I declared Parenting Bankruptcy last week.
What is Parenting Bankruptcy, you might ask?
Well, last week was one of those weeks where everything seemed to go wrong. My wife got strep. My son got hand, foot, and mouth disease and had to be held out of daycare. The heat broke in our house.
And the day we were set to send our son back to daycare, there was a pinkeye outbreak at his school.
It was just one of those weeks.
Sometime around Wednesday, I decided that I wasn’t going to get anything big done. I had some sizable projects that I was hoping to tackle — and it was very clear those weren’t going to happen. My only goal was to make it to the end of the week.
So I declared Parenting Bankruptcy. I cleared everything off my to-do list, and made it my only goal to get to Friday.
The hard part about parenting — at least for me, a dad with a toddler — is time management. (I’m betting that I will have a very different take on this in a decade!) When things are good, there’s a good balance between parenting and work. But when a few things go wrong, the balance gets entirely out of whack.
I’ve had tough weeks before, though I can’t recall one where I kicked all of my to-dos to the next week. This was my first time declaring Parenting Bankruptcy.
I’m sure I’ll do it again one day. This whole “being a dad” thing isn’t always easy; there will be more days and weeks like this.
But I also have to remind myself: There will be even days and weeks where things are great, where my son is an absolute joy, and where I’m so grateful that I’m a dad.
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That’s a photo of my son reading at this little table in our living room, in a far quieter and less hectic moment than the one we went through last week.