Laid-Off Dad

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

Today is 5/12/13, so to all those moms out there, happy Pythagoras Day! And I know what you're thinking. It's a shame that a cruel twist of the calendar would cause Mother's Day to be overshadowed by our culture's universal love of geometry. 

I have nothing against Mother's Day, personally. I'm all for honoring mom, and for giving consumer spending another artificial kick in the pants. I'm all for calling my own mom, to tell her I love her and to please stop voting Republican. I support breakfast in bed, clayed handprints, crayoned love notes, cuddles, kisses, all of it. Motherhood is sacred, and essential, and America, and YES.

But there are two reasons it leaves me ambivalent. For one, I really hope that one day Father's Day can be as big a deal. (Or at least bigger than "Hey, it's June. Let's move some pliers.") And I don't want a handout, either. I want us to earn it, to deserve it, to knock our brains out being the dads our kids need.

Some days, though, the idea seems elusive. I have alerts set up for as much fatherly news as Lord Google can find, and a lot of the stories aren't all that encouraging. You can read only so many headlines about dads with phrases like "shoots son in the liver" and "robs area convenience store" and "watches p0rn on Dad's phone" before you start muttering to yourself, "C'mon, you jags. Do better."

Mother's Day also reminds me of how much of a drag it is not to be in love with the mother of my kids. But I really can't complain (much). Things with Moxie are pretty okay right now. We're friendly, and we see eye-to-eye on most things when it comes to the boys, and that's a lot more than I can say for several friends, whose marriages have blown apart terribly (or are about to). It's just that building a life with someone was one of my primary life goals (even though I had absolutely no idea how to do it), and having failed will always be that little bit of sand in the underpants that won't ever fully rinse away.

I like Pythagoras Day because, unlike life, his theorem is simple, elegant, and eminently provable. Fitting that his day only comes around 11 times per century.

The kindness of strangers

This week, in spiteful defiance of a winter that outlived its welcome months ago, we held our Cub Scout meeting outdoors at a nearby playground. The boys were learning the very important Life Lessons that:

1. picking up litter is a very important expression of civic duty, and
2. many people are careless slobs who drink booze and fornicate near children's playgrounds.

When we arrived, the boys spent about 20 minutes running and yelping and climbing all the things. And just as we were settling down for our meeting, a 30ish woman with a troubled expression and arms crossed firmly across her chest came over to our picnic table and asked to speak with me.

If you've ever spent time on the playground with your kid, you know it's never good when a stranger parent asks for a word. I learned this on some of the tonier NYC playgrounds that are infested with over-earnest helicopter parents devoted to sheltering their children from conflict. So when she pulled me aside, I braced for the worst.

"I just want you to know that I'm very emotional right now, because I'm three months pregnant," she began. "If I start crying, I'm sorry in advance."

Noted. And so we ratchet up to DEFCON 3.

"I just wanted to say that I saw these boys all playing together near the climbing structure, and when my son tried to join in, they all said, 'No, you can't play with us, because we're all Cub Scouts and you're not."

(Emphasis mine, to indicate that as she finished that sentence the tears began pouring forth.)

"But your son ... [sob] ... was the only one of them ... [sniffle] ... who said it was OK and ... welcomed him into the group."

I processed this as my buttcheeks slowly de-clenched.

"Your son was just ... [sob, sniffle] ... so kind. Thank you!"

I have a sense that you could be thinking, in your best Chandler Bing voice, "Could this post BE any more self-indulgent?" And I get that. But I'm writing about it anyway, in part because my sons spend a lot of time being unkind to each other, and it's a relief to see them revert to Jekyll Mode when civilians are involved.

I'm also not in a place to crow too loudly, since I'm not only just half of this parenting effort; I'm almost completely removed from the other half.

Mostly, though, this conversation is sticking with me because it was such a nice surprise. In this era of highfalutin parenting opinions, parents have become experts in bitching about What Your Kid Did. And at the end of a particularly trying day, there really is no better selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor than having a complete stranger approach you out of the blue to tell you you're doing something -- anything -- right.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if your mood has been befouled by the truly nasty detritus that some lazy jagwagon left 10 feet from a trash can, there's nothing like a sweet, emotionally unstable, incipient mother of four to help balance things out.

Off the rails

For a while now, I've been thinking about why I haven't been writing. And a while is about as benign a term as I can conjure, because a while is of such indeterminate length. A while can be half an hour while you're waiting for someone to pick you up at the airport, but it's also been a while since the last Olympics.

My writing drought has skewed toward the latter. On Monday, however, I had a bit of a breakthrough. 

I was over at Moxie's, picking up TwoBert for his Cub Scout meeting, when she and I began discussing the Boston bombings. Since we hadn't talked about them with the boys yet, we were speaking as obliquely as possible, especially about contact we'd had with people in the Boston area. ("Everyone's fine." "I hear one was only 8." "No word yet about Why or How.")

And then the 11yo said, "Are you guys talking about the bombings in Boston today?"

Because of course the story was discussed in school, and he'd had the chance to digest this latest abomination before he'd had any interaction with us.

That seems like the crux of my problem right now, something bigger than how my sons are already desensitizing themselves from the string of deranged, craven assholes determined to kill innocents. When such high-profile violence occurs, a parent's instinct is to figure out how to Discuss It With The Kids. But in this case, someone else had discussed it with them first.

Our ability to control how our kids experience the world is slipping away.

Yes, that's an exceedingly maudlin thing to write. It's also completely inaccurate, since so many of us persevere by deluding ourselves into thinking we have more control than we do. I liked to think my divorce and all those job layoffs inured me to life's transience, but the one constant has been that my kids need me to shelter them from this world that is more full of weeping than they can understand. They still do, but not as much. And as this trend continues, it won't be long until my sons are adolescents and I become a complete idiot.

Parenting is becoming more complicated. My learning curve is steepening. And it's odd to think I'm losing control of the last thing I ever thought I could control, even though I know intellectually that I was never in control in the first place.

I think I need to go to the gym and overthink this some more.