I have several post drafts that I started and abandoned that were all about the notion of my life being on pause and that being the fault of my children. I have started and stopped that post three or four times over the past year or so. I was probably chalking up my failure to complete those posts as the fault of the children as well. They sapped my willpower. I didn’t have time. They wouldn’t leave me alone. But it’s probably that I couldn’t finish those drafts because at my core I knew that it was a false premise.
In my defense, children are hard. And sometimes I feel like my children are harder than they need to be. The littlest is trouble simply because she shifts us into zone defense. When Janelle is busy cooking, for example, it turns into a 3-on-1. This would be less of an issue if the boys were better at either entertaining themselves or being better brothers. There are these flickering windows where they are the siblings I want them to be. Joshua sitting on the couch and reading something to his little brother. Matthew giving Joshua his last piece of dessert because he wants his brother to get to try it. Giant giggles as they hide under a blanket together on the couch. But those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Most of the time it’s Matthew asking to borrow a toy of Joshua’s only to have Joshua flatly refuse every single time without looking up from what he’s doing. Or Matthew getting told he can’t have an extra cookie so he walks over to his brother and slaps him to take out his aggression. Or giant giggles from hiding under the blanket turning to tears after Joshua gets kicked in the face by a little brother who can’t handle his own body when he gets too excited. Singly they are both fantastic little men with vibrant, distinct personalities and interests. Together they are juggalos.
Anyway, my point aside from the venting I feel I need to do from time to time, is that it is exceedingly difficult to do anything that isn’t “regulate on the children” when the children are all awake. To me this translated to my children basically causing my personal development to be put on pause. And while there is an extent to which this is true, in the way that I was trying to communicate it I was just using the children as excuses.
Yes, there is basically no chance that in the next few years I will be able to carve a couple hours out of the middle of each day to work on a screenplay, but nothing would stop me from writing for 15 minutes. Sure, it’s not like every day I have free time when I can have the bros over and drink beers and swear a bunch while we play boardgames. But I can manage to schedule a regular get together for a couple hours each month.
I’m not really considering it a resolution, but the last “f” on my prior list of resolutions is forgiveness. I don’t mean forgiving the children because as much as they make me insane sometimes it’s nothing I’m going to blame them for (yet). I mean to forgive myself for not being “better”. That’s hard to do. I am surrounded by exceptional people who seem to get a lot of great things done despite how busy or distracted they could claim to be. As a result there are times I find it hard not to say to myself on any variety of topics that I should do better, and not simply be aware that I could do more if I wanted to.
I don’t need to write a novel every few months. Sitting down to write for even a couple of minutes is enough for me to grow and progress as a writer if that’s what I want to do. I don’t need to clean the entire house in a weekend, but if I do one small project each day (ideally in a location that won’t be wiped out by children knocking things over the next day) then I’ll get there eventually. I don’t need to be reading constantly, I just need to be reading, you know, at all.
Taking care of the children doesn’t need to be the centerpiece of every moment of my day. If I want to take a little time to work on a project or clean or do anything for 5 minutes, so long as the baby isn’t in danger and the boys aren’t punching each other, then I should feel comfortable allowing myself to do that. It can be a little harder than you would think to avoid a bit of guilt taking even those micro moments. Maybe it’s a lifetime of watching family movies where a central theme is that an adult is not available to their kid because they are busy and that child is then crushed emotionally. Maybe it’s the deluge of media out there telling us we’re not doing as well as we could be in raising our children.
So I’m going to stop using the children as excuses for not getting big things done, and forgive myself for not always having the energy to take on the world. I’m going to take my small steps and hope they lead me to larger things.
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