How I Wish I Spent My Parental Leave

This morning, my eyes welled up a bit as I prepared for my last weekday morning stroll with my infant daughter before having to return to work tomorrow.

It wasn’t that I’m going far away for work, or that I can’t take her for a stroll at the crack of dawn before work, but it’s the end of a short era for me and my little girl.

It was a brief 35-week period in my life, when my only job was to love and care for my child (and her recovering mother). I don’t know if or when there’ll be another time like this in our lives.

As this sobering sense of time sinks in, I reflect on the time that we shared.

What I got right

There are things that I would, without a doubt, do all over again if redos existed.

Home-cooked meals

Due to both baby logistics and massively reduced income, cooking 90% of our meals was a success on multiple fronts. It helped cut our food budget by at least half, and we can eat more healthily, being in control of the ingredients, flavours, portion sizes and cooking methods.

Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free

Quality time

Being attentive to my daughter has allowed me to build early bonds with her that would’ve been much harder with a full-time job. The morning routines, the baby books, the brain development toys, the long stroller walks, and cooking and feeding her baby food are all seeds for the fruits of loving labour.

Self-care

Finally seeing the doctor about shit that “I never had time for” while working. Finally getting orthodontic care. Regular chiropractor visits. Daytime naps, if needed. Basically, most things I’d hide behind work from.

Picking up writing again

There were other neglected interests I wanted to rejuvenate, but writing was easy to do when the baby was sleeping at night or when I had random 20-minute chunks of time to myself. Writing helps me work through my thoughts into self-reflection and potential advice for others.

Getting back into shape

Since my daughter needs us all of the time, I can’t pick road cycling back up again until she’s big enough to go with me. However, walking is fair game. I’d walk my daughter’s stroller along the beaches and greenways anywhere between 3 and 12 kilometres, almost every day. I’ve lost a bit of weight without even trying. Walking also inspires me to write.

Not bingeing on entertainment

I used to love movies, well-made shows, and video games. And this is something that I could have spent a lot of time on. With only a few brief exceptions, I didn’t spend much time on entertainment. Most of the video content we consumed was informational or baby-related.

What I could’ve done better

This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to “reset” my life. While I can’t say it wasn’t well-spent, I can definitely say that it wasn’t optimized.

Replacing work addiction with productivity compulsions

I have worked myself into burnout and beyond. My grind has spanned 3 decades and counting, and I am overcooked. This was my chance to rest. Instead of taking it easy, I replaced work with endless domestic household chores.

Meal prepping

I was cooking 7 days a week, up to 3 meals per day. Not only is this time-consuming, but it creates piles of pots, pans, dishes and cutlery to wash. In theory, cooking large batches is less work, but in practice, we are not repeat leftover eaters. There is so much time this could have saved if you add up 8 months.

Creating me time

Aware of my reduced attentiveness to my daughter for when I get back to work, I tried to compensate by front-loading my fatherly efforts while I can. I was playing hero for my partner, who has made sacrifices for our daughter, but it was overcompensation for a problem she never asked for a solution to. My partner would have better seen me get some deep recharging and reconnecting with my interests during this time. I thought I was being selfless, but as the breadwinner, not properly resting is reckless.

Vacationing

I had 8 months off, and it was all about the baby’s needs and the domestic work surrounding that. To be fair, this is our first child, and we’re just in survival mode most of the time. And baby logistics can be complicated. Even though my savings account was shrinking, I should have just spent more on myself and my partner to have a nice moment during a challenging part of our lives.

Procrastination with an excuse

There was a list of things that I wanted to accomplish while on my leave. Many of them, I never got around to it. And I can easily say that I was just too busy with the baby, too tired or sleep-deprived to do these hard things. And yet I found time to do other things with less value. In my defence, it’s easier to do useless things in 5-minute chunks than it is to do hours of quality work.

Doomscrolling the unfolding of 2025’s political hellscape

I really shouldn’t have wasted any time on this, but it’s like the morbid fascination of watching a train wreck. It’s made me weary of the world that my daughter will grow up in, but at least I know where some people stand. And it’s also disturbing that Twitter (X) political extremists could be anyone in my community, and I may not even know it (if they aren’t bots…please be bots).

My last walk as a full-time father with her

As I approached our home with the stroller, my daughter opened her eyes, looked straight at me, and went back to sleep. And my rule is that I don’t stop walking if she’s asleep, because it wakes her up. So I keep walking.

A part of me wants to believe that she knew what I was thinking: I didn’t want this last walk to end. It wasn’t just a stroll; it was me being everything that I wasn’t for 44 years. It’s being what and who I needed to be, loving unconditionally.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.