Restlessness on Weekends
Making the most of your free time during busy seasons of life.
Many of my weekends are spent restlessly. The restlessness starts exactly one second after 5 p.m. on Friday and runs until my head hits the pillow approximately 54 hours later on Sunday night.
Besides mandatory activities like eating and sleeping, my weekends are typically spent hanging out with Haley and the kids. In the best-case scenario, I get to do at least one thing for myself before stepping back onto the hamster wheel Monday morning.
Just before Alba was born, I spoke with Jeremy, who was already a father twice over, and he shot me straight. I had too many hobbies, he said. At that point, my weekends were still mine. But it wouldn’t be that way much longer.
“Parenthood only accommodates two-and-a-half activities from your previous life,” he explained. “Playing in Friday night soccer leagues?” I asked. Sure, I could do that, he said. “As long as you’re not planning to go fishing on Saturday at sunrise.” And what if I was? “Something else has got to give,” he said. I must bid farewell to either CrossFit workouts, reading books, smoking pipes, going to concerts and movies, or getting coffee with friends.
Once Alba came into the world, she was my responsibility. And I hoped for her to one day want to spend time with me, not out of obligation, but because she might genuinely experience joy in being around her dad. To make the people around you want to be with you, sacrifices are required. I understood that much.
During the first year of Alba’s life, I played in soccer leagues, did CrossFit, and fished at least once a week. Nights alone at the movie theater were fewer, but I found joy in my DVD collection at home.
Two years later, after Enzo, I still played soccer and went to concerts, but I gave up fishing with any regularity and quit CrossFit since I could no longer work out at 5 p.m. when babies tend to be cranky and in need of dinner. In their place, I started writing like a maniac, building out this Substack, writing a book. Last September, Elio was born, putting a nail in the coffin of my rec soccer year. I’ve fished two or three times, and if I can’t make it to the YMCA before 7 a.m. I hit the punching bag in the garage.
I’ve struggled with being unable to do what I want. There are weekends like this one when I want to spend half of Saturday or Sunday fishing in the Smokies and watching a movie with a big bucket of popcorn and suicide soda. I want to spend the morning brutalizing my body at the gym without subtracting that from the window of free time I have to finish reading Dune: Messiah or writing and editing this column.
These desires are selfish. I wonder how fathers before me dealt with the balance of not losing themselves and the things they love while working a job they might not and trying to raise kind, curious children. Does the struggle feel greater for me because my ambitions fall outside the norm of many middle-class Americans? Because I don’t take pride or pleasure in owning a home, driving a nice vehicle, having expensive gadgets, or building an empire. The best news Haley can give me is that she’s also ready to pack it in, sell the house, buy a camper, and hit the open road where solicitors won’t follow.
This is an unlikely dream, so I’ve been trying to take pleasure in my reality. I don’t want to come off as an ungrateful prick. After church yesterday, I read about the concept of ashrama1, the four stages of life through which ancient Hindus were expected to pass before dying: the student (brahmachari), the householder (grihastha), the forest dweller (vanaprastha), and the homeless renouncer (sannyasi).
Today, as a 35-year-old dad of three, I am firmly in the second and longest ashrama stage: married and raising children, putting food in their bellies, temporary tattoos on their arms, and giving at least a tenth of my money and time to church and charities. “Of all the Asramas, this is the most important because it supports all the others,” it reads on The Divine Life Society web page about the four stages. “As all creatures live supported by the air, so the other Orders exist supported by the householder. As all streams and rivers flow to rest in the ocean, so all the Asramas flow to rest in the householder. . .Everything depends on him.”
I wish I could see it as the ancient Hindus did: a vital leg of the journey toward spiritual fulfillment. But most of the time, the stage feels to me like a Sisyphean endeavor. I’m constantly rolling a stone up a hill, stopping and starting over again.
Weekends help me get through. They provide a temporary reprieve from my humdrum existence. This past one was good. On Saturday morning, I shot clays with my friend Landon as part of a fundraiser for Young Life. Haley, the kids, and I walked through Victor Ashe Park in the afternoon. I stayed up late watching UFC 300. After church on Sunday, I had an hour to start writing this, then we went to Bakers Creek with the Collinses. Enzo and Alba crushed it, hitting the trails and pump tracks on their balance bikes. I drove separately so that I could run to Downtown West (with Haley’s permission) and catch the 7:40 showing of Wicked Little Letters. It was great.
By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to the YMCA to chisel down this hibernation bod ahead of summer, then logging onto my computer to sort through emails. But at least this weekend, I got to do a little more than two-and-a-half things I love. By the time I hit send, it’ll be more like four and a half. And, for that, I’m very grateful.
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