Main Character Life with Bit Part Energy: How Can I Romanticize My Life if I’m a Parent?

I’ve enjoyed reading about the trend of “romanticizing your life” and “main character energy.” At its most commercial, romanticizing your life feels a bit like the hygge and Kondo trends that have come before it. There’s a slowing, a move towards self-nurturing. An emphasis on joy and small pleasures. “Romanticizing your life” involves making a deliberate effort to bring a small moment of beauty to your everyday life: buy yourself flowers. Hang eucalyptus in your shower. Make yourself a lovingly-prepared breakfast. 

As one internet commenter wrote, “​​Do you ever watch a movie where they sit on the roof and watch the sun rise, take a road trip or wander the streets and strike up a conversation with someone really interesting, and wish that was your life?”

So, basically, the trend is partly composed of nostalgia for the time before smartphones, but also the desire to embed your everyday life with cinematic significance. 

As with so many trends, I’m noticing that much of this main character energy and life romancing is aimed towards twenty-somethings, not at me: a person society has deemed invisible since I turned 35 and had a kid. Many of the things I can think to do to romanticize my life (read books while the rain patters on the window! Make a four-course dinner for friends! Watch the sunrise by the river!) don’t exactly fit into the allotment of free time I have while caring for a toddler. 

And like…I have to say it. It’s hard to have main character energy when most of the time I feel like a bit part. In most of my waking hours, the main character is played by my child, enacting such scenes as rejecting the dinner I’ve cooked, then launching into a song-and-dance number about her desire to have Play-Doh, crescendoing with a request that I play the Aristocats soundtrack Right NOW! RIGHT NOW! (I know, just wait till she sees Encanto.) 

But as Christina Caron writes for the New York Times, romanticizing your life is more about mindfulness than consumerism, so I figure there’s got to be room for me. 

“Although some of the content appears aspirational — not all of us can afford a quick trip to Italy or run off to a field full of flowers, dressed in flouncy spring fashion — most of it rejects the type of messaging that pushes people to acquire material things…One Reddit commenter found joy even while washing coffee pots at work. ‘After putting a little soap in the pot, I gently squeeze the bottle to blow bubbles out,’ the user wrote in a thread about romanticizing. ‘I love bubbles.’”

Oh, there’s mom. Doing the dishes. 

Romanticizing your life is about adding intention and meditation to your daily rituals. Channeling “main character energy” is a way to ground yourself in your everyday actions, fully notice what’s around you, reclaim your agency, and embrace authenticity. And yeah, put down your phone.

So how do you up the romance and take center stage when you’re the parent of a small child? 

I have more flexible time than most parents I know because I’m home with my child during the day. But for most of my friends with kids? I get the sense their days look a little like this: 

The alarm goes off, or maybe your child is already awake before it. You get the baby up, grab a cup of coffee, and try to assemble breakfast, as well as snacks and lunch to send to daycare. You clean up breakfast. You unload the dishwasher, take the dog out, get everyone dressed. There’s the commute to daycare and work, or maybe you’re working from home. Then the long, full day. 

You return to pick your child up from daycare. There’s the latest scuttlebutt over COVID infections in the infant class, who had Hand Foot Mouth last week, also don’t forget to send more diapers and wipes because we’re out, etc. Then you get home, and you want to spend time with your kid. But who’s making dinner? The constant wiping of hands, sweeping of floors. An after-hours work email comes in that someone has to answer. Then it’s time for the bathtime/bedtime routine. And then what? Your kid’s finally in bed, your house looks like a tornado hit it, and you’re exhausted. 

So you reset the coffee maker for tomorrow, answer another work email that came in while you were doing bedtime, and sink into the couch for some Internet. And then, it’s either time for you to go to sleep, or time to engage in revenge bedtime procrastination, which feels good for the moment, but will punish you tomorrow. 

Show me the romance. (It’s Hand Foot Mouth. You got me.) 

When you do the math, it’s tough. I have about two hours of downtime a day on weekdays when I’m neither working my job nor actively caregiving. The most delicious daydreams of romanticizing my life (sleeping in, listening to the birdsong, reading in bed as the sunlight creeps in through the curtains, making an intricate breakfast) aren’t accessible to me right now. 

But that doesn’t mean parents can’t participate in the romanticizing. Bring it, Gen-Z. 

Here are the moments of romanticized mindfulness I enjoy most in my week: 

Savor the morning coffee. 

I have a strict caffeination-before-parenting rule, which means that even on the weekends, I find it worth it to wake up about 20 minutes before my child does. Also: French press! Feels like a treat, not that much extra effort. 

When possible, add something for yourself into the morning commute. 

For me this looks like walking to pick up my child from preschool instead of driving / taking the bus, and really noticing what nature’s up to while I’m walking.

Be selfish with your kid activities. 

As we learn to live in this pandemic, activities for small children are returning to our lives. But if your kid is too young to have an opinion on the activity, pick something that’s going to add a moment of romanticizing to your life. For me, that’s toddler music class. We’re outdoors, and we’re singing, two things I love. Am I still sometimes having a stern discussion with my two-year-old about why rhythm sticks are not a weapon? Yes. But there are moments of dreaminess when we are singing and dancing together.

Make something.

It’s the new “sleep when the baby sleeps”: do art when your kid does art. It can be tempting, in the ten seconds when they’re engaged independently, to just look at your phone, but I’ve tried meandering through a 100 Day Project instead. While my kid layers seventy five stickers on one sheet of paper, I experimented with watercolor pencils. 

Buy the frou-frou dish soap. 

Because so much of the everyday routine is filled with washing-the-coffee-pot level tasks. 

Segment, don’t binge.

In that precious window at the end of the day, I’ve found that segmenting entertainment can feel more satisfying. Instead of turning on a show and binging until bedtime (or, god forbid, opening TikTok), I’m trying to watch one episode of a show, then pausing to take a shower, then reading a book in bed before I go to sleep. 

About that shower: Light some candles. 

I started showering by candlelight because I struggle with insomnia, and the bright lights in my bathroom weren’t conducive to the “dim the lights” recommendations I was getting for how to cue my body for sleep. But now I realize this is exactly the level of romance I was looking for. I’m going to shower anyway. Why not make it a whole mood? 

Craft a dreamy Saturday ritual. 

If you’re a parent, the romanticized weekend lie-in is probably gone. As is breakfast in bed with the physical copy of the New York Times and that strategically placed vase of tulips on the tray. It’s time to craft a more family-friendly Saturday ritual. Here’s mine: we wake up and feed the toddler “first breakfast,” then order biscuits for pickup from the restaurant up the street. We take a long walk to pick up the biscuits, then hit the farmer’s market, playground, and sometimes the library. That’s it. Maybe it’s basic, but it brings me a lot of joy. 

I’ve seen several lists online like “45 ways to romanticize your life” or “50 moments to harness your main character energy,” and at first I was beating myself up that I only have 8 suggestions of things to do. But now that I’ve written them out, that feels about right. Parenting is not all-day romance. And those cottagecore moms on Instagram are for-sure hiding something. We may be old and uncool now. We may not have survived the vibe shift. But parents deserve moments of beauty and mindfulness, too, even if you don’t care about being trendy. And hey, if it all feels like too much lately, the youths are already onto the next trend—bring on side character summer.

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