When Giving Up Feels Easier Than Showing Up

Before my second child was born, I was chatting with a jiujitsu friend of mine. He is about a year further down the '“two children road” and I was asking for his thoughts on how he was juggling training consistently and present fatherhood. He said that there is a phase when you find yourself thinking it really would be easier if you just gave up jiujitsu rather than trying to fit in a training session on a regular basis. 

Six months later, I knew what he meant. But I think this impulse applies to more than hobbies. There’s a moment some fathers talk about in hushed tones, usually after the kids are asleep, and the house is quiet enough to hear ourselves think. It sounds something like this:

“It feels easier to just give up. On training. On hobbies. On any kind of regular rhythm that was just mine.”

It’s not depression. Not laziness. Not lack of love.

It’s just… reality.

For those of us in the thick of early fatherhood, the grind can be relentless. Sleep is fragmented. Our partners need more from us than we have to give. Work doesn’t slow down. And the kids? They’re not trying to break us. But they might still succeed.

It becomes easier to abandon the things that once anchored us, simply because joyful effort starts to feel like just more effort.

That phase my friend described—where trying to squeeze in a single jiu-jitsu session feels like dragging a wet mattress up a flight of stairs—isn’t limited to training. It bleeds into everything. Even the things we know keep us sane.

And yet.

Somehow we’re still here.

We keep brushing their teeth.

We keep reading the same bedtime story for the hundredth time.

We keep turning up, even when a part of us wants to check out.

That counts.

Sometimes “freedom” gets talked about like it’s a grand act of rebellion. But in these early years, maybe it’s something smaller. Maybe it’s letting go of the idea that resilience always means intensity. Maybe it’s just quietly keeping the pilot light on.

Instead of going all-in, we learn to go just enough in.

A ten-minute stretch instead of a full session.

A walk with a podcast instead of a gym workout.

A message to a mate, even if we don’t have time for a pint.

In his book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes about the futility of trying to “get everything done.” The trick, he suggests, is choosing what’s worth doing even when time and energy are scarce.

Maybe fatherhood teaches us that too. Fatherhood can (if we let it) strip away the inessential, and leave us with what is most valuable to us as men. Of course our children and our relationship with them are fundamental. But are kidding ourselves if we think giving up on our own healthy habits and hobbies is an altruistic act.

For me, jiujitsu is essential for my physical, mental, social and spiritual health. I’m not a better dad if I don’t go. This phase won’t last forever. But the way we move through it—halting, hopeful, half-asleep—shapes the kind of fathers, and men, we become, and the stories we can tell and model for younger men and our children as we do.

We don’t have to show up perfectly.

We just have to keep showing up.