I really wish other parents would stop asking about this.
My husband and I have three great kids who are too young to stay home by themselves. While our eldest could hang at a friend’s house for a few hours, that’s not an option for my younger two. Unlike just about everyone we know, we don’t have extended family available to watch them, either on a regular basis or even just for special occasions.
We bring our kids to places when appropriate but, in other cases, we generally resort to attending social or professional events solo. We have a local babysitter we use maybe three times a year, but paying for care more often isn’t something we are prepared to do, and as you might imagine, we prefer to save the few precious hours of paid childcare for evenings out with just the two of us.
I have struggled a lot with the lack of family support, especially when literally everyone else I talk to has family who provides regular, ongoing help with their children or, at the very least, agrees to do a night every month or two so that Mom and Dad can go out and have fun. We simply don’t have that, and it hurts both because I wish I could do things alone with my husband and because there isn’t the grandparent-grandchild bond so many others have.
The only issue that remains around all this is that my friends and even members of my family are increasingly insistent that both my husband and I attend events to which we’ve been invited. I’ve tried to gently say that we don’t have anyone to watch the kids, but they simply don’t understand that family care is not an option for us, and I don’t really feel like explaining to them that if we pay for a sitter to go to their event, we don’t get an evening out together this summer.
I guess that, as much as I’ve tried to grow out of my jealousy of free and readily available childcare, it’s still a sore spot for me. I have gone as far as I’m comfortable in saying we don’t have anyone to watch the kids, and my next step might be to break down in tears, which I don’t want to do either.
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