Kind of. Sort of. Ok, wow. That sounds so weird. I don’t even have (much) gray hair yet.
This June, after 22 years(!) with my first real-electronic-engineering-job employer, it was time to part ways for a number of reasons I won’t dwell on here (mainly to do with company culture, type and pacing of work following acquisition of a scrappy git-r-done firm by a lumbering multinational mostly-rubber company owned by an oil giant).
Anyway, thanks to being a DINK and a resourceful cheapass for much of my young working life, rather than get another job lined up first, I kind of just… didn’t. Frankly, work and corporate politics aside, the sensation of being on the losing side of a custody battle with my day-job, i.e. only really seeing my kids on weekends, was really starting to wear on me, and we don’t really need the second income anymore, so with the encouragement of my dear Mrs., I’ve been promoted to Fulltime Dad.
(Yes, I’m trying to discourage people from using the ‘R’ word, partly because it makes me sound old, and partly because it implies I don’t still have a day-job with significant time commitments. Fulltime Dad captures the reality a lot better, although I’ve also heard house-elf and it has more than a smack of truth to it.)
Now what?
Yes, everyone I know has been asking that, so I should probably have an answer. It’s only been a few (summer) months now, but the obvious truth is that being solo parent most of the week, outside of households where one plops the kiddos in front of a screen and disappears, really is its own day job. So far, I’m not getting much visibly done during the summer in a put-it-on-a-resume (or -blog) sense, and it’s still a largely solo effort as most of my kids’ friends have two working parents, but it’s reasonably fulfilling so far and nobody has died yet. The concepts of free-time and me-time are still somewhat nuanced; so far what I do during the day is not exactly free choice, quiet alone time is rare and blocking off known quantities of it ahead of time is kind of nonexistent, but “oh dread, I had to take my kids fishing” is not exactly a complaint I can make with a straight face. School season, starting now, is uncharted territory, of course.
The kids, despite having entered their too-cool-for-parents phase, seem to be having fun. For me, the one obvious gap so far is nerd-out time: my kids have respectively either avoided the nerd gene somehow or are kinda performatively in denial about it. During school hours, I suspect much of the free time will be swallowed by household chores and home maintenance, but hopefully some of it will involve geeky programming and OSHW projects like old times. There is a household repairs TODO list of course, full of things that were in that void space between too time-consuming to bite off after bedtime, not worth burning weekend daylight on, and too expensive/irritating to outsource to a professional, but now that it’s actually ‘profitable’ to DIY again, it will end… someday. (Right?)
Guess I’ll have to give it a while and see how it goes!
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