Laid-Off Dad

Condemned to repeat it

When Robert was about a year old, he and I developed this really fun game. Robert would lie prone on the couch for a few seconds before rolling off into my arms, and I would shot-put him back up into Roll-Off Position. We would repeat this 1) for about 10 hours, or 2) until he passed out, whichever came first. Robert grew to love this game so much that he tried to play it with his mama, who had no idea it existed. Imagine her horror, then, when she watched her firstborn hurl himself off the couch and clunk to the floor. A week later he was on the chiropractor's mat, and I was still smarting from a pointed and richly deserved rebuke.

Fast forward to January 2006: TwoBert, no longer satisfied by full-contact speed crawling, has learned to pull himself up and stand abreast of the couch. He loses his balance and falls backward but I, quick as a lemur, swoop in and catch him. TwoBert is enthralled by the adrenaline rush. He pulls himself up and starts Nestea Plunging into my arms over and over again, cackling like a hyena. Soon he is tired, so I start picking him up and placing him against the couch so that he can fall away from it, eyes closed, lines of drool gleaming against his incomplete toothline, beatific and carefree. A new game that my wife knows nothing about is born.

This morning, after I went to work, my wife saw her secondborn hurl himself off the side of his brother's race-car bed and clunk to the floor. And our chiropractor now lives in Wisconsin.

I think I could be a good dad if I wasn't such an idiot.

[EDITED TO ADD: My wife helpfully would like to clarify that Robert threw himself off the bed, not the couch, and that he went to see the chiropractor the next day. In an era of multi-terabyte storage, I have the memory of a VIC-20.]

A typically relaxing weekend with the family

It’s Saturday, and the family is home. The phone rings. A large company gets its kicks (and circumvents our statewide no-call registry) by cold-calling its own customers. A fragmented transcript of the next several minutes appears below. Words in italics are my best guess.

“Mr. Dad, I show here that your cellular phone contract has recently expired.”
“Who’s that on the phone?”
“Can I have some more milk please?”
“MMMMMMMM. EH EH EGGHGHGGPHPHPT.”
“Do not put your finger in your brother’s nose.”
“We can upgrade you to our conquistador plan for only $15 more per month.”
“But TwoBert keeps putting my cars in his mouth!”
“BBBPBPBPBPBBBUH BUH BUH BUHHHHHH.”
“Excellent! Now let me enumerate the 816 covenants of your new agreement.”
“Make sure you get a discount on the flanjammer Spartacus—”
“Daddy! I need a pen so I can draw my construction plans!”
“—then you’ll remove the UPC symbol and include it with form Alpha Two-Niner Delta, filled out in fifthlicate—”
“—definitely get a camera phone, so I can take pictures of child molesters who hang around the playground—”
“DAR DAR DAR DAR DAR DARRRR DEH DEH DEG DEG.”
“—that last phone number is very important, so I hope you wrote it down because I’m only allowed by federal law to say it once—”
“Daddy, get off the phone, please—”
“Oh, and don’t get any texting. I am NOT paying for text spam—”
“You need to help me! Get off the phone NOWWWW-uh!”
“MMMMMMNNNNNEERAHHHHH. GHTHTHP GGGGGUH.”
“—and you can call anyone whose first name ends in L for free on alternate Thursdays—”
“Mommmmmm!”
“—you will have double the minutes on even weekdays after 7 but half the minutes on odd weekends before 8:45—”
“We can watch Wallace & Gromit after Daddy gets off the phone.”
“—that second rebate is only available for the next 70 seconds—”
[fiercely atonal plonking on a toy piano]
“GAH! OYERLLL. NAR NARRR NAR NARRLLL. ERHHMMMM”
“I think TwoBert pooped.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

Yes. May I come live with you for a while?

T, mobile

There was a time when I could leave TwoBert on the floor pummeling his toy piano, attend to something else for a second, and return to find him just where I planted him. Now, he's just as likely to have shimmied over to the waste basket and begun gnawing on the phone bill. Or come tantalizingly close to pulling the broom down onto his fuzzy little noggin. Or, worst of all, to have messed around with Robert's stuff.

My wife and I have two mobile children.

Pish-tosh, says you. The world is full of families with eight kids between the ages of 3 and 7 who walk and talk and sing while they do the daily chores. So TwoBert can crawl. Big whoop.

You're damn right it's a big whoop. It's a positively Brobdingnagian whoop within the confines of the Laid-Off Lair when 1) the weather reverts to its customary Januarian mid-30s and 2) your older son suddenly contracts agoraphobia. (To Robert, it's obvious that TwoBert is morphing into a newer, better vision of him, and if he ever leaves the house we will change the locks and transfer all deeds of toy ownership to his younger brother.) My wife bears the brunt of this daily mayhem, which is why she greets me each night with a look of equal parts despair and carsickness.

I keep flashing back to when I was first laid off, in May 2003. As an emancipated cube jockey, I was ecstatic at the prospect of being outside all day at the peak of spring--and we suffered through the wettest June in the history of New York City. We were forced to improvise a lot at home, so we spent lots of time competing in the LOD-lympics. Now that we have one more competitor (and Torino is only a few weeks away), we've added a few events:

• Fish Dish Wash-n-Dash: place TwoBert in the corner of kitchen and count the number of dishes you can wash before you must intercept his hand as it reaches into the cat's food
• Anti-Crust Floor Exercises: wrap Swiffer pads on TwoBert's knees and leave him to wander around the hardwood floors
• Diaper H-O-R-S-E: self explanatory

My wife and I have two mobile children. Let the Games begin.

Fred

I first heard about Fred during my first week at the current gig, three months after he'd left. Fred had been the head of the tech department, so just about everyone came in contact with him sooner or later. Whenever his name came up, testimony was remarkably universal; everyone was 1) impressed by his character and personality, and 2) dismayed that, as a longtime National Guardsman, he was about to ship out to Iraq.

His tour would last 18 months, but nobody knew when those 18 months began. The day he left his job? The day he arrived for basic training? The day he was "boots down" in Tikrit? It was a moot point, anyway, since the Army could just extend his tour if it chose to. After he landed in Iraq, we sent several care packages over to him (the most prized contribution: Baby Wipes), and excerpts from his e-mails filtered into hallway conversations. And the Legend of Fred grew.

When I first saw him, he was home on an emergency two-week leave for the birth of his first child, Emmie. He bounded into the workplace wearing fatigues, as you do when you're still on active duty, and he was so surrounded by colleagues that I couldn't get near. Those of us who didn't know him sort of sat back, marveling at his following. For about half an hour he stood proudly amid the throng, smiling broadly and shaking every hand that was thrust his way.

Then Emmie was born, and within a week he was gone again. I thought about him a lot after that, whenever life at home was particularly dirty, or chaotic, or sleepless, or asphyxiating. Whatever my problem, I thought, Fred has it worse. And every once in a while, maybe during a quiet moment while TwoBert sucked my nose, I would think, Fred is missing stuff like this.

Fred helped me keep a strong perspective through some really weird times, and I told him so when I finally met him this morning, his first day back at the job. He is exactly as advertised: a funny, brilliant, genuine, charismatic nerd. As we spoke we learned that Emmie and TwoBert were born less than an hour apart, and it suddenly dawned that Emmie was conceived while he and his wife were at Fort Dix, waiting for orders that could come down at any moment. The timing and motivation seem entirely understandable.

Fred still helps me keep my balance, because at any moment the Army can tap him on the shoulder and send him back. When he left last time, Emmie was a barely-responsive larva. Now she's a girl, and if he has to detach from that sweet little face for another year, it will be brutal.

Whatever my problem, Fred has it worse.

Barely bearable

A married couple rests on the couch after a full day of boy-wrangling. Their backs are against opposite armrests, her legs on his. They are watching television, when a promo for a show about Wild and Wacky Weddings comes on. In the montage of seizure-inducing smash cuts, a groom is dressed as Beetlejuice.

She: If I wasn't living with you, I would absolutely watch that show.
He: Yep. That's what your life would be like without me. Home alone watching awful television instead of, you know, going on dates.
She: Ugh. I can't imagine dating.
He: Why not?
She: I'd have to learn tolerate another person's shit. I can barely tolerate your shit, and I love you.
He: You're beautiful when you're ornery.

Silent scream

We had great plans for the long weekend. Two of my wife's best friends are expecting babies this spring, and we were all set to pack the family into a minivan and drive to Westport for a Pre-Baby Summit. My wife, the medical hobbyist, would grill them on all things reproductive while the husbands, unwilling to hang around for frank discussions about discharge, would take the kids to dig trenches on the beach. The weather had been balmy all week, perfect conditions for little boys to ferret for sand-booty.

Until the wall of cold blew into town and knocked out their power, effectively killing the day.

Parents are conditioned to the basic truth that any plan has about a 60% chance of fruition. But this cancellation was a real blow, because we had spent Saturday morning gleaning six bags of babyphernalia to offload on the newbie moms, and Saturday afternoon staring into a half-empty closet, rapturous over the myriad storage possibilities.

Sadly, they were not to be. We were on the table, prepped and ready for a massive detritus-ectomy, and the surgeon dropped dead in his scrubs.

Plan B was an important zen exercise: the Steelers-Colts game. I've been a Steeler fan since kindergarten, so seeing them jump out to a huge lead over the best team in football piqued my interest. Then came the fourth quarter, which was one of the most heart-rendingly ridiculous 15 minutes of football played in recent memory, full of momentum swings and terrible officiating that would normally have sent me into barbaric yawps of incredulity (and others into cardiac events). But while my brain boiled on the inside I was the picture of outer calm, because TwoBert spent the whole quarter asleep on my chest.

You know those dudes who use mind over matter to walk on hot coals or sleep on a bed of nails? Wussie-boys.

Goatee-be-gone

It lived its life to the fullest during its brief existence, but over the weekend I laid the remains of my goatee to rest at the bottom of our kitchen garbage can. It served admirably on the chin-stroking front, but it has always grown in redder than the rest of my hair; since I'm now all about the salt-and-pepper on top, people kept asking if I colored it.

[Right. I colored it. I used that terrific new men's product, Just For Jagoffs.]

The primary reason, however, was much more serious. When your mouth is surrounded with scratchy little hairlings, it's impossible to give your 8-month-old a top-quality zerbit.

The gift that keeps on crapping

The data have been crunched, and the results are momentous. Over 27 hours, we heard from readers in 43 states (plus DC) and 18 countries. And 320 is a nice, round number, so I'll go with that. When you tack on the matching offers from readers Liz and Stacey, it looks like Heifer is about to get $960 $1,280. [UPDATE: Reader Pamela (see comment 10) has pledged another $320. The warm and the fuzzy just got warmer and fuzzier.]

Thanks also for your words, which were voluminous and inspirational--just the thing to pull out and read when I'm staring at a blank screen and feeling like a barren fraud.

I'm still looking over Heifer's gift options, and the current front-runner is rabbits. Heifer says rabbits are good gifts for two main reasons: reproduction and poop. Seems appropriate, since those two topics tend to dominate this site's content.

Once again, thank you all very much for chiming in and making this De-Lurking Drive such a success. Because of your efforts, one lucky village will soon be ankle-deep in bunny shit. Doesn't that make you feel warm all over?

Phriday Phenomenomenon

You know, I remember when Sheryl's International De-Lurking Week was just an ember of an idea. (Last year.) Now, it's a massive conflagration blazing across the blogosphere, and thousands of readers are smelling the smoke. They're poking their furtive little snouts out from their warrens of anonymity, saying hello, and scurrying back underground. It's become a phenomenon.

(And if you're like me, you like to let the word "phenomenon" loop along recursively in your brain. "Phenomenomenomenomen..." Definitely helps bring down the old diastolic after a stressful day. Try it at home!)

Dutch and Wood over at Sweet Juniper smartly transformed DLW into a charitable event, and in the interest of blatant meme-icry, I too am in the mood to part with a pile of money.

For every unique commenter between now and the deadline (Friday at 5 p.m. EST), my wife and I will donate $1 to Heifer International. If you don't have an e-mail address or a website, I don't care. Make something up. "denise@underpants.org." "farty@buttmas.edu." Whatever. A first name and your home town is all I'm looking for, because it intrigues me to see just how far news of TwoBert's drooling has spread across the globe.

Thanks in advance for making this a very lucky Friday the 13th.

Update: Whoa, Nelly! After 27 hours, we've reached the end of the road. Thanks to Sheryl for the spark, to Juniper for the inspiration, and to all of you for commenting so generously. And a super-special tip of the cap to Liz and Stacey, each of whom has offered to match the Laid-Off Donation. Now if you'll excuse us, we have a menagerie to browse.

A post-holiday post worth de-lurking over

There's a reason why January 6 is referred to as the Epiphany; at that point, most people come to the startling revelation that there's a big dead tree in their house, and it's covered in live electrical wires. Tannenbaums are all about festivity and warmth and glee as Christmas nears, but in the bleak light of post-holiday empiricism, they look ridiculous and pathetic, like a 40-year-old at a house party. So out to the compost it goes, along with most of the holiday cards.

After I gathered our cards from around the living room and gave them a last thumb-through, I noticed that almost no one included a picture of him- or herself. Instead, all the pictures were of children (or failing that, dogs in sweaters). Then I went to my parents' house for Christmas II (Electric Boogaloo)--multiple Christmases being a nice perk of geographically diverse grandparents--and their card collection was resplendent with buck teeth, cowlicks, freckles, and matching red gingham dresses. But not an adult in sight.

Listen, friends. If you sent my family a Christmas card (or in our case a New Year's card, since we never place our Shutterfly order until December 24), thank you. It's great to know that you're 1) still alive and 2) not quivering in a ball on the floor, praying for the pain to end. But you are my friends, not your kids. In many respects, I've never even met your kids. So I'm not all that impressed if they've managed to increase in mass this year. I might have guessed that already.

When you send me a card, I want to see what you look like. I need evidence that my friends, whom I care for deeply, are decomposing as alarmingly as I am. I want to see cracked teeth, mange, incipient jowls, translucent skin, paunches, premature grays, gingivitis, moobs, wrinkles, ear hair, surgical scars, as well as a general look of fatigue/malaise, just so I know I'm not the only parent of young children who looks like the picture of Dorian Gray.

Will my wife and I share a private chortle at your expense? Possibly. But I'll also miss you all the more, perhaps enough to make contact and set up travel plans, so we can have a beer and compare hairlines in person. And isn't that what true friendship is all about?