Note: The following is a revised post of one I wrote earlier but took down. It captures a lot of what I’m going for in this Substack. Thoughts on parenting, mental health, and surviving life. I took it down cause I thought I might submit it to some journals and lit magazines don’t want work that is “previously published,” but I figure if some journal isn’t okay with a rough draft appearing on my site that 15 people read than that’s on them. :)
It’s Monday morning at 10:00 a.m. I’m lying on the floor playing an imaginary game called “swimming pool” with my three-year-old daughter. It’s a new game for us, as the city just recently re-opened the pools after they were closed last summer due to covid. We lie on our backs in the “pool” as she brings me a piece of blue tissue paper which is my “bathing suit” and a small towel, which is a “floatie.” We lie like this for a while until she tells me to get up and that we’re now going to the “slides” at the park, which is our couch. Then we’re playing camping and making a fort (it can be hard to keep up). Eventually, I must leave the swimming pool/campground/playground to feed a bottle to her baby sister. While I have my back turned in the kitchen, for just a second, my oldest pulls a coffee filter out of the cupboard and takes huge bite out of it.
“What are you doing?!” I ask her.
“Es raspberries dada,” she says, munching on the filter.
Oh, of course. Raspberries. Silly me. Why else would you be eating the coffee filter?
* * *
I never thought I would be a stay-at-home dad of two during a global pandemic. I mean, I’ve pictured myself as a lot of things over the years—a business owner, a writer, an artist, possible nominee for best model slash actor, but not as a stay-at-home-dad. I know this was sort of our family plan, but last year at this same time I was the one working while my wife Cat stayed at home with our first daughter, Evangeline. Now, our positions are reversed. I lost my job last year in 2020 (coffee industry) just as my wife was offered one, thankfully.
Over the years my wife and I have done a good job, nay, a terrific job, switching support roles over the course of our marriage. I was in a grad school for a while she brought home most of the turkey bacon, and then she started grad school and we had our first daughter while I worked, at times, 2-3 jobs, while she stayed at home.
I guess it’s my turn now. I’m writing this to convince myself everything will be okay, still a little scarred after spending the last nine months inside our house with a two-and-a-half-year-old during a global pandemic and multiple climate related disasters here in Oregon—including wildfires, ice storms, and most recently, heat domes.
The pandemic is almost over, I think, I hope, but not quite. Vaccination rates are up. Covid rates are down. But now there’s also the Delta variant (insert frowny face/exasperated emoji here). Things are starting to re-open, albeit, in a limited capacity out here in Portland. Yet not two months ago, my daughter’s daycare was shut down because a teacher at their school tested positive for covid. Those two days we send Evangeline to daycare are clutch. They are the days when we catch up on laundry and cleaning and maybe writing or reading and maybe a shower and remember what it’s like to be a human being not in service of a raging hormonal toddler or needy infant. We love these girls of ours—the crazy, adventurous toddler and this sweet, fussy infant of ours—but boy do they test our patience like nothing we’ve encountered before.
* * *
We have two daughters. A three-month and a three-year old. I repeat this to myself in the morning as I do when the news comes on (today is Tuesday, June 29th) as an anchor point of some kind. Something to hold onto in this shaky year and remind me that this is all really happening.
Evangeline was not even two the pandemic began. Now she just turned three and it’s still not over. For an entire year there have been no playdates. No story times. No libraries or indoor play centers. I still can’t get Evangeline to wear a mask for more than ten-fifteen minutes at a time. She also stopped taking naps and often still wakes up once a night. Sometimes she pees in our bed and I am woken up by a warm, wet sensation that is anything but tropical.
Then we had our second daughter, Emerson, also in a pandemic. No one could visit us at the hospital. We had to wear masks and weren’t allowed to walk the halls. Emerson just barely started sleeping in five to six hour stretches so it’s pretty much guaranteed that one of them will wake up in the middle night at least once, maybe twice.
In the day, the toddler tries to jumps on her sister, slaps her belly or even bites her just to get a reaction from her or us. Then she screams in the living room, “Waa, Imma a baby, waa, waa!”
All I do is clean up pee and poop now it seems. Diapers and pull-ups. Wash dishes. Wipe counters. Cook dinner. Put away dinner. The endless laundry. There’s also the animals, their shit, now easy to forget. I fantasize about giving up. Letting the dishes overflow in the sink. The mold and dust creep and cover the countertops. I want to let the coyotes and raccoons take up residence. At least they’d keep cleaner dens. Now all my life is taken up with menial tasks like picking up alphabet letters on the hardwood floors and scooping poop out of the bathtub.
I understand what the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard was writing about in Book 1 of his My Struggle series:
“And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape. Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I … do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards. It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do the rooms are littered with mess and junk, and the children, who are taken care of every waking minute, are more stubborn than I have ever known children to be.”
I think I would be more up to the challenge of staying home with my two girls had I not already been staying at home with a two-year-old during a global pandemic through a rainy PNW winter. I am sick of my beautiful house by now. A toddler tornado touches down once a day and destroys everything I do to keep things organized and clean. Tornadoes are named after toddlers I’m pretty sure, the damage that lays in their wake. At least Sisyphus got a workout in rolling that boulder up the hill. My back hurts for no reason other than bending over to pick up toys and used food pouches. I’m not eating the best or getting enough exercise, which I need for the endorphins.
At what point do I subscribe to Good Housekeeping? At what point does a dad bod just become a fat bod?
* * *
I look for jobs but there is almost nothing available in my industry—coffee—that pays enough to afford sending two kids to daycare in the United States. I question my career choices. So glad I studied something useful like creative writing! I’ve spent over a dozen years working in the writing and coffee industry and now have no career to show for it.
And yet, even there was a job I wanted or could see myself doing, I’m not sure I would be interested. I have no personal drive or motivation anymore since becoming a parent. My mind is mush. I’ve already given my all in the past decade to the starting of a business, a church, and companies that you bend over backwards for, only to be kicked to the curb. So, a stay-at-home-dad, it is I think. I’ll become a rosé drinking househusband.
Yet I also feel like I’m going to have to quit drinking, for as nice as it is to pour yourself some wine or whiskey after the kids are in bed, there’s simply no way to drink to relax at night and be awake/alert/energetic enough to take care of your kids the next day. Have you ever been slightly hungover and sleep deprived at the same time? It’s not a good combination. It feels like death, except worse, you wish for death so you can finally sleep. Probably for the best, for, as Jenny Offill says in her book of her character in the novel Dept. of Speculation, “She signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.”
* * *
Try as I might, I’ve still struggled to embrace my role as a Father. Perhaps because I am a 4 on the Enneagram and someone who tries to hold onto his creative, artistic, and individual identity as much as possible. The selfish part of me still wants to focus on my writing, stay out late, and relax on the weekends. And well, kids disrupt these plans and whatever ambitions you once had. Kids just take A LOT from you. Everything really. There’s no way to half-ass it with kids unless you want to be an absent parent.
We parents like to think that we can do it all. Have a career and kids. Write and have kids. Maintain the same body and have kids. But it’s not all possible. Sometimes those things are simply on hold. Or you frustrate yourself to death by thinking you can or should do it all.
Yet I think (I hope) after nearly three years of being a dad, I’ve started to embrace my role rather than resist it. Some days are straight fun—I basically visit zoos and parks for a living! Once I accept the fact that my writing output will not be the same, my toddler will have at least two-end-of-the-world tantrums a day, my newborn will spit up on me several times a day, and that I will not get any sleep, well, it’s fine, I guess. Expectations are key. Throwing them out that is.
* * *
I ask my friend Matt, who also became a stay-at-home-dad for his kids later in life, how he did it.
“It’s just not something I would choose necessarily,” I said to him, “Being a stay-at-home dad.”
“The stay-at-home dad life chose you,” he said back to me.
But did it? How do you know?
* * *
Staying home with my daughter this past year has been more draining than any job I’ve ever had (but also, more rewarding and fulfilling somehow?) Mothers (especially single mothers) deserve all the respect and admiration and honor and value and money we’ve never given them. Because, unfortunately, even as men and women share more of the childrearing burden, the weight of raising children and doing household chores still tips heavily onto women. This pandemic, as many have pointed out, has laid bare the inequity of modern life in many ways, including childrearing. I do a shit ton of work around the house—cleaning, cooking, staying home with girls now (I like to think that in our house my wife and I are 50/50 and my wife more or less agrees with me on this, but who knows?) For all this, people might say I am a “good” dad. But would they say the same thing about my wife if our roles were reversed? We heap praise on men for doing the bare minimum around the house.
Men ignore how much work it is to stay at home with kids and keep the domestic life flowing because most of them have no idea. There is still a very large gap between the household and childrearing work that women vs. men do. While the work men do has doubled since 1965, women still spend around 4 hours a day on unpaid labor while men spend around 2.5 hours. In some cities and countries, the gender gap doesn’t seem far off, but it’s still not the norm across the country or the world. “Women are not going to be equal inside the home until men are equal in it,” once said Gloria Steinem.
* * *
Parenting is challenging too especially if you struggle with mental health. I for one, struggle with depression and can have some serious bouts of it. It adds a whole other dimension to your life. Self-care becomes more challenging. The exhaustion more. Depression, isolation and loneliness are real struggles for the stay-at-home parent that can nearly overwhelm you. And yet, also, weirdly, it seems as if parenting can also improve your mental health? Gives your life purpose and meaning? WTF? Parenting is a true mind-trip. Somedays I really don’t think I can do it. Others, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Raising my two daughters is a fulfilling and joyous experience and one that can also be exhausting and frustrating and mind-numbing in its routine and monotony. As Offill says of her character in The Dept. of Speculation: “The days with the baby felt long but there was nothing expansive about them. Caring for her required me to repeat a series of tasks that had the peculiar quality of seeming both urgent and tedious. They cut the day up into little scraps.”
For, like the ocean, kids drag you under their current into their depths. You only have a few seconds out of the day to bob your head out and write a sentence or read a sentence from a book or do something for yourself or your partner until you are carried back under into the depths of their needs. Most days you find yourself kicking and treading water just to stay afloat. It’s pure survival. Staying at home has also given me utmost respect for single parents. I really have no idea how they do it. The best thing my wife and I can do to each other is switch off and give each other a break.
* * *
I worry about my writing while parenting. It’s lack of existence. Frustrated and afraid I will never be able to write a comprehensible sentence ever again. This rambling piece of prose wherein I vent and complain is about all I got. Yet, it seems there can be many similarities between writing and child rearing, as Anne Lamott notes in her book, Bird by Bird:
“Your work as a writer, when you are giving everything to your characters and readers, will periodically make you feel like the single parent of a three-year-old, who is, by turns, wonderful, willful, terrible, craved, and adoring...your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that’s one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover you’ve been given that gold nugget you were looking for all along.”
* * *
I also feel conflicted about being a Dad, because part of my M.O. for as long back as I can remember is to resist the nuclear family and comfortable, cookie-cutter lifestyle of two kids + one house + dog + Subaru etc. To rebel against it, to carve my own counter-cultural path. And yet, I too now have a Subaru and a rescue pit and two kids, and a mortgage, and now, one of my greatest fears is: What does this mean? Am I fucking yuppie? Why even have kids in the first place? What is the meaning of life?
Yet I feel bad complaining about fatherhood. It’s not like someone held a gun to my head and forced me to have kids. Unless that someone was my wife, which, no, of course not…she would never do that (do you see me blinking my eyes in morse code?). You choose to become a parent.
* * *
“What made you decide to have kids?” my friend Lucas asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. My wife wanted kids is what I want to say. But that’s a cop-out. “I wanted kids,” I said, “Yet if it was purely up to me I don’t know that I would have ever pulled the trigger. I would have kept putting it off until I finished my next book, felt more mature, etc. And eventually you have to make a decision.” Yet it’s also nice blame someone for your kids. I.e., the refrain you often hear from parents about Your kid, rather than Our kid.)
“It’s impossible to explain,” says someone else.
It’s impossible to explain love is I guess what it comes down to. How do I explain the love that wells up in my heart as I’m driving my daughter to a doctor’s appointment? I watch her fall asleep in the rearview mirror and am almost reduced to tears of joy. I don’t deserve her I think. Then she’s awake and I’m yelling at her not to run into the street and I wish she’d ever been born.
My friend Brandon has two kids. The first was an accident (as much of an “accident” as a kid can be when you’re just relying on that good ole’ natural birth control). I once asked him if he even wanted kids and he thought that he didn’t know, but he did say that that he wanted to experience the full spectrum of the human experience while he was on planet earth, part of which included kids, so yes, in a way, he did wants kids.
* * *
The central question in Sheila Heit’s book, Motherhood, revolves around whether the narrator of the book, a woman, wants to have a child or not, and what this says about her and society and art and relationships and so on:
“On the one hand, hand, the joy of children,” she writes. “On the other hand, the misery of them. On the one hand, the freedom of not having children. On the other hand, the loss of never having had them—but what is there to lose? The love, the child, and all those motherly feelings that the mothers speak about in such an enticing way, as though a child is something to have, not something to do. The doing is what seems hard. The having seems marvelous. But one doesn’t have a child, one does it.”
Heiti explores Motherhood from multiple angles, filling pages and pages about the decision to parent or not. In a conversation with her partner at one point she taps into what is, perhaps, my deepest fear about children: “He said that one can either be a great artist and a mediocre parent, or the reverse, but not great at both.”
I threw the book across the room when I read that line. And so I think, what will happen to my writing? Already I can feel it slow to a drip. With enough drips however, who knows?
* * *
Just recently in 2021 we had a heat dome settle on top of Portland. The high for two days straight in Portland was 115 degrees. The day before that it was 108. Then 113, then 116. Each day broke its previous record for hottest day ever in Portland. It was hotter in Portland than many places in the Middle East, the 4th highest temperature recorded in a major city in the U.S. In the Pacific Northwest! I mean, I did write a novel set in the near future that was loosely about climate change and heatwaves and wildfires, but I figured that would be in the Southwest, not the Northwest!
I began to feel a rush of panic, anxiety, and claustrophobia coming for me as I found myself trapped inside, yet again, (with two kids now) and no air conditioning and nowhere to go. Pandemic Parental PTSD. Evangeline was hot and fussy and I felt terrible for getting frustrated at her but I was also hot and fussy. Just when I was about ready to pack the kids up in the car and drop them off at the fire station, the air miraculously cooled down 37 degrees in five hours and I could feel myself regaining consciousness.
* * *
And yet, despite the frustrations, in the afternoon one day, I sit out on the back porch holding my youngest while my oldest plays with her water table and her animal figurines. The babies one hand is cocked behind her head at a forty-five degree angle, like a model, eyes closed, cheeks fat. I stare out at a patch of grass for twenty minutes, or five, it’s hard to tell. Sometimes I do this a lot. Shellshocked I think is the word. Time means nothing anymore. My mind feels completely disconnected from my body. Both of which are badly in need of sleep and rest. My mind slips in and out of past and present and future. I think it’s late in the afternoon but there are still three hours till dinner (“the days are long, but the years are fast,” another friend says to me). My daughter is playing with her water table on the back porch. Tossing tiny whale and dolphin and sea lion figurines down a circular tube she then pours water down to let them slide through. Then she goes inside, grabs her milk and proceeds to dump her entire cup of milk out on the porch.
What are you doing?!” I ask her.
“Penguins thirsty dada,” she says calmly as she then mimics them slurping up the milk.
“Oh really?” I ask. And then I think, yes, yes of course they are.
“Thirsty penguins.” That’s what I say now whenever anyone asks me why I have kids. Because who else would give the penguins their milk?
“Every phase of your life and career will require a different you.” -Mel Robbins