Jason Pfeiffer
speaker
203 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Jason Pfeiffer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I don't think that there's any one answer here, right? Like there are friends of mine who are parents and being a parent is the center of their identity and they love it and they won't relate to any of this. And then there are other people who fall at other parts of the spectrum.
So I don't want to say that like anything that I'm going to say here is universalized, but I do think that what you just said there is relevant to a whole lot of people. You make a life choice, whatever that life choice is. And then you want to feel like it was a good life choice because otherwise you're living with a lot of regret.
And I think that a lot of parents get uncomfortable when being confronted with the possibility that their life choice wasn't perfect. I think that it's fine to acknowledge that maybe your life choice wasn't perfect. I saw somebody on TikTok say recently, they're like, a lot of people criticize me for not having kids or something like that, or say they don't understand me, that I didn't have kids.
But I want you, if you're a parent right now, to close your eyes and picture your perfect Sunday morning Now, let me tell you something. Your kids are not in that picture, are they? And it's true. Perfect Sunday morning, Nicole. weekends are exhausting with kids. They're so exhausting. Like your life goes inverse when you have kids where like weekends and summer used to be this flexible time.
And now it is the inflexible time. Now it's the time where you're spending the most time on kid management. And it's actually like work time and like the school year where you have the most free time as an adult with small kids, at least. And like, My ideal Sunday morning does not involve my kids.
It doesn't because to be spending Sunday morning with my kids is to be stopping them from fighting each other or being like running a restaurant in my kitchen and trying to get them food.
My ideal Sunday morning would be going out to brunch with my wife and having a nice leisurely stroll somewhere or just catching up with friends or just doing something where I feel like I have freedom of movement as an adult in the world, which is not what I have with my kids. But to say that is to indeed challenge some of the life choices that I've made.
And I just don't think that should be a scary thing. We all make life choices and it benefits us in some ways and it subtracts something in other ways. As I'm talking about this, I'm talking about the things that I've lost, but I've gained things with having kids too.
We could talk about that, but I think it's just fine to live in the complexity of having lost things as kids and that the life choice that you made was complicated and that's okay.
Yes. Anybody who has older kids wants to reach into this episode right now and say, It gets easier. It gets easier. Little kids are really, really hard. And that's true. And I've heard that over and over again. And every time people tell me that, I'm like, I hear that. I'm waiting to see it. But it's also disingenuous because a nine-year-old and a five-year-old is way easier than like a...
five-year-old and a one-year-old. So my life has gotten easier. I am able to move around more than I used to. I don't get woken up by screams in the morning, which is what happens when you have a kid that's just like three. And I suspect that when my kids are older and they're not exhausting in the way that they are now,
and I have more freedom of movement as an adult in the world, maybe won't even have much of a memory of the kinds of things that were frustrating me at this point in my life. So yeah, I think that it's a scale. And So my wife, Jen, she always tells me a lot of this comes down to the expectations that you set for yourself.
I always complain about family vacations because they're not the kind of vacations that I like to take. I like to go to a city that I've never been to before, and I like to spend the entire day walking around and just discovering random things and eating random things and meeting random people. You can't do that with kids at all, 0%. You cannot do that with kids. So what can you do with kids?
You can go to the beach or you can rent an Airbnb with a pool. I don't care about these things. I don't like these things. And then, of course, you're dealing with, you're going to fill the kids' time. You're going to entertain them. And that's not to say that this is unenjoyable. Yeah, it's fun spending time with the kids, but it's not the way that I would want a vacation.
And so my wife keeps telling me, when we're going on these vacations, you have to understand that this is not the vacation that you would love. This is a different thing. This is family bonding time. And that's going to come with different... roles and different outcomes. And that's true.
If I go down Sunday morning from my bedroom and I think, I'm going to get a lot of work done this Sunday morning, that's going to be great. It's going to make me feel less stressed. And then I'm trying to work and my kids are constantly interrupting me.
And I'm frustrated by that because they want another bowl of cereal and they won't get off their butts and do it themselves, even though they can, which is a constant conversation. Then I'm going to be really frustrated. But if I went down and I was like, I'm not going to get any work done right now, so I'm not even going to try. And that is all true. Jen is completely right about that.
And I'm working on that.
And the challenge is, I don't know. And I'm hesitating on saying this because I don't want to sound like a bad person. But that's the whole thing about this kind of straight parenting talk is that you keep walking this line of being judged. I'll just say that. And then I'll say, I don't know how to find joy in getting my kids the cereal. It is not a joyful task. It's an annoying task.
It makes me feel like I'm running a restaurant in my house where I'm constantly being asked, hey, can you get this? Push me in. I want another one of these. And that's not fun. There's nothing fun about that. And there's no way to make it fun. And I think that the answer is that you do it knowing that you don't have to do it forever. I don't know that there's another answer to it, right?
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