Any time stay-at-home parenting gets too hard on me I threaten to clear out the bank account and head to the casino.
As I vividly imagined this fantasy on Monday (due to a very difficult morning that started at 2 AM, then 4 AM, then pivoted to a second child at 6 AM and wove them both together at 7 AM), it finally dawned on me that it’s a horrible fantasy because I don’t like gambling.
If I’m going to abandon my kids, squander two peoples’ life savings, and essentially blow up my marriage, it oughta be for something I’d enjoy.
It would be just my luck to abandon my mid-life crisis because I can’t get past the room service prices. $18 for an egg sandwich, what am I the Queen of England!?
Even when planning to throw my life away, I’d like to do it responsibly.
You might be wondering why, if I’m planning to abandon my family and spend my remaining days as a degenerate gambler, I would share this information with my wife. That’s a very fair question.
It’s clearly a cry for help.
I secretly want to get caught before blowing through EVERYTHING, but not before I get the rush of feeling completely free. That and it’s just a joke, like a “celebrity hall pass” for evading the responsibilities I’ve packed onto my life.
I’ve always been attracted to fantasies of an unencumbered life.
As a boy I dreamed of running away to join the circus. I don’t have any circus talents but I figured I’d make friends with a chimp like Toby Tyler did and everything else would just fall into place.
As an adolescent I was drawn to movies like Easy Rider and books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that found meaning from the simple act of leaving itself.
The solo one-way road trips of my early adult years will always hold a special part in my heart as the time in my life where I scratched that existential itch and leaned into the freedom an unattached youth provides.
I retired that vision of freedom when Mom got sick and I learned that family obligations aren’t impediments to freedom but rather they’re the best possible outcomes.
Still, when it’s a Monday morning smack in the middle of a heat wave and my kids are being especially difficult, it’s fun to dream of running off to try something new.
Any parent who says they’ve never imagined walking out the door (while leaving a capable guardian behind) is either lying or the last person you want to sit next to during parents’ night at your kid’s school.
On Monday, I traded in my Foxwoods plan for a new one of fleeing to Ireland and living as the eccentric American who’s always looking for leprechauns.
I plan to get a gold-plated shillelagh to distinguish me from any other leprechaun seekers. Not only will I look fantastic walking through forests and glens with it, but the gold might serve as irresistible bait for the leprechauns.
As I formulated this plan and started researching whether leprechauns gather gold or merely protect it, my two-and-a-half-year-old toddler snapped me out of the fantasy with an uncharacteristic request for me to rock her to sleep.
This surprised me since she hasn’t wanted to be rocked for about a year (minus the one time she fell off a bottom step and spooked herself).
She might have asked because she’s teething two more large molars, or because her sleep schedule got savaged over the weekend, or because the heat wave sapped her of her strength, but it put her difficult morning behavior into perspective.
I happily obliged, although it was heavily complicated because I was already rocking my five-month-old son to sleep.
I shifted him onto my right side as she climbed onto my left and for a while the three of us silently rocked.
In the quietness of that moment without any tantrums or crying, soiled diapers or bottles to clean, I felt again how fortunate I am to live a truly unencumbered life (even on the bad days).
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