When I last posted about my kids, I heaped lavish praise on my youngest daughter, who was at the time the most low-maintenance baby in the history of infants. She just slept all day and rarely cried.
Today, she's 11 months old and mobile. She went from being a quiet, sleepy baby to someone that you have to watch constantly because she will go to anything and everything and try to eat it. This includes my wife's cell phone, which she broke because she chewed it until it died. Having to constantly monitor her is exhausting as shit.
My oldest used to be easy to take care of too, but only because she hated me. For the first year and a half of her life, if I came near her, she'd start crying. So watching her was easy; I just played whatever movie she felt like watching that day and not much else needed to be done.
At the time, I hated that she hated me. People told me that it's common that babies hate their dads at first, that it's just a phase, and she'll grow out of it. She did.
Now, my oldest kid loves me. She loves me so much that whenever I'm home, she wants to be near me. All day, every day. Every minute of every waking moment of both our lives. Ron Swanson summed this up well:
I've watched so much Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood that I'm enraged by the idea of Fred Rogers leaving a legacy. I keep hoping that Prince Wednesday will go all Joffrey, kill his dad so he can claim the throne, and execute the entire cast just so this damn show will be over. But it wouldn't be over, because of the damn DVR that holds all the episodes.
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| Share my toys? I AM YOUR KING! |
My wife is just as burned out as I am. She used to love being a mom, but like me, she's grown tired of the lack of free time, constantly having to monitor one kid to keep her from eating glass, and another one that is attached to her hip. She keeps talking about wanting to get away from the kids for a weekend, but the truth is that we'd need more than a weekend. Probably a month.
Then, there's the guilt. The guilt from not wanting to be around your kids anymore. Hating yourself for being resentful of two loving kids that just want you to be with them and play with them. I have to constantly control my temper because I have to resist the urge to scream at my kids when they're not being bad, but just annoying or too young to understand what I'm telling them.
They're too young to understand that you just want to be left alone sometimes. I can't tell my kid, "Look, I don't want to play with you right now. I just want to lay on the couch and binge-watch Jessica Jones! Go play by yourself!" Even if you could get them to understand what you're saying, they wouldn't understand that it's not personal. You just want some free time.
Eventually, they'll get older and will go to school. They'll play with friends after school, and have enough autonomy to be able to be left alone without adult supervision. That's a long way off though, and my wife and I are just exhausted.
