“Your time is no longer your own” is what I’d tell anyone seriously considering the plunge into parenthood.
I don’t know how selfish or set in your ways the various readers of this blog may be but I’d put myself pretty near a rock star 9.5 prior to my engagement at age 34 in January of 1998.
Back then I was working nights and some weekends with my days free for sleeping til noon and doing what I felt like in the hours I felt like doing anything. It suited me well to stay up til 3 and drive around a city I felt very comfortable in since I had effectively eliminated rush hours from my life.
Things changed a bit when the future Wife moved in but not much beyond having to be quiet while she slept.
No more.
I felt it without regret when Kid One was born five years ago. It was a new adventure and the joy of it outweighed all the work. Somehow I even managed to stay actively creative, writing and performing, passing the squawling baton back and forth to Wife and visting kin.
No more. Kid Two is here and the responsibilities have grown as Kid One demands more sophistication in his parenting and Kid Two just needs to be kept alive each day. She may sleep two hours at a time or two minutes. So far it averages out around 20 minutes a pop.
There’s a screenplay I want to finish before my wife’s birthday and I can’t seem to get the head of steam going. I’m sneaking this blog in while Kid Two is passed out, trying not to anticipate the high-pitched call to bottle-diaper-mental stimulation Action. I swear to God there have been days when I can’t get through a single, realtively light-weight comic book, let alone bang out a minimal blog.
Imagine trying to do algebra knowing that every few minutes an air-horn is going to go off in your face and if you don’t figure out how to turn it off your house will burn down.
That’s my life.
My job is to create Stuff anyway.
How am I doing?
