I love my kids, I just hate parenting
About once a week, I work from home. And I HATE it.
I didn’t like being a stay-at-home dad and I don’t like working from home. It’s not my forte, and that has nothing to do with my gender.
It has more to do with my kids.
Parents spend so much time teaching our kids the dos and don’ts of proper behavior that we seem to forget that we need to adhere to the same rules.
We want our kids to grow up with empathy and compassion, acceptance and generosity and more, but we often go around practicing the exact opposite, particularly when it comes to our interactions with fellow parents.
Can’t we all get along?
Stress isn’t a competition. Newsflash: We’re all stressed out of our minds!
Adulthood is stressful. Work is stressful. Marriage is stressful. The state of the world is stressful. Life is stressful!
And, of course, parenting is stressful too, in more ways than one. But parenting stress is a little different, because being a parent is both stressful in and of itself and because the presence of children adds an extra layer of stress on top of everything else. It’s fun!
Last week, The Hammer turned two!
The last two years have moved pretty quickly, but a lot of that is probably because I’ve spent most of that time sleepwalking half-awake through my life. The baby phase is over and the toddler phase is in full-swing, so if the terrible twos actually arrive on time (Detective Munch didn’t get terrible until he became a threenager), I’m about to be awoken very abruptly.
In order to save my sanity, I’ve started indulging in some second kid slacking.
I recently shared a tweet decrying the daily balance parents are forced to strike between their kids’ lives and their own.
My tweet was about the well-deserved oasis of adult time that falls between those few hours when my oldest son goes to sleep and when I go to sleep, and about how that gap is shrinking as he gets older and stays up later.
When I shared it on Twitter, a fellow parent responded succinctly: Parenting is overrated.
But is it?
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