People often talk about “work-life balance.” Mine is more like “child-life fusion.”
I’m not one of those parents who sneaks off for spa days or spontaneous coffee meetups. If my son is home and awake, I’m there — fully, aggressively available.
Phone calls? After he sleeps.
Returning messages? After he sleeps.
Meeting friends? Again — after he sleeps.
I have pockets of time, but I hoard them like a squirrel saving up for emotional winter. I don’t spend them on myself; I spend them waiting to be available for him.
My husband is exactly the same. He works out after our son sleeps. He finishes work after he sleeps. We both operate as if his waking hours are prime-time broadcasting and everything else must air during reruns.
We didn’t plan this. We just… never learned to do it differently.
The realization hit in the most ordinary moment. I casually mentioned to my husband, “You should take a break someday. Go out. Just breathe.” He shrugged and said, “I’ll go after he sleeps.”
I nodded — because that’s what I do too — and then suddenly thought: Why do we both behave like our personal lives must run in stealth mode?
It’s not fear. It’s not guilt. It’s not noble. It’s just habit — a habit disguised as love. A reflex that quietly eliminated entire categories of “me time” because neither of us had ever modeled it for ourselves.
Sometimes I catch myself rejecting a phone call because my son is currently discussing the cons of power steering or the engine of a really long truck. And it feels correct. Not heroic — just correct.
But then I notice I’ve done this for seven years. Seven years where any potential adult socializing is saved for “later,” and “later” only arrives after 7:30 p.m. By then, I have the social energy of a houseplant.
My husband and I love that we’re present parents. But sometimes I wonder if we’ve built a world where he gets 100% of us… and we get whatever remains after bedtime. Not out of sacrifice — but out of a reflex we never questioned.
I’ve forgotten how to leave the house for myself without mentally rehearsing the justification. I’ve forgotten that adults are supposed to have lives that stretch beyond the glow of homework, bedtime stories, and Lego commentary.
It’s not guilt holding me back — it’s the discomfort of re-learning something I unlearned too easily. I don’t have a solution yet. I don’t have a tidy ending. Just an awareness blooming in a corner of my mind:
Maybe my son doesn’t need me to be available every moment he’s awake. Maybe he needs to see that I am a person who exists outside him. So he can learn to be a person who exists outside us.
We’re not there yet. But the thought is there. And sometimes that’s how change begins — not with action, but with noticing.
~ Ashmita, somewhere between presence and personhood, trying to find a little space for both.
#UnscriptedEncounters #ParentingReflections #ModernMotherhood #IdentityAndCare #HonestConversations #AshmitaWrites
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash
