It's 2:41 a.m. I'm eating when I happen across a photo of my children. And it hits me how little interest I have in the life I had before them.
I loved that life. It got us here. But being a dad has grown on me to the point where I can't imagine living without these people. Why the fuck would I keep trying to recreate a time when they weren't in it?
That's the part I can't get my head around when people talk about getting away and being a couple again. My wife and I are still a couple. We've just got more people we want to bring.
A holiday without the kids? I'd see something they'd love and wish they were there. Lovely. I've paid to miss my children somewhere with better towels.
My wife feels the same. We want them involved. The extra bags, the slower walks, whatever. They're coming.
Maybe that sounds limiting. It doesn't feel that way from here. My idea of a good life got bigger when they arrived, and I want to give them everything I can while we're in it together.
When I picture somewhere I'd rather be, they're there too.
There's more to this
I suppose what bothers me goes beyond holidays. It's how often I hear family life discussed as something you need to recover from. Get away. Get yourself back. As though the person you've become since having children is a temporary inconvenience, and the real you is waiting at a bar somewhere.
I remember being that person. He's fine. He can finish his drink.
An occasional evening alone doesn't bother me. It's the idea that regularly escaping the life you've built is what keeps it worth living. Once you have children, your priorities change. I think they're supposed to. Mine did, and I have no desire to reverse it.
I'm 40. I've watched more and more of life become available from a chair. Food turns up. Entertainment never ends. You can talk to someone on the other side of the world without getting dressed. I use all this shit too. I'm hardly writing this with a quill.
But I wonder what it does to us when we get so used to having everything on our own terms. A video can be skipped. A conversation can be muted. Someone in your house needs you, and suddenly you have to deal with a person who doesn't come with those buttons.
I worry we're getting very good at arranging a life around ourselves and less willing to make room for anyone else. Even the people we chose to have in it.
I've always leaned toward the family, the clan, the whole noisy lot. People belonging to each other. I think a better society starts with more of that willingness to be involved, even when it's inconvenient. You can't expect a world where people look after each other if everyone's first concern is how much of themselves they can keep out of it.
That is the part of traditional family life I want to hold on to. The ordinary expectation that you show up. That a child grows up seeing people take care of each other and carries some of it into their own life.
I want to be optimistic about the world my children will inherit. Some days I struggle. I look around and wonder how much of this we can undo. Then there's my family, right here, and a much more useful question: what am I actually going to give them?
Everything I can. My time is part of that. So is letting them see what matters to me, instead of leaving them to guess from whatever I happened to be angry about that day.
Maybe that's why I'm writing this down. Years from now, my children might find it and have their own arguments with it. I'd like to hear them.
At least they'll know where their old man was coming from. I wanted them in my life. In the plans. On the fucking holiday.