Learning to Ride a Bike

Yesterday, I went to work at 3:30 am. I was home just after noon and I was exhausted. Still, I felt that I should take the time and take my 7 year old daughter with her bicycle and teach her to ride without the training wheels.

I couldn't help wondering how pitiful it was that fatherhood was such a grind. I love my kids, all 3 of them, and I'd like to enrich their lives every opportunity I can get, but far too much of my life is consumed with distracting obligations and I don't get around to them.

As it is, I wont work overtime; while this brings more money, it would make me a stranger in my own home. When I am home, I have too much to do there as well...

Is this normal? Am I a whinny wimp?

We bought a tiny bungalow (800 sq ft) in a suburban community. When my wife was pregnant with our third child, with two preschoolers and a raft of kids she was doing daycare with, we decided that we would need a bigger house. We looked around, but nothing suited us. Since I had overseen other renovations in the past, we chose to renovate.

I was the general contractor for a reno that tripled our floor space. When my daughter was born, my wife had to vacuum out her crib of wood and drywall dust before she slept, in our stud-wall 'room'. For anyone who has done even modest renos to either the family kitchen or the washroom, you probably have some idea how much stress is involved. Doing the whole house was a recipe for divorce.

But we survived it. Furthermore, since our debts had likewise grown, I now needed to finish the basement in order to rent it out. Before I got married my parents had done this for many years, so I knew how to make this work.

I spent the following 5 years doing the evening and weekend work in the basement. My kids would ask me 'Daddy, can you take us to the park when you're finished renobating?' Perhaps now you can understand why I wanted to take my daughter and teach her to ride her bike.

During these last 5+ years, I had to stop doing my 6km runs because I needed the energy when I got home to do the basement. Despite doing construction, the net effect was my gaining 40 lbs, and my blood pressure went up too.

I'm done now, and I've gotten back to running, though I haven't lost any weight yet. I can only tell you that as a parent trying to give my kids as much as I had, its too much work. I'm not lazy, but I can readily see why families break up, even if they don't take on mad missions as my wife and I had.

I have a life long history of documenting and analyzing the events of my own life in order to understand what goes on around me, and I know that society favours having one or no kids. Little allowance is made for the huge undertaking that kids require, and while it is the most rewarding thing anyone can do, it's a reward that can easily crush you.

What a thing to conclude...