One of the biggest changes in going from “single guy” to “family man” is that the weekend, once the thing that got one through a tough week, is now..something else entirely. It’s not ‘my’ time anymore, it belongs to my wife and children as well. It was a harsh adjustment at first, of course (especially when the first child arrived and everything changed, but now that I’ve set my expectations for what a weekend entails accordingly, I can handle it.
Most importantly, there is no “reset button” anymore; there were many weeks during single life where I’d work crazy hours and then just hole up in my apartment all weekend long doing very little in the way of anything productive whatsoever. By Monday morning, I was ready to go at it again and it was easy to cycle that for months at a time. Life was extremely predictable then and for someone like me, that’s quite comforting..but at the same time, it doesn’t really go anywhere.
Now, no two weeks run the same at all; there’s always something going unexpectedly, a new place to go, a new thing the children are doing as they grow and learn and change so very rapidly. There’s still certain rhythms, certain routines to follow, but otherwise, I have to not expect anything to go exactly as planned and making any concrete plans are bound to fail in some form, way, or shape. But yet..I’m going somewhere, learning more about how to be a better person through my family. Getting done what I want to get done means just going and doing it instead of making meticulous plans (very much against my grain, but until the kids move out, they come first.).
Sometimes I wonder if I have more fun making plans than actually executing them, because a plan by itself can never go wrong, but reality makes actually trying them..imperfect. If I ever want to do what I really want to do, that must change.
Here’s to another weekend..