Journaling project, Day 40

[drwex]

There will come a time when you think it’s all over, everything is finished… you’ve reached the end of the road. That’s the starting line. Be humble. Be teachable. The world is bigger than your view of the world. There’s always room for a new idea, a new step… a new beginning.

What does “a new beginning” mean to you right now?

This feels a lot like a continuation of the previous prompt. The end of the road comes when I'm dead, and hopefully not a moment sooner. I suppose it's possible that either my mind or my body will give out before the other does and that'd be a kind of end as well. There are certainly days and situations in which I can't push myself any further and maybe that'll happen but it's not the future I'm planning on. Ultimately the question isn't whether I've reached the end but whether I'm capable of taking the next step.

And, like with the last entry, a new beginning for me right now means embarking on the next phase of my life, the post-parent phase. For a long time we've used polyamory language to talk about our relationships with the kids. That is, a 'primary' relationship is one in which the other individual has first call on my time, resources, and when there are conflicts which way do I lean. Being a parent means (meant) leaning toward the kids. Making sacrifices in what I do, where I go, how I behave in order to be available and have resources for the kids.

Moving into the next phase means that I don't have to take their priorities into the same level of account. I don't have plans now that don't take into account "how does this affect Thing 2's schooling?" or their transport or where they're going to stay, what they'll eat, etc. I'm not one of those parents who'd ever shut their kids out if they wanted to move back home, but there's just a fundamental difference in the responsibility and accounting I do for a parent-kid relationship from any other.

I'm pretty sure I don't accurately remember what it's like to be not-a-parent and I'm also pretty sure that how I'll interact with the world is different than it was back then, anyway. So I need to figure that out.

Anyone else looking at a new beginning?

Comments

[flexagon]

Yes... I will almost certainly leave full-time tech work within a few years. It's a race between burnout and having two people's worth of FYM (I already have one person's worth). When that ends I will enter a phase of full-on life-crafting with more freedom than I've ever had before, and that's both exciting and daunting.

I view it as something akin to graduating from school.

[drwex]

FYM?

[flexagon]

FYM = Fuck-You Money: a sufficient retirement fund to walk away from any undesired work situation.

[chhotii]

Yes! See my recent post.

[intuition_ist]

Kind of a new beginning: Lots of my friends now have teenage-or-older kids, and I'm looking forward to getting back in touch to see if we have anything at all in common any more.

It's not that I didn't like the kids -- in many cases I did. But I didn't want to be a pseudo-parent, and the parent set tended to congregate around other parents, and the kids were often so clingy and demanding that I didn't feel that I could really even carry on an adult conversation with the adults who were (theoretically) not involved in child care. Add to that the sudden fire-engine shrieks that kids always make, and well, I made myself scarce. I think I've improved as a person in that time; maybe I'll get an outside opinion or three.