SAHD: Fail

I’m two weeks away from leaving my position as full time stay at home dad.

How did that happen? Well, essentially my wife fired me. Sort of. And I’m extremely thankful she did.

As we’ve discussed previously, when I FIRE’d late this winter, I’d planned on slowly easing into being a part time stay at home dad. Then we found out our daycare was doing shady shit; thankfully we were fortunate to have an extra adult(me) hanging around to supervise our two kids. So instead of a slow transition from a stressful career to a part time caregiver, I went from crazy work to getting smacked in the face by the 2×4 that is being a full time parent.

It did not go well.

To be fair, I had about 6 weeks to chill post-FIRE/pre-discovery of daycare shadyness. I vaguely recall relaxing a bunch and it being nice. Seems hazy now, but there it is.

These past couple months have been a little rough. I say little, as I know that I’m very lucky that having to take care of my kids is my biggest challenge. I get it, in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big of a deal. Hell, I’ve spent years of my life where people legitimately tried to kill me on the reg. And you know what? The stress I feel now about childcare seems to be at least the same as I experienced while working, if not more. I guess it all really is relative.

It’s kind of like altitude acclimation. You go from living at sea level to living at 10K feet, and you can barely run half a mile without puking. A month later, and you’re back to knocking out 6 minute miles despite the altitude. Shit, you don’t even notice it. Then you go back to sea level, and holy fuck! You’re a god damn rockstar; you can sprint for days. But stay at sea level a few more weeks and you’re body has adapted again. No more superhuman sprints, back to where you were before.

Such has it been with my current state of things. I recall not stressing about the little things back when life and death was my way of life. Now that I’m out of that, the little things have become the only things, and they stress me the fuck out.

Intellectually, this has given me empathy for people’s worries even when externally they seem to have everything in the world. Emotionally, this whole experience has made be feel like a bitch. And the good thing about feeling like a female canine? Realizing yet again that I’m not all of that, but I still can make it through stuff that sucks. It will just suck.

Back to the case at hand.

Since the quick transition to full time SAHD, I’ve been lamenting constantly to my wife about all of this. Unfortunately for her, she’s the only adult I regularly interact with anymore. So she’s been bearing the majority of my complaints, especially as I beleaguer her with the rapid descent of my mental health.

About a month ago, she found a place for our oldest to go two days a week. I hemmed and hawed, as I felt like this was giving up. Never admit defeat!! Stupid. Then 30 seconds later I was like “Sounds great! For the love of god let’s do it!!”. So that’s been nice.

Despite that change, I’ve still been pretty low. The depression, anxiety, and anger have been as bad as when I was at my lowest with work. And I’ve complained about it A LOT. My wife had about enough of that.

Previously we’d arranged 3 day a week childcare for our youngest starting in September. My wife called the caregiver and asked if we could get her in any sooner (something I should have done, but the bandwidth was not there). They had an opening, and I had even less hesitation this time around. Our youngest now starts her three day a week daycare in two weeks instead of two months.

Things will look like this moving forward:

Monday: Youngest in daycare, I’m hanging with the oldest.

Tuesday: Oldest in daycare, playing with the youngest all day.

Wednesday: They’re both at daycare. I’m by MYSELF.

Thursday: Me and both kids are doing whatevs.

Friday: Youngest at daycare, me and the oldest adventure day.

And so it will be until our oldest starts kindergarten in August. Then I’m essentially just making sure the kids are where they’re supposed to be, and watching our youngest two days a week.

Got to admit, I feel like a failure. But then I’ve failed before at shit I cared about. And it worked out then. It will probably work out now.

I had really hoped I’d like being a full time SAHD. But despite my best efforts to mentally reframe shit and use a plethora of coping skills, it did not go well. Not. At. All. I’ve been descending into becoming angry dad, the man I swore I’d never be. I’m not there yet, but it’s been harder and harder to keep myself from being that dick. Even though I’ve thrown all of the self-awareness, stress management, and meditation at this thing, the stress has still mounted and I can’t seem to help becoming someone I don’t want to be.

This experience has made me seriously question my previously held beliefs about one’s own agency surrounding self improvement. Something to think about and write on later, perhaps.

Failure sucks, but then it’s probably one of the better ways to learn. Well I sure as shit have learned a lot about myself these past few months, especially about what I want to do. As much as this has been stressful, there’s been some great moments. And a big chunk of me is sad that I’ll be missing out on time with my favorite people as I outsource their care in the near future. But I fall back to this question:

Would it be better for my kids if they spent all day with a temperamental dickhead, or part of the day with a dude who has the space to be the best version of himself?

Easy choice there.

It’s also helped to adopt the “experiment” mindset around this failure. I’ve heard of this before, but most recently was reminded of it on the Mile High FI podcast where they had FIoneer Jessica on.

I’m one to commit to stuff full bore, and not give up even when I no longer enjoy or even care about it. This has lead to a fair amount of misery and wasted time in life. A possibly better mindset would be to treat choices as experiments.

I’m trying to look at this whole SAHD thing from that perspective: I tried being a full time stay at home dad. I did not enjoy it, nor did my family.

I now have a choice:

A. Make my life an example of insanity, and keep doing the same thing hoping for a different result.

B. Realize this isn’t for me, dial back the SAHD role to part time, and see how that works out. Continue experimenting and getting closer to an even more awesome life.

C. Get abducted by aliens, then rolled into a plot to defend earth from other aliens with evil designs on the universe. Adventures abound, I get a cool jacket and fuzzy sidekick.

Of course I choose C., but while I wait for that to happen I’ll go with B.

To cap things off, I want to make sure I cover something. I love my family, and I want to make it clear that my inability to cope with being a full time SAHD is not anyone’s fault but my own. I made numerous life choices in the past which negatively impacted my mental health. It is my belief that my struggles with mental health are directly related with the inordinate stress and anxiety surrounding my attempt at being a full time SAHD. I am not a victim of a situation or someone else’s actions. My kids and wife are awesome, my mental health-not so much.

I am a survivor of experiences that I chose to put myself in. Luckily I made some good choices too, and I’m surrounded by good people who love me. While my own choices put me in this mess, I’ve chosen to move on and keep trying to get better.

I’m learning how to embrace failure and learn for it, instead of allowing myself to become a victim of my own choices. If you’ve had similar experiences, I’d love to hear about it. Maybe we can learn from each other while we’re all on this crazy journey.