On the blending of days
I think I've mentioned it before but I'm father to a loving almost-2-year old ball of lard with the energy of a nuclear reactor.
Many things have changed since I became a parent (including not wanting to be a parent to begin with), but the one that has impacted me the most is how fast things seem to be moving now. I know it's a cliche, people saying that time speeds up after you become a parent, but it's true.
On one side this is not necessarily bad. I'm definitely much (much) busier now than I was before, I now have enough free time to just do maybe one or two personal things I want to on a given day. On the surface it sounds bleak, but I'm lucky in that I actually enjoy spending time with my son. Playing with him, seeing him learn and grow (and seeing me learn to be a parent), have been one of the biggest joys of my life.
Being extra busy has also been a positive for my mental health in some ways. The fact that I have less free time also means I have less time to spend worrying about senseless stuff (my favorite hobby), less time to spend ruminating or imagining painful futures that are extremely unlikely to happen.
However, there's always something special going on lately, always something noteworthy. This, coupled with the strict schedule that my days seem to have, makes it so that my days appear to be blurring one into the other.
I feel that before, when there wasn't much happening in my life, I could use special events as markers, obelisks or island that I could look back on to measure the passage of time. But how can you measure time if you have a wall, just stretching out backwards until the horizon?
Earlier this week I was telling my son how well he was walking, and then realized that he's been walking ok for the past 6 months or so! I still feel like he started walking last month.
I imagine this blurring is greatly enhanced by the fact that, with a kid, things mostly happen in a continuous way. Every once in a while you do get new behaviors from one day to the next, but mostly things evolve slowly over a large span of time. For instance, my son has been babbling (what I think is mostly) nonsense for a while now, but how do you know when that nonsense stops being him just parroting words he hears, and starts being original thoughts? By the time you notice, you've already been hearing him express himself for a while without realizing what was happening.
Looking back I can see how this feeling, that things are just slipping through my mind, is a big inspiration for why I've been writing so much lately. Maybe I'm subconsciously trying to leave some kind of mark for my future self saying I was here, something I can look back on and see how things have changed.
You can't really put a kid on pause and then come back to them when you feel like it. They have their own peculiar way to summon attention, and I think we (as parents) are biologically wired to provide it. And this is good. I often find myself reevaluating my behaviors, admonishing myself when I do something I wouldn't like him to repeat, and in so doing I've realized I'm steadily, slowly, reinventing small parts of myself as I try to be the best role model I can be.
Sure, I don't always manage it, and sometimes it can't be helped, but it's definitely the best motivator I've had to try and grow as a person.
Reminds me of the popular cheesy quote that goes something like:
Try to be the person you want your children to grow into.
~ Take care 🌱