Dads, dont be afraid of banality

BANAL

 I went out with my friend last night for tea.  I seem to have this perpetual cough going on since November.  So I try to stay off the alcohol, even coffee and stick with tea. But a first tea turns into a second beer.  

Anyway, I was out with a friend who is quite wise and usually creates a beautiful epithet, or a major thinking point in our discussions.  But this time I pat myself on the shoulder because I think I came up with a doozer of a thought.  

I am going to have to do some explaining on this first and that wont relate to dadding.  But it will end up connecting to being a dad once I get the background down.  

Here. 

I think I have said someplace in some other blog that really your whole day is rather downtempo, ritual except maybe 15 minutes when the adrenalin really gets going and something high tension or really exciting happens.  But that is just for such a little part of the day. I dont care if you are a priest or the president of the United States.  Most of your day is not "on the move".   Even though nobody reads this blog besides me and maybe two others (I dont know them) you are probably saying, "he doesnt have my job".  But sorry I dont care if you are stationed in a military zone or a drug addict, most of your day is low tempo. AND if you do have an event which is high adrenaline for longer, then after the low "nothing happening" is even longer.  You party friday night till Saturday morning and then you sleep for twenty four hours.  A drug addict takes some speed and is speeding for the whole day.  Then he sleeps for 36 or more.  Or if he does keep taking more drugs, then he eventually burns out and goes crazy or dies or sleeps for weeeks on end.  If you are in the army and there is a battle, its crazy for several hours.  Then you sit in your fox hole and nothing happens for a week or you get up your stuff and sludge on.  You get the idea.  The high tension is followed by 4x as much low tempo.  That is my theory.  Like it or laugh at it, but think of any other example.  

And look, if that were not true, I dont think you would live very long.  The adrenaline is not meant to go and go and go. It is used for a spike and then it dies down.  You get passed the battlion and you run run run for a little while then you pass it to someone else and stop.  Or else your boss yells at you or you have a high powered meeting and then you get back to your desk and start writing or look at the computer or get a glass of water and your body... decompresses.  

Anyway. 

MEDIOCRE

The other point is one side of the coin, there is Sheryl Sandberg, writing a book

Im Sheryl, I can do anything

saying "if you would just be like me, you would be a millionaire, or break the glass ceiling, or be a big magnate etc.... "   No no no.  Listen sweetie Sheryl, that is the point, most of us are not you.  Yeah, pat yourself now on the back, you are special, but most of us are not and will not be you or even be like you.  On the other side, there are a lot of weird people it seems who are written about regularly in the bulvar magazines all across the country (in actually any country you live in) who are cutting up their kids and putting them in the freezer. Or trying to shoot mistletoe from a tree with their guns so they can sell it at the christmas market, or have a meth lab in their basement. You would think there is a thousand meth labs in all the small towns. 

 mummified' baby in a box

Although there are a plethora of these stories, the truth is, the grand, great majority of us are neither meth lab baby killers nor Sheryl Sandbergs or even Elon Musk Zuckerbergs, thank god for that.  We are in the middle, mediocre regular people. And that is not a bad thing. And maybe for about 15 minutes, maybe half an hour a day we have a really exciting adrenaline ripping event.  But then we settle back down into our rituals, whatever that may be.  

So, the point being future dads:  If you think that being a dad and staying home from some other job is going to be boring, stunt your career, or deaden your mind. I have news for you.  No it wont, and your regular job is just as mind numbing, boring and even worse maybe than being a dad at home.   In other words, being a dad at home is JUST THE SAME as any other job. It has its 15 minutes of pure adrenaline pumping excitement but most of it is ritual, standard. I can see that you still dont believe me, that your other job is just the same as being a dad, or very close to it.  Think about all the jobs out there and being a parent, probably for a small baby or toddler and if you look at it long enough and put all the jobs in front of you, you will see what I am talking about.  

Really the only difference is, and if more dads stayed at home, I think this would change too, we dont get paid for being a parent.  Males would suddenly wake up and see that the shoe is on the other foot and think that maybe this child raising job wasnt as easy as they thought it was (when only women did it) and that it should be somehow compensated.  But I digress. 

I want to make the announcement.  Dads, dont be afraid of banality.  The truth is, your other paying job wasnt so high powered and being an at home father is just as much if not more high powered.  Look, what were you doing at your other job?  You were organizing marketing campaigns and in meetings but most of the time sitting at your desk thinking and planning and executing. And now what are you doing at home?  You are racing around trying to get things done to keep things from falling apart.  You got to keep the meals coming, which means you have to have the food ready, which means you have to plan it and organize the supplies, all before the tummies start making a lot of noise and people start throwing stuff at you. 

You have to keep the clothes clean, the kids clean (if they are young) and the house clean and the kitchen clean all in a timely manner.  Look, if any one of these areas starts to slip or you let it slide, it will get out of hand and it will be just double the work the next morning.  If you dont do the dishes in the night. They are still there in the morning and more are added to them.  And if you stop getting to them,  the problem is not going to go away, it will just get worse.  Same with having food around.  And unlike the office where you can work on one area to decrease the pile, if you work just on one thing at home, the other areas are just going to pile up and up too. If you suddenly say I am going to get to these dishes, then you realize it is getting later and dinner takes so long to prepare and its going to be terribly late if you dont stop this and start that. 

You have to understand what I am getting at.  And to top it off, there is always a few points in the day which are just truly relaxing, kind of like lunchtime at work, or truly adrenaline pumping.  Ie, if you have a baby it is my opinion that changing the diaper is in a strange way a "go getter" 10 minutes in the day.  It can be a real harrowing activity if you have a hyper baby.  Or for me, getting up at 5 am or sometime in the middle of the night to make a milk was a little like a fireman fighting a fire, yes in a way.  That is my opinion.  Maybe there are other events which get the adrenaline going.  

So can i put this together now? 

The first point is that the great majority of us live our lives in the mediocre middle, which is not a bad thing. We are not high nor low, we are good solid middle people, who dont kill, but are not living on the planet of the billionaires.  Billionaires are really a weird other worldly type of person.  It aint me. You aint one either. 

The second point is, our jobs as dads are going to be just the same as any other job we might have , or we did have or we are not doing because we are a dad.  There are mostly middle mediocre times in which we do our job and try to get it done because we have to and if we didnt, it would only get worse.  

In fact, as the kids get older, there are a lot of nice times like playing monopoly on Sunday or even watching a movie on Saturday night.  In fact that can be nicer than your other job.  Swimmng in the lake every afternoon and tossing the football during vacation.  Come to think of it, unless you really love your job, you might even have more high exciting nice points in your day as dad to your kids than being in some other job which you are just doing your market campaign.

  Dads, dont be afraid,... dont be afraid of being dads.  A) You can do it B)it is really similar to any other job.  

Go for it dads.  

 

2023 Recap 2022. Can I Overcome?

Maybe WE shall overcome.  It is easier to do it together.  But the question is whether I shall overcome by myself for 2023.  In thnking about three problems that were mentioned a lot in 2022, I think I will be lucky on only one of them.  

Lets start out easy with number 1:Food. 

One of the problems I mentioned the most from 2022 is my repertoire of dinners.  In one post I calculate how many dinners I need to know how to make for a three and four week vacation.  I think I can overcome this problem, in other words, I think I can have enough new selections for my summer 2023 repertoire.  

A problem, I notice though, is that many of these potential new meals are thought of as finger food.  Kids meals.  Easy, but not so healthy meals.  Things kids like to eat when they are... well kids, but maybe dont have such great nutritional value for them.  Meals like pizza, hamburgers, submarines, even spaghetti are not high on the nutritional value ladder.  Which sometimes puzzles me. It seems like many Mexican and Italian foods are in this category.  Maybe a level up because it is home cooking from junk food, but again, not of great value.  

This makes me sad and frustrated as I thought I could add some more meals to my repertoire, but admittedly, they might be from this category.   I wanted to learn how to make homemade bread and then pizza is an easy step after that.  My Mother did that.  Then chili con carne, or tacos or enchiladas, but all of these would probably fall in the little better than junk food category.  

So, I think I can increase my repertoire, the question is if I can climb to a higher level of nutritional value in doing so.   ????? That is the real challenge.

The second problem: overcoming the generation gap. 

I was thinking about this more as I rode the train with my teenage daughter to our new years eve cottage location.   Teen agers spend endless time, if you let them, on their gadgets, doing in my opinion valueless stupid things.  Mostly looking at tik tok.  Sorry, but I just have an axe to grind against that app. I watch people looking at it and I cant see any worth in it.  Zero, nada.  People look at small films for 1 to 10 seconds. If a good one catches their eye they may watch it several times or to the end.  But most of the stuff on there is pure crap, and people slide through those films

easier than soft butter.  Ok, I dont get it even though there are hundreds of millions of people watching those videos.  I dont care to get it, I dont want to waste my precious time, even if it means choosing to look out a train window when it is dark outside.  Get it?   Zero value.  Anything else is better.

So stuff like this I cant get over my generation gap.  It wont happen.  It is not so much a generation gap as a technology gap.   Granted there were always these type of gaps in the generations.  From the invention and take off of TV in the 50s to stereo music rock n roll and then computers and now other technologies, I am sure parents have often felt the entertainment was just plain stupid and ... valueless compared to what they grew up with .  Who can argue with this?  Its probably true.  My Father wasnt a TV man because he didnt grow up with it himself.  He must have thought it was mind numbing, and in fact a lot of it is/was that I was watching.  So.... it is just the inherent moving forward of inventions that creates a ge neration    gap.   I experience it with my kids too. So what? Should I learn to love tik tok?  I probably wont, but no big deal really. Its a gap.These will always exist between parents and kids

3.  Getting back to actually being 40 percent daddy at home.   

As I said on a post back in August, I went from 100 percent daddy to 5 to 10 per cent daddy.  Although that was normal as my wife took my kids on vacation after I got back with them, it didnt get much better over the following months.  It was the backwash of the covid times.  During covid I was home A LOT and was doing a lot with/for my kids.  Now, I am in the store A LOT and it has balanced out the time I am not home with my kids with covid times.  

The question is if in the new year and the coming months I can recalibrate and swing the pendulum back a bit so I can be at 25-35 per cent with my kids during the week.  If I could have half the Saturdays off and every Tuesday off that would be great. That would be an improvement.   The thing is, I have to make a lot more money in my business to do that.  That is the crisis, sad truth, of having your own business.  You really have to put the time in your self.  If you are an employee of somebody, you have your hours, thats it.  But having your own small business... you are the one and only lonely who has to take care of everything.   Its possible I could get up to the 6 days (Sunday is always off, so 10 a month), but I cant predict now.  And... time is running out.  My daughters are getting older and bigger and soon when they are both teenagers, probably wont want me messing in on anything they do besides giving them money and buying them stuff and maybe taking them someplace.  Who knows.  But... time doesnt wait for anyone. Time does not stand still.   But sometimes I do.    

I hope, and I think 2023 will be much better than 2022.  Then again, that just might be the euforia of a new year speaking through me, and it will be more or less the same as 2022.  But I have to be optimistic, especially at the beginning of the new year.  

Much success to all, including me, for the coming year.  

Max 

Listening to sone old stuff while writing.  I have the whole fugazi collection. I want to get this Bob Dylan Cd.