The fuck you would. Not much is stopping you from doing that now, just in a longer timeframe.
You’d be sat here with me and everyone else scrolling your phone for hours, before thinking “Oh yeah I was gonna do that thing…can’t be arsed now”.
This is a wildly vague question, but a snippet of advice I was given years ago by a mate with a kid a few years older than my (then) toddlers was “You don’t have to provide them with constant entertainment, you just need to do one or two activities for a short amount of time and that’s what they remember”.
It’s great advice. Kids at early ages can be a fucking nightmare, but the truth is, you take them swimming for an hour, or do some painting for a while, or go to the park for a bit, and that’s what gets imbued on their consciousness. You get the rewards when they fill in that little book at school about what they did at the weekend, and it’s a ten minute window of shit you did that was fun for them, and not the rest of the stressful admin that comes with dealing with young children.
My nearly adult kids often say to me now “you were always doing fun things with us”. Mate, I played table tennis in a shed with you for 20 minutes, or sat down with you for a bit and made a robot out of a fucking cardboard box and a bog roll.
One or two activities a day where your attention is fully on them is enough to create happy memories for them. You don’t need to helicopter about.
Yeah, there’s two seasons of about 10 episodes each, so each one is bingeable in a weekend. There’s a third season planned although in my opinion it wouldn’t have been a travesty if they didn’t, as the ending to S2 was satisfying enough for me.
It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, equal parts funny, poignant and weird, it deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.
Apple TV+ offers various free trials, and worth doing for Severance alone. Absolutely superb show.
They were 7 and 10 when we separated, so late teens now.
Currently amicably divorcing. We’ve actually been separated for 8 years, and it’s only now that I’m sorting out the divorce. Neither of us considered ourselves married after we separated, and both moved on to other partners, so the paperwork now is just a formality, primarily driven by our new respective partners not loving the fact that we’re still married.
We were together 18 years in total, starting from university age, and married for a decade. Two kids, no infidelity etc. I think it was a classic example of a relationship in which we’d grown apart and were effectively cohabiting rather than happy husband and wife. The truth is most people who get together at that age go through significant change over the ensuing decade, as you discover more about yourself and life, and grow in confidence. However you don’t necessarily grow in the same direction as your partner. It’s nobody’s fault, although it can be if you fail to acknowledge that and want to realign, but sometimes it’s too late and the love has gone. The marriage has become a routine, and it’s only stepping back and questioning whether you are truly happy that can allow you to figure out whether things can get better, and whether you even want them to.
I think, after 18 years together, there were no surprises, and within that environment there was limited capacity or drive to change. I think after it ended (once the initial trauma was out of the way), I became a much more independent, confident and responsible individual, because I didn’t have the safety barrier of somebody who could provide that extra decision-making or support. I had to do it myself, something I’d never had to do before.
In our case, even if it didn’t immediately seem that way, it was exactly the right decision, for both of us and the kids. Both our lives are happier and the kids have probably massively benefitted from two people that fully co-parent. I could probably write a book about that latter claim, but I believe that the kids splitting their time between two intelligent parents who understand that they are the priority, and that the parents themselves get a “break” from constant parenting while the children are with the other person, has been of huge benefit all round.
Fair enough. Back to scrolling then, like the rest of us.