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Hello fellow dad!
The key here is to work on not feeling guilty about solo time. It’s not easy. But it’s necessary. You need to recharge and some solo run time is an excellent way of doing it. One method I use is to remind myself that by doing this for me it will aid my family because I will be in a better head space for them.
As important as this is you should also encourage your wife to get some solo time as well. She needs balance too.
Best of luck to you!
Yea, my wife gets way more solo time than I do!
Good!
Then for sure don’t feel guilty about solo time. You need it and your family needs you to need it.
That's the thing, I feel that she deserves it more than I do. She's had to commit so much more of her body/time towards the kids, especially in those early months (and prior to birth)... so there's a lot more that she should get before I get anything.
Making time for yourself gives you an opportunity to be better dad and partner. I understand feeling guilty, but be sure to remind yourself that. Give yourself room to decompress and take care of yourself - don’t put that mental weight on yourself because it makes things harder especially when you’re already doing a good thing for yourself and your family.
Make sure your partner gets that chance too (which you said they do) and you can be your best possible parenting team.
Our one-year-old daughter takes a little extra work as a former micropremie with a few things to work through yet, but she should be pretty much all clear in the next couple months.
I'm fortunate enough to work from home and have a fairly flexible schedule. My wife handles most of the daytime baby work, but I'm also the first to wake up in the morning and last to go to bed. Sometimes the wife will leave baby with me and take a nap for an hour.
I'm good with that, because about once a month or so I'll get my own break. Typically this comes in the form of me going to a hot spring place a couple hours away from home. Between the scenic drive, soaking naked in a pool of warm water, sipping a drink, and often seeing a couple friends there, I have a chance to recharge and come home to a wife, daughter, and doggy who are all happy to see me.
I don’t have any suggestions and all I can do is commiserate that the struggle is real
I greatly benefit from being hard of hearing and a wife that understands that we don't both have to suffer. For both of our kids, she's let me sleep without my hearing aids (and thus, not waking up with every little sound). As they get older, I'm solely responsible for them at night (she wakes me, and I go take care of them), but I still benefit from true silence at night, and only woken when it's important.
The other, unspoken, part of my question is the fact that our lives are busy AF, and our time is absurdly limited. My free time ends up being chores, or doing things that I've either neglected or that have piled up in the interim (so many things to do around the house, both fun and not)... it's so rare to find time to do nothing
Our baby isn't here yet and I feel the same thing. My partner has had intense symptoms from the pregnancy, and isn't capable of what she normally is. We also have dogs, cats, goats, chickens, and a garden. And I am taking care of 90% of it. I don't have almost any "nothing" time.
I am hoping it gets better after the baby is here and her body recovers. But I fear the world you are experiencing. Good luck and let me know if you find out a technique.