One day a week I don’t have any hard commitments until I pick my kids up in the afternoon, so I tend to look forward to this day as one in which I can get extra work done, do my laundry, clean my house, etc.
When it gets interrupted by a necessity of taking my children earlier in the day, I feel anxious about losing this only time I have to take care of foundational stuff.
Then I start thinking that I am not able to get done the work I planned to get done because I can’t work around my kids.
I was talking to my therapist about this this morning and I explained that I feel like I’m a bad dad if I work on my computer while I have my kids. She challenged this as all or nothing thinking, and I dug into my thinking a bit to figure out where it comes from.
The first thing I realized was that two weeks ago I did some work on a day when I had the kids and it went fine, and I got a lot of work done, but I felt guilty and anxious about it.
The second thing I realized was that I feel fine about silently reading a book around my kids and letting them play; I don’t feel I need to be involved with them all the time; I just have a certain hangup about “working” around them.
And that’s when I realized it goes back to when I stopped traveling for work in order to take care of the kids when my ex said she couldn’t take care of them because of her health. I attempted to work from home, but had a lot of childcare responsibilities.
Back then the twins would have normal type kid fits now and then, and when that happened, my ex would react badly. Because I didn’t want her to react badly, I was hyperfixated on preventing the kids from having normal type kid fits.
I realized that my anxiety about working around the kids is not actually that I can’t do it, or that it doesn’t work. It’s that her extreme reactions to their normal behavior had conditioned in me a tendency to be as preventative of their fits as I could, which prevented me from focusing deeply enough on work to be productive.
And I realized that I don’t believe working around your children makes you a bad dad. It might make you a not broke dad. It also is very normal for a single dad.
That means when I lose anticipated alone time but gain unanticipated kid time, I can be happy about the gain, knowing that it won’t be able to be the most quality dad time since I still have to meet my work responsibilities, but also knowing that even if my kids have a fit now and then nobody is going to emerge from their bedroom in a rage and behave inappropriately about. Because I’m in a different house now and nobody like that lives in this house.