Slow the Fuck Down

Unless you're the protagonist from Crank. Please keep going if you happen to be reading this.

Ever since taking on The Optimally Fuckable Husband project, my phone usage has decreased dramatically. I haven’t kept up with it perfectly, but at my best I was averaging less than 45 minutes a day.

The main way I achieved these really low numbers was just keeping myself so occupied with being a Fuckable Husband that I didn’t have time to be on my phone. When you’re working out and having quality time with the kids and keeping the house in order and everything else that goes into it, things like phone usage just get crowded out.

For ages, my daily screen time was my windsock for how much I lived in the moment. Too much Reddit or scrolling for too many minutes on the phone meant that I wasn’t present that day. And since the average amount of time a person spends on their phone is a little over five hours daily, and since even my worst days are still typically under two hours, I felt my daily level of presence was on par with Gandhi or the Dalai Lama.

It wasn’t until an interaction with my daughter that I realized I had a long way to go in truly being present.

Here’s what happened:

I was on paternity leave. My wife and I just had our third and final child, and our divisions of responsibility were very clear. She keeps the new baby alive. I keep the old babies alive. Literally nothing else was on my plate besides that one task.

One morning I took our Golden Doodles to doggy day care (We are suburban basic bitches). My wife insisted that I leave the kids at home, and I raced out the door to make the dogs someone else’s problem.

Later that day, my 4-yr-old asked me:

Daughter: “Daddy, you didn’t let me say bye.”

Me: “Did you want to say bye to the dogs?”

Daughter: “No you didn’t let me say bye to you. Why didn’t you say bye?”

Ouch. Way to drop the ball Dad.

Me: “I’m so sorry kiddo. I was in a rush.”

Daughter: “Why were you in a rush?”

And I sat there with no answer. Why was I in a rush? In so much of a rush, I didn’t even see my daughter waiting to say bye to me. The question crushed me. My daughter moved on within minutes but I was terrified about all the other things I’d probably rushed past without noticing.

My daughter’s question “Why were you in a rush” bothered me for weeks. And as I thought about it I kept catching myself in real time rushing through tasks and chores and even some games for no discernible reason.

It was in catching myself so many times that I realized why I personally was rushing through everything.

I’m in sales. My job sort of never ends. There’s always something else I can be doing to make progress on my quota. I live in a house with three dogs, a cat, three kids, and a wife. Someone always needs something. The house is always in more of a mess than anyone would like it to be. Dogs constantly need taking care of. And on top of all of that there was a mountain of house projects stacking. There’s just so much that could be done.

I’m going to highlight that distinction. Not “things to do”, just things that could be done. But I had never asked myself the question, “what is important for me to do today?”

We live in a world obsessed with productivity. Without asking that question directly, what seems important are the things that seem productive. And what seems productive is dealing with the thousands of things I can clearly see that need to get done.

But when I sit down and ask what’s important today, getting all of the dishes out of the drying rack doesn’t make the list. Getting the dogs to doggy daycare at 7:30 instead of 7:32 does not make the list. Making my kids feel loved and my wife feel lucky and myself feel valuable, those things almost always make the list.

I’m somewhat surprised it took me as long as it did to figure it out because I had been living the value of slowing down during my kid’s bedtimes.

I really dislike putting my kids to bed. It’s almost always a chore to me. But my kids have a blast, and so I’ve always made the conscious effort to not let them know that I would like bedtime to be over already. I refuse to skip pages in a book or tell them to hurry up. I make sure we all get to savor the time, even if I don’t much care for it.

And I bet you some of my kids’ best fun comes from bedtime.

My two-year-old son always tries to escape when I’m putting his clothes on, and I nearly always let him think that he barely got away. My wife has had to return to me the wet, giggling naked toddler that went looking for her after his escape.

My daughter has invented tons of goofy games that I play with her when I’m putting her down. She does everything in her power to keep me from leaving and now nightly asks me questions she thinks will take me forever to answer. She’s asked great questions like”How are mirrors made?” “How do eyes see?” “What’s inside my belly?” and “how far away are planets?” and “why do boys have balls?” (We’re getting perilously close to “where do babies come from?”). And I, true to my commitment, spend as much time as needed answering her myriad of questions.

And I can tell she loves it. She explains all these things back to mom and grandma and excitedly points out to me the things she’s learned when she runs into them in real life.

I’m very glad I learned this lesson. Because The Optimally Fuckable Husband Project actually grates against this concept. Because to me, the Fuckable Husband is in some terms to do it all. To be fit and to contribute excitedly, and to be present and to be a capable provider and to go out of your way to make your partner feel special. It’s to clear the plate of stress to the best of your ability off of everyone seated at the table.

And that task is never ending. So if I hadn’t learned the importance of pre-defining what is most important that day, I’d probably still be rushing past the things that matter to finish the things that don’t.