My daughter just turned 5 months recently. The first few months were great, although I felt myself slipping away a little at a time. I kept thinking I'll just catch up later at some point. Recently I have felt like I no longer exist as my own person, and I'm not even sure what to do about it.I wake up every morning and go to a job I hate. I spend hours there doing as little work as possible just to not get fired, but I think my boss is starting to catch on, and now I'm worried about my job. I recently got prescribed Ritalin because my doctor was concerned about my description of how I act at work and had me take a pre-screening test for ADD/ADHD. I am apparently at a pretty high risk of having it, so I'm going to be getting a more thorough test soon. The medication is helping a bit, but I still hate the job and have no desire to work.I leave work in the evening to head home, and once I get there our caretaker leaves. I have my daughter to myself for anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on when my wife gets home. During that time I have no opportunity to rest since that tends to be when she is fully awake and wants me to sing to her, or play with her. I do enjoy this time with her, but it's a bit exhausting right after I get home.Once my wife gets home, I'm getting dinner ready for us while she feeds the baby. We don't do anything complicated these days, but it still takes some time even if I'm just making spaghetti and meatballs. My wife's hands and wrists are killing her due to tendonitis and carpal tunnel that stems from breastfeeding. So once dinner is ready and we sit down, I generally hold the baby while we eat, since she doesn't like it when we put her in her highchair. We'll finish dinner and my wife will clear the dishes and clean up while I handle our LO.After dinner is cleared and away, the two of us will play with LO for a while, usually for another hour or two. We generally only stop the playtime when she needs to eat again. While wife feeds her, she constantly needs to ask me for things which I feel the need to obligate the requests because hey, she's feeding our child and making sure she survives. The least I can do is get her a drink, a snack, the remote, her phone, etc.At this point, it's about 10pm and we're starting to get LO ready for bed. How that goes depends on the night, so it can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours, but either way, once she is down, we're both exhausted and crawl into bed.Weekends are generally packed with things that need to get done around the house and taking care of the LO, or trying to do something fun as a family. This weekend was awful, mostly because my wife recognized that I was about to lose it. She decided to try and let me relax, but I don't really know how to anymore. Even when we would all sit down to just read/watch tv/whatever and she would take our daughter, it was still the issue of a constant request for items or help with something.So anyway, amidst all of my complaints and ranting, I guess my generally point is that I don't feel like a person anymore. I'm a husband/father/employee who doesn't have the opportunity or ability to relax and be himself anymore. Does anyone else have this issue? Does it get better? Any advice?Oh, there's also a ton of emotional issues going on because of some shit happening with my parents that just makes everything worse. It has caused my wife and I to really have trouble even talking anymore because I just don't know how to deal with any of that either.Tl;dr - I'm lost. Part of me just wants out of the whole husband/father thing, but more than that, I need help relaxing. Please help. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2bwotLY
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