Binge /binj/ (verb): To indulge in an activity, especially eating, to excess.
I remember so vividly spending my early and mid-twenties plastered to either a television screen or my computer for hours on end as I binge-watched episode after episode of one show or another. I can't even begin to list all the shows that I spent endless hours watching over the years between DVD's, Netflix, Hulu and wherever else I could find them. It has always been one of my favorite past times, because honestly there's just something satisfying about taking in an entire season of a show and not having to wait weeks between episodes to find the series' resolutions. Nobody want's to be left in the dark of a cliff-hanger, so bingeing season after season always seems to leave me with a sense of accomplishment. It's instant gratification at its finest, and I'm oddly alright with that being a large part of my college years.
But, now my life is unequivocally different than it was in my early twenties. I'm starting my thirties as a husband, a father of two boys, an overtime worker and a student. It's hectic, chaotic and completely insane in our house at times - but I wouldn't change a thing about it. Even though I come from a very mellow family (imagine The Brady Bunch meets Little House on The Prairie and you've got the gist of my extended family), I'm learning to adjust to the chaos - slowly; kind of. Yet that's what my wife is used to and she absolutely revels in it, she loves the busy, the chaos - it's comfortable for her and it's one of the things that I love about her because that's definitely not my comfort.
With all the chaos on a daily basis, it's been a long time since I even thought about bingeing. Literally anything. I watch an episode of a show here or there; mostly just to try to stay up to date on whatever show it is that I'm watching, which happen to be The OA, Supernatural & The Magicians currently at the top of my Netflix queue. Yet, I'm lucky if I get to watch one episode of one of these shows every couple days, normally when my alarm goes off at 4:45am and the rest of the house is sleeping (hopefully). I purposely set my alarm to wake me at ungodly times like that so I can find a bit of time to myself, and I usually wind up linking several things together during that time. Sometimes I'll watch a show on my iPad while I blog here or with Creators Media, other times I'll put an episode on the iPad and sit in front of the TV and catch up on the backlog of games I have for my Xbox or PlayStation. My mornings couldn't be considered a binge session by a long shot considering that I probably only get a half hour to an hour, tops. Yet it's the time that I have to indulge in the activities that satisfy my need to just shut everything off for a bit.
Except I started thinking about it over the last couple weeks when my youngest son has been waking up with me by 5:00AM. He's 15 months by the way; no normal 1 year old should be as awake at 5 in the morning as he is - yet he is. He's definitely my child in that sense. I've always been an early riser, and it looks like Travis is going to be just like me. At first it was frustrating that I was missing out on my time to shut my mind off and just get lost in a game or a show. Not that I didn't love my time with my child, but I felt like it wasn't fair that I never seemed to catch a break for a moment alone. I'd wake up with him, then wait for my wife to wake up, then head off to work and be on the phone all day, then come home for dinner, then play for a bit, then get everyone off to bed, then cuddle with my older son and watch Phineas & Ferb, then put him to bed, then watch a show with my wife and go to sleep myself. It felt as though there was no time for me to just enjoy being me, if that makes sense.
So as you can imagine, I had this chip on my shoulder if you'll afford me the allusion. I was carrying this, anger is a harsh word but yeah, I guess to a point I was angry that I had no time to relax. I kinda just pushed it away thinking that I'd just have to "deal with it." Then I had this revelation.
It happened one evening when I came home from an unusually stressful day at work, and I walked up to the back door and found an eagerly waiting 1 year old with his face smushed up against the slider glass door. He saw me step around the corner, into the light of the back porch and his eyes got wide and he spit his pacifier out with such a big smile. I could hear him squealing with delight and pounding on the glass slider door. I opened the door and he reached for me, so I lifted him up and he leaned in for a hug and patted my back, babbling the entire time.
It was one of those moments of just pure bliss that doesn't happen too often, and it just melted away all the tension I had. After I set him down he reached for my pinky finger and dragged me into the other room. As he was leading me around the house, I couldn't help but smile because it's almost as if he was taking me on a tour of everything he saw today. He wanted so much to just be near me, and show me his world that I finally realized something.
I realized that I'm not the only person who needed to binge. Travis, and for that matter Brycen, my 4 year old, both desperately wanted to binge me. Now that may sound like a weird phrasing, but it's true. They so desperately wanted to be around me that perhaps on a subconscious level, they were waking up earlier and earlier because they knew that I would be there in that time with them: no distractions. And that's what I needed a reminder of - I needed to remember that now, as a Father, the things that are the most important are experiencing the moments that I have with these boys. Bingeing on these experiences is a two way street and they get just as much out of being around me as I get from being around them.