like writing over the last week or two. It’s like no matter how much I try to streamline my days and look for ways to open up a little bit more time in the evenings to where I can have some quiet, wind-down time to myself, the more it seems like the windows of freedom get smaller and smaller.
Whether it’s daily chores and the resetting of the house for the kids to wreck it the following day, food prep for the kids, side projects that have long since gotten to the point where it almost feels like a chore but I still have to follow it through to the end, or when I feel like I need to do some exercise, what used to be 4-5 hours a night of downtime feels more like three hours, sometimes two, where I feel like I can actually goof off and do something, not necessarily productive.
And then I get choice paralysis and/or trapped into doom scrolling on my phone, where I fall into a reel pit of Game of Thrones clips where I muse about how good the television show really was in spite of the dodgy ending. Now I have like an hour to myself, and an hour doesn’t feel like an adequate time to get my head into the act of writing, so I end up watching Ted Lasso clips on YouTube or continuing to fall into the pit of old GoT clips among other useless things.
Or, I watch an episode of Yellowstone, which is actually something that’s been on my list of things to watch. I’m on season three currently, and I’m relieved that save for the pilot episode, the episodes are a fairly manageable 45~minute range. It’s not necessarily the banger of a series that I thought it might be, but at the same time it’s still slowly intriguing. I have yet to watch Succession, which is another show on my list, but given what I know about that show, I feel like Yellowstone is basically a cowboy version of it.
Not giving anything away, but some of the moments of the show that I’ve found myself enjoying every time, is whenever Kevin Costner’s John Dutton character, is interacting with his grandson, Tate. At least so far, the boy is as innocent to the world as they come, and in spite of being the cunning mastermind of just about everything that goes on in Yellowstone, Montana, John Dutton turns into a tender, caring and seemingly awesome grandfather to Tate, and as a parent to young children, it’s scenes like these that pique my interest every time they present themselves.
But it’s not just Yellowstone solely, I’ve come to the realization that when it comes to watching shows or movies, what tends to elicit the most uncomfortable reaction out of me is whenever there’s anything pertaining to violence, trauma or just a negative situation against young kids. Like if a kid is in danger, I find my anxiety beginning to spike, and these are the instances where I feel like I might squirm or squeeze an arm rest.
It bleeds my heart when children characters have to deal with non-physical trauma like learning of a death in the family, abandonment, or divorcing parents. Just about anything that results in a child becoming sad, breaking out in tears or wailing out hits a place in me that obviously didn’t exist prior to having children myself.
I’m not saying that I was ever immune to empathy for children prior to having my own, but now that I do, it’s amplified and it’s almost like I’m going to start needing trigger warnings on things that feature children having to deal with trauma of any sort. Having my Dada-radar tripped and bringing me close to tears watching innocuous television is something I didn’t know was going to happen when I had children.
