Maddy Siletti 🟧

Here's what's going on: Dads are spending more time with their kids, which is good. Moms are working more outside the home. Moms are NONETHELESS spending more of their day on *purely parenting responsibilities.* We're overparenting. It's anti-natal.

Am I just a monster? It's been 4 years since I became a father and I'm beginning to fear for my soul. The truth is I just don't like being around kids for very long. Historically, this is not uncommon among fathers, but today it feels almost illegal. It's causing me a lot of confusion and anguish. The ideal amount of time I would like to spend playing with my kids is probably about 70-140 minutes a week—roughly ten minutes each day, maybe 2x/day, taking breaks from work. My feelings of love toward them are perfectly strong, but if I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about 10 minutes my blood starts to boil. I just want to be working, or accomplishing something. I try to be grateful, but it doesn't work. It's 9 AM this morning, Saturday, January 3. It's a sunny, warm day here in Austin, and my four-year-old son is begging me to play catch in the street. I was drinking coffee, still waking up, so I didn’t really feel like it, but at this age his desire to play is insatiable. He begged and begged, so I conceded, and with a smile. I have no problem being a kind and loving father, the problem is only that I do not enjoy it. It's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure; it just seems wrong that I experience so little delight when my dad friends all claim to experience so much. It was beautiful. We live on a picturesque, tree-lined block. I am even relatively relaxed from the holiday rest. Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic, peak experience. Yet for every single minute, on the inside, I just don't want to be there. I want to be drinking my coffee in peace. Then I feel guilty and absurdly ungrateful, and ashamed, when we're done. I know that when he is a teenager, I'll long to have these days back. I have all of this perspective rationally, and I've been very patient and steadfast trying to digest it, but nothing fixes me emotionally. Am I a terrible person? Or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal and it's modern parenting norms that are off? Whether it's my fault or not, I don't even care, I just want to figure this out. Something is wrong and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this.

A lot of men seem to think that household labor is unnecessary or beneath them, and in the same breath expect that the woman they claim to love take on all of it.

when I was 15 (!!) my parents took an overnight trip and I mentioned to my friend that I was going to be home alone for an evening and my school guidance counselor found out and, I am not joking, called the police on my parents

Starting to feel a bit deflated about the World Cup tbh. The awful ticket allocations, the eye watering price of those tickets, the abysmal resale platform that is literally licensed touting. Then the games themselves. The dreadful kick off times for everyone at home are bad enough and now we’ve got breaks in play every 20 minutes regardless of the weather. I think we can all guess what those breaks are really for and it’s not about the players safety. More FIFA greed. Still hoping to go over but it’s a fairly shite state of affairs IMHO.