Getting back

“Look, it’s the lizard of Oz!” I threw down the stuffed animal lizard. We were pretending to be Dorothy and the scarecrow. My daughter cracked up laughing. Her laughing made me laugh, and that made her laugh, for a few minutes.

I had a conversation with a friend recently about how parenting is really satisfying but often not that fun. That’s true a lot of the time. The positive results appear in the long run, so to speak - we have good weeks, made up of difficult days and sleepless nights. But there are some really fun moments too, like laughing together. I have a lot more of a particular silly kind of fun since I became a parent, laughing at wordplay, making up nonsense rhymes, dancing in funny ways. That’s a lot of fun. It’s a kind of break from adult expectations and I appreciate it a lot.

My kids were born at the right time of my life, generally speaking. I was kind of over a lot of grown up fun. I do wish I had more time to get drunk and to go out, but if I had all the time I wanted for that, I would do it really infrequently. Most of the time I like kid-style interactions much more than adult interactions at this point, especially single-people and bar-scene interactions. Parenting scratches itches I didn’t know I had, like the itch to make book puns, and to play hide and seek.

Just after the holidays my family went to visit some relatives for almost two weeks. I missed them a lot and I planned to get a ton of work done while they were gone. I did get a lot done, and I was more caught up on my sleep than I’d been for a long time before that, but the productivity boost wasn’t as high as I thought. Partly this was because I was tired from a difficult schedule over the winter months before that. Partly this was because, as I learned, I apparently am working closer to my optimal output than I thought. And partly this was because I figured out I get more back from my family than I sometimes realize. I’m not proud of this but when work gets crazy and my kids get sick I sometimes feel a bit of resentment for a moment, in the sense that for a moment I fall into a real situation of competition for scarce resources: I only have so much time and energy and I have to decide where to put it, and there are costs either way. I let down my family, or I don’t get as much work done, which has financial effects on my family since I’m the wage-earner in our household. Damned either way. While my family was gone, I kept feeling mopey and slow, because I missed them but also because, as I figured out, my family helps me recharge. I change mental gears with my family. I play and laugh and turn off work stuff. That’s good for me in so many ways, something that I sometimes can forget.

[didn’t feel like writing but forced myself, ground this out fast, 11:20, 525 w0rds]