Dear Diary. I won't lie or pretend anymore; parenting is just a massive scam. I don't know who benefits from it. Someone has to because there's this mass unspoken agreement that parents have to pretend that they like looking after the kids and like being a parent. The fact is that the happiest people I know and I'm sure you know as well are those without children. I'm sure I'd be much happier if neither of my sons had been born. Actually, I think now that I've become a parent, I've just traded one misery for another. Because when I was in my twenties and childless, I wasn't happy then either. Now, I'm still not happy but it's a different kind of unhappiness. Now it's one caused by the near-constant mental torture of having a four-year-old want my attention non-stop. I suspect 4-year-old is more difficult than other children in the sense that he's lazy and always wants me to play with him. He's very needy. Even as a baby, he was a difficult child who would cry for hours. The only thing that would console him was breastfeeding. Sometimes he would suck on Girlfriend’s breast for almost the whole day. Not because he was hungry, but for some other reason that we never figured out. I think it might have been colic.

The only good thing about being a parent is that the constant demands of parenting distract you from your underlying unhappiness. So you don't have time to dwell on your unhappiness anymore. Instead of feeling sad, you now feel drained and annoyed instead.

Weekdays are better. Thank Christ for school. I don't know what I’d do if I had to look after 4-year-old 365 days of the year. I probably would have blown my head off with a homemade shotgun.

I think to be a happy parent, you need money to afford people to help you. Whereas if you're poor, then you have to do the bulk of parenting yourself, plus the household chores and the cooking and the grocery shopping, and of course you're going to feel overworked and stressed.