Old and Tired

I dumped on my son yesterday. There are occasions where I am able to step back, weigh out consequences and decide to let small things that bug me drop. Such situations are too few unfortunately. Yesterday i just didn't have the resources left to do it.


My wife, our household financial overseer, had told me we were too close to the red line. We had a bunch of upcoming expenses: three tax quarterly payments in 6 months, several cross country trips for sports activities and camps, impending car fixer upper things, replacing worn out and broken things around the house, etc. To cover things, I picked up a number of extra call shifts for the next several weeks.

Last week's load was maybe a bit too much work. i picked up several calls for that week alone. I ended up working tuesday night, thursday night and saturday day and night. since i picked up the week day calls at the last minute, i also worked the day before each shift and the morning after, as those had already been scheduled with patients. I did fine thru the first two calls but was pretty worn out by the time i finished on saturday. All the little annoyances with our new charting system had worn me down and exposed my worst tendencies.

Some of this extra work was done to help cover the expense of my son's upcoming lacrosse trips on a travel team. After I got back from work, I watched his practice yesterday and he was just kind of jacking around. He hasn't done one single extra thing to get better outside of his team practices. He'd rather play Halo or World of Warcraft. After practice in the morning, he left his bag in my wife's car. I guess he just expected that she would drop it off at home for him, unasked, so that he could get it for a private practice session that had been set up with his school coach later that afternoon. When it came time for going to practice, it became apparant that he had no gear. It was all in his mom's car. That just set me off. I practically killed myself, working over a hundred hours last week to help him with lacrosse (well, to pay all those other bills too, but at the time, it was all to pay for his lacrosse) and he couldn't even keep track of his gear and missed a private training session. After dropping off his friends, i kept jabbing away at how disappointed I was in his effort. I didn't do the "angry" thing so much, just the "you're never going to make it like this" rigamarole. On and on. "You know how many times your sister has forgotten her volleyball gear? NONE. Never. What does that tell you?" That kind of stuff. I guess we're equally disappointed in each other now. Bad dad. Guess I'm not as good at sleep deprivation as I used to be.

Yoga? No, not lately. Mis-aligned stars or something. Not one full practice since mid February. That's why there's only pictures of babies and dogs up.