Friday, May 29, 2009

I Hate Fridays

As someone who has been both a student and a teacher, I used to live for Friday. Thursday was almost as good, because it meant that the next day was Friday. And Friday, well, that was practically Saturday, and Saturday used to mean sleeping in, laying around the house, maybe watching a movie, doing a little laundry, and probably having a meal out.

As with every other thing in my life, having a baby changed that. Harry has no concept of "weekend" and therefore I don't either, anymore. I am still awakened between 6 and 6:30. Because I can't possibly get all of my paid work done during the week and be a competent mother, the paid work necessarily slips into Saturday (oh, who am I kidding, into Sunday). Working on the weekend kind of deflates the awesomeness of Friday, and when I work on the weekend I just feel self-pity and not a small amount of guilt that Kevin, who has worked hard Monday through Friday, has the lion's share of the parenting responsibility every weekend.

I can appreciate that he wants to escape to the basement to play video games or watch a basketball game in its entirety on Saturday, and for some reason, I feel like it's more important to foster Kevin's "me-time" than my own. Ask him and you'll probably get a vastly different answer, but I estimate that I give him at least two hours a week of unrestricted time for him to do his thing but carve out something like 30 minutes for myself (and mine is always when Harry is in bed. I cannot bring myself to knit or read when he is awake: the guilt!). There, in a nutshell, is what I have come to understand about being a mother: everyone, not just the baby, is higher on your list than you are.

So there is my crappy mood summed up in 10 minutes of typing while Harry cries in his crib, determined not to nap. This is how I developed my unpopular opinion: I hate Fridays.

What's your unpopular opinion? What do you hate (or love) that everyone else seems to love (or hate) universally?

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