What do you wish you could do more every day?

This is going to be a long read, so I apologise in advance, and I know to some this rant might come off a little whiney, so I apologise for that too.

Okay, so this is an easy one to answer, but a difficult subject for me to speak on. I wish that I could spend more quality time with my family. The emphasis here being on the word quality!

Now I know this probably sounds like a cliché or the most obvious or common answer you would expect to get from a full-time working husband and father, but the sad reality is that it is so common because it’s true. We don’t get to spend a lot of QUALITY time with our families and it hurts.

I am a civil servant, working for eight hours a day as my core time, Monday to Friday, so forty hours a week in total. Not too hectic right? Now add to that an extra forty hours of mandatory planned overtime each month. Still manageable? Sure, but now please add to that a full week of being on mandatory standby, so after my shift has ended I need to still be available on call at any God given hour, but for this week though, it’s Monday to Sunday and the areas that I service, you can bet your bottom dollar that you will be getting that call daily, most times more than once a night.

Now make no mistake, I am extremely grateful for the work I have. The benefits are great, the pay is decent, it allows me to provide a roof over the heads of my family and a warm meal each night. What I do not feel comfortable with though is the time it takes from my family.

Now something I feel we can almost all relate to is the fact that COVID-19 epidemic and hard lockdown hit us all pretty hard mentally, physically, emotionally and financially. Things got to the point where we were struggling to make ends meet aaaaand my wife was forced to take a position working the nightshift, as the shift allowance meant some extra money to help tie us over each month.

What this essentially means is that by the time I get home from work, my wife is starting work, and by the time I leave for work in the morning, my wife is still sleeping as her shift ended not too long before that. The only time we get to spend much time together is on the weekends, and even that can be a delicate juggling act as we are both so exhausted after our busy weeks that we can hardly give our eight year old son the attention he desires, let alone each other!

I know that this is just a phase in our lives where we need to bite the bullet and push through it, as there is light at the end of the tunnel and things will change again for the better. At the moment that light just feels like the tiniest of twinkles in the distance, like someone holding a candle in the middle of the night a few kilometres away, barely visible to the naked eye.

Let me reiterate that I am extremely grateful that we are still able to provide and have work as I know many people were hit a lot harder than what we were and my heart bleeds for everyone that was negatively affected in any way by the pandemic. I am simply a man who loves his family dearly and wishes he could spend more quality time with them.