Hey y'all,
Because I am a giving, loving, sharing, peace-and-hippy-love kinda chick, I am doing you all a massive community service today by bringing you a guest post from one of my absolute favorite bloggers. His name is the SuperDaddy (Not his real name. Probably.) As we know, I love a good daddy blogger. And I love anyone with a Twitter addiction. And I love bloggers who are keeping it real, putting parenthood and all it's icky bits out there for the world to see. The SuperDaddy checks all those boxes.
OK. Enough of my waffle. I'm not even supposed to be here here today. Introducing.. the SuperDaddy!!
Not his real moustache. Or top hat. Probably.
“I’m not even suppose to be here today!”
Years ago, I had a decent job, by decent I mean paid well, the job actually sucked. It did not matter if I liked my job or not, I put every fiber of my being into that job. I was hiding from my life and from myself, so I worked all the time. I spent some of my days off on the job location doing things. I would work for people just so I would not be alone. I even, for one particular holiday, worked over twenty-four hours straight, so I would not have to think about myself, my life or anyone else. I was responsible for something and damn it, I was going to see it through to the end.
A year into this spiral decent into selling my soul to a company I loathed, I stood in the middle of the building one day and looked up, looked right, looked left, behind me and in front of me. It was then I realized I had successfully boxed myself in and I did not know what was going on in the world. I did not watch TV or read the newspaper; I still cannot tell you what or if anything happened in the world that year. I became the antithesis of everything I dreamed of becoming. I don’t want to get all cheesy and say I and an epiphany, but I do believe I muttered the line from Clerks that Dante repeats over and over in the movie, “I’m not even suppose to be here today!”
It‘s been ten years since I left that job. Many things have happened in my life between then and now. For starters, I got married.
When Rebecca and I got married, we said that we were too selfish with our time to have kids. Well, life has a way of teaching you lessons. Not only did we find out that we were indeed selfless people, but we enjoyed having kids.
However, once again I find myself boxed in. Boxed in among the four walls of my home with two kids that I think sometimes have it out for me. I have been trying to finish out my college degree, but my GPA went from a 4.0 to a 3.8 last semester and then there is this semester. I just have not had the time for homework and my GPA this semester has suffered. I haven’t had time to paint for over a year, I haven’t written anything creative for over a year (excluding the blog). I just have not had much time for me. I get maybe an hour in the afternoon when the kids are napping to be alone and maybe two hours after they go to bed for the night and before I go to bed.
I love my kids and I love taking care of them and I am proud to be the at home parent. However, I feel that I am loosing myself in the hustle of child rearing. It has started to fester inside me and I snapped the other night.
I went off the handle and made an ass of myself. I need to learn to let go when Rebecca comes home from work. I need to learn that the household will not fall apart if I decide to leave for a few hours. I need to learn to let Rebecca do her parental job. I need to get involved in some out-of-the-house activities. As a stay at home parent, I don’t get to say, “I’m not even suppose to be here today”, but we should be able to say, “Honey, I’m glad you’re home. I’ve missed you and I love you, but I’m leaving for a couple hours to be by myself, so I can rejuvenate my body and mind.”
This post is more of a confession. A confession of, I am not very super. I’m just a guy that makes mistakes everyday, some big and some small. Most days my mistakes go unnoticed, and then there are days when my mistakes seem to take the breath out of me. It is on those days when, we stay at home parents, need a day off. The working world gets two days off from their jobs, away from their co-workers and clients/customers. Stay at home parents really do not get that time away, not even when their spouse comes home. We still hear the fights, the whining; “I don’t like”, “I need”, when the spouse comes home it usually means that there is just an extra person to clean up after, just one more person that wants my attention, one more person that won’t leave me alone unless I go to the bathroom…and that’s what I get. I get ten minutes alone in the bathroom. My confession is; I am jealous of people who have it together.