It Isn't Too Much Pressure

I was talking to my sister telling her how excited I am to have my kids with me for the entire summer and she asked if it wouldn’t be too much. Too much? Too much how? “Too much pressure?” she said. The pressure of being with the kids and doing remote work at the same time.

For a second I thought I just hadn’t understood the question, because I was answering from inside my own head and from inside my head, the math of having my kids here doesn’t produce pressure, especially during summer where we don’t have school schedules or other obligations making us busier. Summer is for us to do whatever it is we want. I work remotely, so I’m already home, building software and related technical artifacts, which I love. And my children, who are honestly and objectively two of my favorite people alive, are right here with me. Yes, I’m responsible for them. Yes, I feed them. Yes, I’m the parent. But they are also the people I most want to spend time with. So where exactly is the pressure supposed to come from? If anything, with them, performance and pressure go out the window.

In my mind, if you enjoy someone, you want as much time and as many experiences with them as you can get. That for me is literally what enjoying a person means and it doesn’t switch off because I happen to be working or because it takes effort. If anything it gets better for me when I’m working remotely, because they get to accompany me through my day versus grinding away alone. And that’s not to say alone time is not necessary, I love my alone time, I thrive in the shadows of my own loneliness, like Bane, but these years will pass by, or more accurately, fly by, and I will never be able to enjoy these early baby and toddler faces and moments again. Frankly, in this day and age it’s pretty rare for a father to be able to enjoy their children this much because most fathers leave the house to work and the kids stay behind, and the workday becomes a wall between them, and possibly still is until we die or retire, right? In the end, that’s what our “culture” is about nowadays, the grind and the work, the monies and the hustle. Well, I get to resist all of that and keep that work wall down, and my children are a part of my day, and it’s really no pressure. If anything, the opposite: having my children with me is the clearest glimmer I can get, and IMHO definitely not a burden or pressure I’m carrying but a privilege I lucked into (or worked and keep working my way into).

And it’s not just my sister. A few months ago I posted about doing this on Threads and I got scorched by mothers telling me I would buckle under the pressure, that I would do a shitty job at work or with my children, or both, that all of it was impossible.

View on Threads

Perhaps that’s the “pressure” I was being asked about. I had to sit with the question, and hell, I ended up writing this. It kept me reflective that entire week, because if I’m honest, I know the pull my sister and the others are pointing at because I’ve felt it too. It’s that quiet voice that frames the children, las bendiciones, las bendis, as the thing standing between me and “my real day”, my real work, the life I keep telling myself is happening somewhere just past the kids. I’ve caught myself treating presence as the interruption and the screen as the rest I earned. The difference is I caught it and swatted that idea. The privilege I mentioned earlier is not that I never feel that pull. It is that I can see it and choose against it. For me, that’s maturing as a parent: acknowledging that yes, it’s hard and it takes effort. And if you are a parent feeling a little lost, that is the invitation: look inside, figure yourself out, because las bendis deserve our best and most conscious effort.

That’s the main topic here, that consciousness of how much effort it takes for anything to flower, especially our children. And in my case, how much effort it will take to live a full summer with my children while working remotely. Nurturing is not easy. For a garden to thrive it needs energy, time, learning, tweaking, practice, and our children are literally pods in growth, feeding off the environment we provide. We can’t and shouldn’t forget that everything good takes work. A good meal, a real relationship, a healthy child and family system, a healthy self-image and balanced living, all of it carries a similar cost, and that “hardness” is the price of the thing being good. With parenting, that price is not optional, which, paradoxically, should feel like pressure but for me it doesn’t, because it is the given the moment we become parents.

I think being conscious means preparing for that realization and clocking the hours with grace. Ultimately, I feel the “Uber Eats” culture of instant everything and instant gratification and things “being so easy” trained us to flinch at the cost of things and to treat effort itself as a defect, and finally to blame the children for how hard parenting inherently is. Is it hard to work remotely, cook, and be with my kids all summer? You bet it is. You damn bet it is. But like any fulfilling relationship, I expected it to be hard, because it is, and that is the point. We made the same mistake with social media, calling it connection until we slowly realized it was never connection at all. The effort was the relationship. Same with our children: the bendición is the relationship, and the effort is the feed, the water, the fertilizer. We optimized the effort away and then wondered why nothing feels real, why even relating to our own kids feels so hard.

And I’ll tell you another thing that, depending on your mindset, could produce additional pressure right away. My children, our children, are a small mirror. What I mean is that most of what I can’t stand in them, I’m probably the one who installed it. We parents install so much shit on our children. So imagine a day in the life of a child whose parent feels their parental responsibilities as pressure, versus a day in the life of a child whose parent is integrated and conscious. Diametrically different experiences and environments, and that’s part of the installation I was referring to. We parents set that vibe. So whenever I catch myself wanting to complain about them, it is almost always myself I’m complaining about, but with extra steps and a side of lack of awareness. This responsibility, this mirror, has been a hard one to sit with, and it lands right on a pattern I’ve been working to dismantle for a while which I call the scorekeeper: a part of me that keeps a running ledger of who did what, tallies the effort, and secretly decides who owes whom, with the blame mostly pointing away from me. Perhaps pointed at my kids and that same reflex turns their behavior into a grievance instead of a signal about me. So yeah, I raise this flag, red or yellow, in case you recognize the same self-fulfilling pressure loop, because naming it is how I started getting out of it.

Nowadays the maturity I’m reaching for as a parent is the opposite move. For me that’s the anti-pressure medicine. I believe in accepting the role as a given, with my full heart, effort, and energy, not as a burden I’m owed credit for carrying, and in letting love do the thing where the work stops feeling like work (similar to the way it does in my actual work, because I do love being a technologist and solving problems, I haven’t felt I’ve worked a day in my professional life). I don’t always get there and I don’t think I’m supposed to. I’m not “fully matured,” because that’s not a final destination but a journey and it’s natural because children grow, as we grow, and life changes, life fluctuates, it’s ongoing and there is nothing to perform because the pressure was never about the kids and it was about the version of me that wanted them to cost less than they do, and maturing removes that friction. Maturing is accepting that this is hard and takes effort, and that it is also deep and full of love and giggles. It is realizing the cost was always an investment, that love multiplies and amplifies. We’ll see how this unfolds.

Ultimately, once we become parents we are not living the old solo life with a kid bolted onto the side of it. We are living a different life now, a whole different thing, and the part I keep returning to is that these small people didn’t consent to any of it. We brought them here and we brought them here to put in the effort and to enjoy them. So the real question for me is why presence with them gets framed as a cost, or as pressure, at all. I think if I keep looking here I will keep identifying my own shadows and lifting the weight. I think the least we owe our children is to not treat their existence as the inconvenience standing between us and the life we think we were supposed to have.

So no. It isn’t too much pressure. It’s the most and the least I can do.