Some Nights I Want to Leave. I Still Walk In.

There's a specific kind of exhaustion I feel most days on my way home. Some of it is from work itself. But most of it is from what's waiting after it.

I catch myself hoping, almost every evening, that today will be different. Quieter. Easier. I don't know why I keep expecting that, given how rarely it actually happens. But I do.

Then I open the door, and it's the opposite. Complaints before I've even taken my shoes off.

Shouting from one room or another. Something got broken, or he didn't listen, or the day apparently went sideways in six different ways before I even walked in.

And something in me reacts to that before I've had a chance to think about it. Not just tiredness. Something closer to a kind of ache — a pull toward a version of my evening that doesn't exist anymore. Just going somewhere. Doing nothing that anyone needs from me. Sitting in silence I didn't have to create for anyone else.

This isn't a new feeling. It's been sitting in the back of my mind for a long time now, showing up most clearly on exactly these evenings — the ones where I'd built up a small hope for something calmer, and got the opposite instead.

For a moment, the thought gets loud. What if I just left. Drove somewhere with no destination. Didn't answer for a few hours. Lived like I used to, before all of this needed managing.

And then, almost as quickly, I remember I can't. Not because I'm told I can't. Because I actually can't. There's a kid in that house who needs someone steady, and tonight, steady is my job whether I feel like it or not - well, not so steady to admit it — the kind of uncertainty that's everywhere right now, where you don't always know if a role or a decision is still going to be there tomorrow!

I don't think that thought — the wanting-to-leave one — makes me a bad father. It's not the only complicated feeling I've caught in myself with him — written before about the opposite instinct too, the one that makes me want to control every small moment instead of escape it.

I think it just makes me tired, in a specific way that doesn't always look like tiredness from the outside. I still walk in. I still deal with whatever's actually happening. But some nights, right before I do, there's this brief, honest moment where I want something else entirely.

I don't know if that feeling ever fully goes away for anyone in this position. I don't think I'm trying to make it go away, actually. I think I just wanted to admit it exists, instead of pretending every evening home is one I walk into fully willing.

These evenings are real. So are the mornings — some of them, anyway, when just for a minute, none of this feels like something I want to escape at all.