"The first time I dropped my kids off at the YMCA, it felt like reverse shoplifting. I signed them in, said goodbye, and tiptoed backward out of the room. I lifted weights, sat in the steam room, took a shower, and returned a new man. Why doesn’t everybody do this?! I wondered. I had conflicting thoughts: tell every parent I see, or keep it my special secret, the way people who live in Montana hide their entire state.
This became my new routine as a stay-at-home dad: morning nap for my 9-month-old, short episode of Construction Vehicle YouTube for my 2-year-old, neaten the kitchen for me, and then we were off to the Y to see the crew. What a luxury! Two uninterrupted hours to exercise and gather my thoughts without a kid snotting on my shoulder or peeing on the floor or banging on the window with a plastic hammer.
When spring sprung, I took the boys to the park in the afternoon, and the nannies were all wondering where we’d been. “We discovered the YMCA,” I told them like we had found a way to split the atom.
What it’s like being a stay-at-home dad
Physically, being a stay-at-home dad is not hard. Doing laundry, cleaning people, places, and things, managing schedules, keeping my child from grabbing knives—OK, it’s not easy, but physically, the whole thing is manageable. Mentally, I find it brutal. The 5:30 a.m. wake up with a child on your head, the battle over breakfast, the battles over everything. No, you can’t have any more orange juice, put down daddy’s hot coffee, stop hitting your brother, where did you find another knife?!
Before the YMCA, I spent the fall mornings dreading the entire day, the repetitive tasks like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: As soon as you finish, you start over again. My patience, already at a deficit, took very little prodding to drain. My toddler is skilled at pushing buttons and then slamming them with a clown-sized sledgehammer, and when I react in anger with a yell or a squeeze on the thigh that’s a little too hard, I am ashamed. I feel my face get hot, and I imagine that from my child’s point of view, it must be gigantic and red and full of bulging veins.
“Physically, being a stay-at-home dad is not hard… OK, it’s not easy, but physically, the whole thing is manageable. Mentally, I find it brutal.”
“Daddy mad,” he said one time after I opened a cabinet and a glass cup shattered on the ground. It seemed like any loud noise was now connected with my temper. Some Instagram influencer’s voice enters my head, talking about how gentle parenting is the solution to my juvenile anger and also all world problems. See, I know that I shouldn’t be angry. I get it. He’s a toddler, and I am a grown man. And yet, here we are, with the dirt from the potted houseplant all over the carpet, again.
Lessons learned as a stay-at-home dad
Exercise is not the solution to everything, but it keeps me cooler longer: I don’t start the day drained of patience, and I’m not easily rattled… but when you’re a stay-at-home parent, workout time is a luxury.
Before the YMCA and shortly after our second son was born, my wife and I tried to integrate my toddler in at-home workouts unsuccessfully. He watched us watch these adults dressed as birds, instructing us on how to hop like chickens or touch our toes like cranes or flap our wings like storks. When you get to the 10-minute mark of doing aviary-themed exercises, your child with a genuinely concerned look on his face, you wonder if you, too, should be concerned about you. We needed another solution.
Around Christmas, my wife started pining for Lifetime Fitness, which is so fancy it’s called a health club. Back when we were in the double income no kids category, we could afford this. My wife recalled the smell of mint and eucalyptus in the carpeted locker rooms, the sauna, the steam room, and the childcare. Was there a way we could afford Fancy Fitness again? No, there was not.
That’s when she found the YMCA and learned they, like many other gyms, offer childcare for two hours a day. They had a pool. We could take the boys swimming and exercise as individual adults without thoughts of poultry.
The boys and I are now frequent fliers; we go almost every weekday. I asked my wife why she wanted to get a membership there, and she mentioned all the fancy things from Fancy Club, but she also knew I was struggling. She would come home at the end of the day and see my eyes dim, and I would pass the responsibility of the kids to her like I was handing over car keys, my brain turning off.
Stay-at-home dad depression is real, but exercise helps
I’m in a stay-at-home dad group on Reddit, and half the posts are guys talking about how depressed they are. When I saw the first one, I was like, woah, I don’t know if I’m ready to use the D word, but this sounds familiar. And then I was doing some research on postpartum depression in men and found that it affects one in 10 of us, with some symptoms that I’ve been flirting with, like anger, sudden outbursts, irritability, low motivation, the list goes on here.
The cool thing about this Reddit group is that most of the responses to the depressed dads are stressing the importance of exercise. We’ve done the Googling, we know exercise is important, but we don’t have the time or the money or the motivation. I was missing those three things, too, and then my wife found the YMCA. I use a free Nike Training fitness app that runs me through workouts, and beyond that, I get a short break from my high-impact kiddos, who I love very much and who I’m better equipped to love when I’ve had a lift and a break.
