[chandmk]

I am thinking about,

All those parents who are forced to work but always wanted to stay back and provide best care for their kids but couldn't do so.. feeling a gut punch.

Parents who chose career path and gets the slap in the face moments every time they realized that they could have spent more time with the kids instead of the work.

Is it possible to eat the cake and have it too?

[treis]

Yeah but you've got to learn to let things go. I'm temporarily single parenting with a full time job and it doesn't have to be that hard. Like kiddo usually eats microwaved meat & vegetables plus a pasta/rice that I cook twice a week. Is that worse than a cooked from scratch meal? Everyone will say yes, but he's getting the macronutrients and vitamins he needs so what difference does it make? Kind of applies to everything. Some days he doesn't get a bath, the house gets wild, I put a movie on because I'm tired of his shit and so on. But I'm 80-90% of ideal but that's enough for 99%+ of the benefits.

I've seen reflections of OP in a lot of parents in my life. They fall into two categories:

Type As that direct this sort of extreme level of effort to anything they do.

Anxiety/OCD that just can't let that little bit of benefit go combined with satisfying their complusion of controlling everything.

[gus_massa]

How many kids? She has twins.

A long time ago, when I had only one child I made a joke to one of my coworkers that had twins. It was something like that child care was O(N), so she had the double of problems.

Now I have two small children (and a big one), and now I'm convinced that it's at least O(N^2). [In my case O(5) not O(9), because the old one is old enough.]

[treis]

It's not really about the amount of work needed to parent. It's more about letting go until the amount of work matches your capacity plus some time for other things.

For the people in my life that sound similar to the OP they do the reverse. They add parenting work until their capacity is full. If you gave them and extra 3 hours in the day they'd still be just as busy.

[barefeg]

The philosophy I try to follow (which I borrowed from someone else) is: sometimes eat the cake, sometimes have it. Meaning if I’m trying to develop my career for a promotion or new job, I’ll adjust the priorities to achieve that, I.e. spend enough time with the kid, sacrifice me-time, sometimes a bit of sleep, etc. And once I achieve it, then “cool off” a bit, meaning spend all my spare time with the kid, finish work at 5, don’t hesitate to take PTO, etc.

[acid_dog]

Possibly with part time work but it can be hard to find, and it's still a compromise.