Coming out of my cage and I've been doing NOT FINE
I’ve been flat this week. Struggling to kick a winter cold, which can always be an energy-sapper, and also going a little stir-crazy. I normally work from home for 3 or 4 days per week, and go to the office for the remainder. My company is moving offices, though, so we’ve been without a space for the month of November. Despite being a mega introvert and enjoying my own space, I’ve found myself struggling a lot as the weeks go on.
Some of this is just the reality of the home-as-workplace setup. When you hover between your professional and personal spaces, you never properly exist in either of them. When I go downstairs to make a coffee, I’m thrust into the world of parenting a nearly-six-month-old and feel guilty for not helping out while I’m in between calls. Then ten minutes later I’m on a quarterly planning call and can hear the baby crying downstairs, or the four year old home from school and charging around the house dressed as a pirate.
My response to this challenge was perhaps a classic man trait: try to ignore it or power through, until I get overwhelmed by it all and have to just drop everything and get out of the house. A few nights ago I chucked the baby in the pram at 6pm and wandered off to the supermarket for a completely pointless trip where I didn’t need anything… except to leave the house and look at some different scenery for half an hour.
Textbook parenting error, though: the baby fell asleep on the way home at 6:30pm, lulled into a “danger nap” by the gentle motion of the pushchair and the warm coat she was bundled up in. Fast-forward to 10pm that night and she was wide awake. See, bottling up emotions has multiple side-effects…
Sometimes advocating for myself is hard: when you have young children and need a bit of a break from them (or just want to do something for yourself, kid-free), this is basically a negotiation with your partner where they have to do double the work to enable you to do your thing. On the surface this is just another relationship instance of give and take, but when you’re tired, stressed and probably running low on sleep, it can feel like an insurmountable challenge. Luckily I’m blessed with a fantastic partner who knows when I’m struggling, can tell when I just need to get over myself and go and sit in a quiet pub somewhere with a book, and will kick me out of the door to go and do this if I don’t get myself there. But I wish I was better at spotting the signs when things are making me feel cooped up and trapped in domesticity, before I end up being “too tired” to play pirates with the kids or get the baby down to sleep.
Mini feels this week
Those men at gigs
I went to see the Prodigy last night at an arena show in Birmingham. They’re not my normal listening but a friend needed a gig buddy and given I’ve already seen Shania Twain this year, I thought I might as well say yes to this unexpected experience too. The band were great and it was probably the closest I’ve come to that club scene in the Matrix where everyone’s all green and dancing. But next to us in the crowd were what I can only describe as some of those guys – the LADS LADS LADS type who had their shirts off, were mock-fighting each other throughout the support band, and then doing that super-edgy thing where they take it in turns to fling half-full pint glasses into the far reaches of the crowd. I tried to imagine how I’d feel if a warm half-pint of Strongbow Dark Fruit landed on my head as I was raving to Firestarter, and I knew that my sense of outraged annoyance was exactly what these guys would be finding funny right now: some random punter covered in beer, cursing the anonymous dickhead who threw it.
Alright, alright, it’s a Prodigy gig, nobody’s expecting it to be a night at the opera. But I looked around and could see other punters giving this same group of men the wide berth we were. I wondered to myself what those men felt like about themselves, alone and without anonymity, when they think about being those guys who throw pints into crowds, start fights with strangers and all the other things you can no doubt speculate on for yourself.
Bit of a downer, this issue, right?! Sorry – just one of those weeks. As I type I can hear my son arriving home from school and we’re about to get him changed and jump in the car to head to my mum’s for the weekend to celebrate “Early Christmas” – a new family tradition where we do basically the entire Christmas celebration a month early, to allow for everyone’s different locations/movements on the day itself. It’s much needed and I can’t wait to eat my bodyweight in cheese.
Until next week!
– Matt