Is this just… it? Is this what being a parent means now? Because honestly, I'm just so *tired* of the playgroup. Every Thursday, same damn thing. Sarah, my wife, she loves it, she thinks it's so great that I'm "connecting with other dads," but what connection? What are we even connecting about? It’s like a competition to see who has the best lawn, who can tell the most boring story about their sprinkler system, or who can recite last night's sports scores with the most conviction. As if that’s all that matters. As if we don't all have tiny humans screaming for goldfish crackers and demanding to be held every single day, every day, all day long. My kid is… he’s amazing, he’s perfect, but he’s also a tornado of needs and anxieties and sleepless nights and I just… I want to talk about it. I want to talk about how it feels like my brain has been permanently rewired, how I can’t remember what I ate for lunch but I can tell you the exact decibel level of a toddler tantrum. Is that weird? Does everyone just pretend it’s fine? Does everyone just talk about their goddamn grass? I look around at these guys, all of them in their slightly-too-nice athleisure wear, sipping their lukewarm coffee, and I just want to shake them. Like, *hello*? Our lives are completely different now. We used to go out, we used to have opinions on things that weren’t… topsoil. And now it’s just this endless, repetitive drone of suburban banality. I mean, my career is still, like, a huge thing for me. I’m still trying to make it work, still putting in the hours, still worried about how we’re gonna afford this city, this apartment, daycare, everything. And then I come to this, hoping for some semblance of… I don’t know, real human interaction? And it’s just… which type of fertilizer do you use for fescue? What in the ACTUAL HELL. Am I the only one who feels like my entire identity has been swallowed by this new reality, and I just wanna scream about it instead of discussing the merits of synthetic versus organic weed killer? What is wrong with these people? What is wrong with *me* for wanting more than that? It’s just… it’s frustrating. It’s infuriating, actually. Because I know they’re struggling too. I see it in their eyes sometimes, that flicker of exhaustion, that desperate need for a quiet moment. But then someone brings up the playoffs again and it’s like a switch flips and they’re all just… gone. Lost in the weeds of trivial nonsense while I’m sitting there, my brain buzzing with a million worries, feeling so incredibly alone in a room full of other dads. And I can’t even bring it up, because then I’d be the weird one, the one who’s "too intense" or whatever. So I just nod, and I fake-laugh at the terribly unfunny joke about leaf blowers, and I count the minutes until I can escape and go back to my actual life, which, believe it or not, involves more than just keeping my lawn pristine. It involves a tiny human who needs me, and a wife who needs me, and a job that needs me, and a brain that feels like it’s going to explode from the sheer volume of unspoken things. Every single day.