Being parents throw both of us into a frenzy as we struggle with balancing our ongoing responsibilities with parental responsibilities. You might have noticed how our engagement on social media and blogging has reduced drastically ever since 2018. That's just the reality for full time hands on working parents with no helper. We no longer have the luxury of time to do blogging and posing for pretty photos to do sharing. Our priorities has shifted to attending our children's needs whenever we are off work. When the kids are taking naps or asleep, we either concuss together with them on the bed or we would be busy doing housework. To some extent, we don't even have the time to do simple things like completing a Korean drama.
Impact on lifestyle:
We used to love long weekends but now we dreaded it. Don't get me wrong, we love playing with our kids but it's just simply said, tiring. Sometimes seemingly simple tasks can seem so taunting for us.We look forward to Mondays because we can send them to school to play and learn while we get to be ourselves and not Daddy or Mummy. We can go grocery shopping without needing to worry that the kids are pulling something off the shelves or spoiling any fruits. We can go for long lunches at restaurants without needing to carry a huge bag of wet wipes and play stuff to engage them. We can also hold hands and walk without our children insisting we can only hold their hands.
We used to camp for discounts on items that we love. But now the only few things we can think of buying with our vouchers or promo codes is to buy baby stuff like diapers, milk powder, baby clothes or wet wipes etc. I remembered having a long debate with Mr OOPS about his intention to buy an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, not because we cannot afford it but because we have no time to utilise it. As what we have predicted, even though we have it for more than 3 months, we haven't used it for more than 3 times so far.
Impact on friendships:
We found ourselves drifting apart from friends who does not have children and it happened so naturally to the extent whereby we can only sigh about it. We struggled to make time to go for meet ups and am unable to hang out till super late because the kids would be waiting. At times whereby we can go out late, we would either suffer from parental guilt or the guilt of leaving our partner to manage on the kids all by him/herself. During Covid times, even zoom meetings were difficult to arrange because the kids wants our companionship and they would be pressing all sorts of buttons on our computers, which is disruptive.
For friends who have children, we could still arrange for playdates. But are playdates for infants and toddlers really that relaxing? All of us would be on guard to always look out for our own kids in fear that they are doing some risky behaviours. Sometimes we are so caught up with that to the extent we didnt have time to chat.
Impact on marital relationship:
Some romance is dying and it's very true. Sometimes, I have to consciously correct myself by calling Mr OOPS as "Dear" instead of "Papa" when children are not around. Just me calling him "Papa" and him calling me "Mummy" is helpful for the kids but it just kills the romance. We are constantly and unconsciously reminding ourselves of our parenting roles. It doesn't help when we sometimes compete for our own personal self-care time by getting the other to manage both kids or get into conflicts over who's washing the milk bottles today. 80% of our conversations revolves around children related topics.
Transition from having 1 child to 2 children:
There are reasons behind why we chose to have another child but I wont be sharing it in this post. What I wanted to highlight was the transition. Just when Mr OOPS and I felt that we are both capable and experienced parents, whose threshold, confidence and emotional bandwidth has been well trained, we found ourselves being thrown into this whole new challenge of managing 2 young children. It is really tough. I can literally look back at myself 1 year back (when I have just BabyOOPS) and laugh at myself for saying I felt tired back then. We need to deal with more issues like sibling rivalry, management of logistics (diapers, more baby clothes), more furniture, more housework and more child-minding stress. Our diaper bags expanded. We went from being very confident about travelling with child to sharing with one another about the stress of travelling with 2 young children.
Phew.
Afterthoughts:
After all the rambling, I would have to say there are still many joys in parenting and those experiences are not just memorable but valuable. I'm also very thankful that Mr OOPS, my partner in life, is not just supportive but a very involved parent. Meanwhile, we had started making very intentional efforts to have lunch dates (thanks to WFH) to keep our sanity and to always chat about our differences. I also appreciate the times whereby he makes effort to hear and understand my reasons for certain parenting attitudes and viewpoints which I take a firm stand on. There would be times whereby we would have very different opinions but so far it had not evolved into World War 3, so all's good. These efforts make the whole parenting comradeship an even more pleasant one. <3
With love,
Mrs OOPS
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