Reflections on a weekend solo parenting
spoiler: it was surprisingly fun
This last weekend (10/9-10/11) was the first time my wife Kathy left our 16 month old son Rami overnight. She had a bachelerotte party for one of her closest friends in Vegas, so she left early Fri morning and came back Sun afternoon. It was my first time solo parenting and surprisingly it was quite a lot of fun.
As Kathy is in (but nearing the end of) the first trimester of her pregnancy, she’s been very nauseous and tired, so I already was kinda used to being the primary parent on duty while Rami was awake. That aspect wasn’t too much of a shock to me. I did find myself sometimes feeling a bit of irrational and unwarranted resentment towards Kathy for having to sometimes take Rami for many hours while doing all the chores etc. Of course I felt bad about feeling any resentment here, because she has been dying from first trimester symptoms and deserves all the rest she can get while literally bringing new life into this world. I knew intellectually feeling any resentment was very silly, but I still felt the emotion once in a while anyways.
One of the surprises for me during this solo parenting weekend was that all of that melted away. I had been slightly expecting it because I had read a tweet that said something along the lines of “when you’re on the only parent in charge, it’s easier in some ways because there’s no thoughts that you could be doing something else, because you literally can’t be.” That resonates with my experience. While it was obviously tiring to handle a toddler for 3 days and 2 nights, he’s ultimately very chill and my attention was fully accounted for in taking care of him. I just took him outside a lot to tire him out and otherwise had a fun time hanging out with him. I somehow even managed to do all of my usual chores (dishes, laundry, vaccuuming) while taking care of him full time, which was really a surprise. It makes me wonder what I spend my time doing on a normal day…
I was the only one on duty and that made my next actions simple. Notably I feel that I suffered (in the Buddhist sense) much less than I do on a normal day where (1) I am putting pressure on myself to use the times when he’s asleep productively and (2) I sometimes feel low-grade resentment at Kathy for not doing more, not cleaning up after herself, etc. It was strangely cleansing to solo parent for a few days.
One takeaway from this experience could be that I should actually have less available time to brood or mull things over in my own head, eg by one of us going back to work. I have a friend who admits to enjoying having a job and 2 young kids because it removes any free time for him to stew in his own thoughts. But this feels perverse to me. I want my head to be a place I enjoy being when I do choose to spend time there.
So I find myself landing on the notion that there is no reason I can’t bring the attitude I had during this weekend into my typical day to day life. It’s largely a choice.
Postscript (10/14)
Some light feelings of resentment did return after Kathy got back. But interestingly I noticed that they are correlated with how late in the day it is. If I am cleaning up a bunch of things early in the morning, which I normally don’t do but did due to our flight to VA, I didn’t mind at all. I even found myself feeling a bit of gratitude for getting to do chores to take care of my family. Again, the takeaway is attitude is primary. It is possible to romanticize “menial” domestic tasks.