I don’t know you in real life so I can’t comment on whether you’re “an emotionally unavailable workaholic,” but I can tell you that I *do not know* what I’m going to do when my son is out of school for the four or five weeks when we have no camps and no travel. (He gets out June 21, we’re traveling for about 2 weeks here and there, and he’s got 2 weeks of [yikes pricey] camps–leaving a little more than a month of free time before returning to school.) I love my kid to bits but I GET SO BORED when I have to play with him all day. All this is just to say that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself for THAT…or else, I guess, that I should be harder on myself? No, it’s just too tedious to do kid stuff day in and day out!
heu mihi – No daycare = panic attack for me. I admitted as much to my pregnant sister earlier today, and she said, “We weren’t raised to be stay-at-home moms. Our mom always worked harder than dad did, and we were on our own.” That’s true. There’s no model for non-working women on my mother’s side of the family, which we were closest to. My dad’s mom never worked a day in her life, but she was also sickly and wasn’t domestic in any way. So she basically did nothing. The models therefore were (1) work your ass off always, (2) do nothing and be sickly. To me, it wasn’t a choice.
Still, guilt plagues me no matter what I do. It’s tough.
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I don’t know you in real life so I can’t comment on whether you’re “an emotionally unavailable workaholic,” but I can tell you that I *do not know* what I’m going to do when my son is out of school for the four or five weeks when we have no camps and no travel. (He gets out June 21, we’re traveling for about 2 weeks here and there, and he’s got 2 weeks of [yikes pricey] camps–leaving a little more than a month of free time before returning to school.) I love my kid to bits but I GET SO BORED when I have to play with him all day. All this is just to say that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself for THAT…or else, I guess, that I should be harder on myself? No, it’s just too tedious to do kid stuff day in and day out!
heu mihi – No daycare = panic attack for me. I admitted as much to my pregnant sister earlier today, and she said, “We weren’t raised to be stay-at-home moms. Our mom always worked harder than dad did, and we were on our own.” That’s true. There’s no model for non-working women on my mother’s side of the family, which we were closest to. My dad’s mom never worked a day in her life, but she was also sickly and wasn’t domestic in any way. So she basically did nothing. The models therefore were (1) work your ass off always, (2) do nothing and be sickly. To me, it wasn’t a choice.
Still, guilt plagues me no matter what I do. It’s tough.