Dad guilt.
You hear mom guilt all the time, but have you heard of dad guilt? If you haven’t let me enlighten you:
Let me start off by filling you all in on my entire schedule from the moment I wake up:
I wake up at about 7 - 7:15am and get ready for the day. By 7:45 I leave my home and take my kids to school. I live in Santa Clarita and my children go to the school in the valley which should take about 20 minutes to get to, but let’s be real, this is L.A. I get to their school anywhere from 35 - 45 minutes.
As I sign them in and drop them off, I head to Starbucks and hit the road on what seems to be the darkest depth of hell, also known as the 405 freeway. If you know, you know. From the valley to Torrance where I work, takes about 1.5 hours. No matter how many bangers I listen to or epic True Crime podcasts I listen to, the drive itself is still exhausting. If you’re from L.A., you know.
You may ask, why I work so far away; I ask myself that daily. However, my family business is located in Torrance so I do not have a choice. After my father passed away, my mother and I have been at the helm of the company, so us being physically at work is crucial. Working in construction, we deal with very interesting and complex situations daily and I firmly believe that in my line of work specifically, the stress that we deal with daily is not the ordinary stress an average everyday buisness would have. So in between our daily tasks, problematic situations on the job, making sure we do everything accordingly to get through the day can be very taxing both physically and mentally.
After a long day, I drive from the Southbay home to Santa Clarita. Normally, it SHOULD take me 1 hour to get home without traffic but, who am I kidding? It takes me anywhere from 2 hours to 2.5 hours. There has been times where I’ve been in traffic for 3 whole hours.
When I get home, I am always physically drained. So many times the kids ask me to chase after them and play with them but I am so tired, I cannot do it every single day. It weighs very heavy on me and I feel horribly guilty when I don’t play with them but, what can I do when I have zero energy? I’m so afraid that the kids don’t feel loved by me when this happens because I said “no” to playing. They’re way too young to understand what I have gone through throughout the day that causes the exhaustion I feel. I hope that when they grow up they will realize that their father worked very very hard to provide for them and continuously makes sacrifices for them every single day.
However, I have been making a very conscious effort into changing that and I have been playing with them with much calmer activities like coloring or helping them with letters. Something that doesn’t require much physical activity. Still, I always have the feeling that i’m not doing enough but, i’m beginning to think it’s normal. Do other dad’s feel this way?