Laid-Off Dad

Welcome to hell. Here's your popsicle.

Whoa. What gives, LOD? I had just gotten used to reading one or two posts per week, at best. Why are you roiling the still waters of my reality and posting twice in two days? And why are you wasting valuable blog real estate by putting words in my mouth?

The truth is, there have been developments. As there often are. Especially among parents, who are in a constant state of flux and know better than to embrace even the slightest whiff of complacency. Because whenever you do some new thing flashes at you from some as-yet-unheard-of direction.

First, drop-offs have been better, and Robert actually has good things to say about his day when I get home. And not in a way that suggests his spirit is broken and he drifts through the halls like a lobotomized McMurphy. His voice has an actual lilt, which wafts liltingly off his tongue. Hopefully, this will forestall my wife's nefarious plans of teachercide.

Speaking of lobotomies, the boys and I were wrestling yesterday when Robert rolled over my face and scratched the sharp edge of my coke-bottle eyeglass lens over my forehead. So now I look like a surgeon came at me with a scalpel and Eased My Pain. I did feel pain when it happened, but I had no idea how grisly it looked until I saw myself in the mirror when I got home. So I walked three crosstown blocks with this bloody, two-inch gash in my head, and none of the dozens of passersby said a thing. Or even looked at me funny. Ah, New York. Promise me you'll never change.

But the big news is ... big. Big! Bigger than the father of the biggest blue whale in the world!

When I walked out of the apartment last night, I found flowers and a bag of Belgian chocolates taped to our door. With it was a note:

"Thank you so much for your help with making the hours before 9am less noisy! We greatly appreciate it!"

Can you believe it? Weirdly and Creepella are satiated!

Naturally, I was floored. It felt like I'd capped Krakatoa.

Granted, the flowers were a pair of wilted hydrangeas that will be dead  by sundown. And the chocolates 1) had melted and re-solidified and 2) tasted stale enough to have been re-gifted from one of those Christmas sampler baskets that clients exchange. But it was the thought that counted, big time.

So there is good news, which is good. Because the weather is coldening, and Daylight Saving Time will end next month, and soon the boys, who are bigger than they were last winter, will be trapped in the house for hours at a stretch. And the lava beneath Krakatoa will be re-unleashed.

In which we take full advantage of the five-point harness

We've spent two weeks IN DANK REGRET, and the drop-offs aren't getting any easier. Robert still staunchly decries the American educational system and begs and pleads not to be a part of it. I can understand how he'd rather spend his time building spaceships out of stepladders in his living room, but there's also the wild card of this teacher, of whom reports are getting worse.

That's the frustrating bit. These are reports. I don't see any of it, because I'm out the door earlier and at my desk when the shit goes down. I've met the teacher exactly once, at Orientation Day, and the initial vibe was ... meh. But my wife is the one who does daily drop-off, and who sits for 20 minutes during parent/child reading time, and who has to chase Robert down when makes a break for it, past the screws and into the exercise yard. She's also the one who interacts regularly with the teacher, whose latest bit of chicanery was to move Robert's curriculum night to the morning, when working parents can't attend, so she can attend her own kid's curriculum night at a different school.

When you mention stuff like this to the principal, you are met with a what-can-you-do shrug, since this is the teacher's union we're talking about. Teachers are really hard to uproot once they're rooted, to the point that if she duct-taped the kids to the wall, stripped naked, and told them dirty jokes for three hours she might get a stern talking-to.

I'm trying to reserve a little judgment on this, and hope these are mere adjustment issues that will fade with time. But the rest of the family is not happy. My wife is plotting the teacher's ruination, Robert is using floor plans to model his escape routes, and TwoBert spends his days telling his sitter, "Robert home RIGHT NOW!"

The stress has addled us a bit lately, and the other day found the boys and me unconsciously blowing off a little steam. Robert had is bike, and TwoBert was in the stroller, and when we got to some security pylons at an intersection we starting racing around and slaloming through them. Then Robert chased us, and we chased him, and then the whole thing devolved into Demolition Stroller Derby. We'd start with some evasive action, whereby I'd turn the stroller on a dime to avoid getting rammed and TwoBert would squeal with delight as the harness saved him from centrifugal explusion. And we ran and swerved and piled on the screech-boom-bam sound effects for about half an hour, until Daddy needed to lie down in the grass until the world stopped spinning.

Thus a new relaxation game was invented. If you have a disgruntled kindergartener, a thrill-seeking two-year-old, the right conveyances, and a buttload of stress, I recommend it.

Adjustments

Kindergarten is now at full throttle, finally, after a few fits and starts. "Starts" because of the four days of abbreviated schedules, so the little darlings can acclimate to their new lives in this capacious, gray fortress. "Fits" because Robert already finds school "boring" and "awful," and he spent yesterday counting the hours before the four-day, Rosh Hashanah respite.

There are rules, you see. Rules that must be followed. From now until then you will do this, in this place. Then you will shift your place and do a different thing, for another prearranged period of time, with these strange people. You will obey your teacher, who at first blush strikes your dad as a tiny-minded, cap-toothed yenta. You will eat, pee, and think according to a specific schedule. You will either get busy livin', or get busy dyin'. Talking out of turn? That's a night in the box.

You will provide several bags of school supplies that your father spent hours tracking down among the myriad drug stores, office-supply centers, and stationery purveyors in the neighborhood. Your father will also make the rookie mistake of going to The Office Superstore That Rhymes With Maples at 7pm on Sunday night, the day before these supplies are "due," and find hundreds of millions of thousands of other parents all searching for the same shit and denuding shelves faster than a cloud of napalm. Your father will also thank said superstore for having the foresight to staff four cashiers among the 14 registers, so that the exit line will stretch around the corner, and up and over and through and back again, weaving a desperately grumpy scrum of humanity that just wants to pay for its blue Z-Grip retractable ball-point pens (!) and get the hell home and take three showers.

It's early, I tell him, and we're all adapting to this new stricture that has so rudely supplanted our free-form summer fun. He is trusting, but skeptical. Then we head to the playground for a few thousand innings of baseball with his friends. We use the big ball, the one about the size of his teacher's head. Line drives are scorched into the outfield, and homers are celebrated with screams and group hugs.

He is free to do what he wants, for a day at least, and he's learning not to take that for granted.

Answer the bell

The end of summer means buying a host of school supplies, like paper towels and brand-specific glue sticks, and watching Robert carefully arrange them in his new Lightning McQueen backpack so that no distending parts impede the zipper.

The end of summer means no more enslavement to inept weather forecasts.

The end of summer means skipping out of work to run back home and walk Robert to his first day of kindergarten, and listening to him talk his way out of being so desperately nervous.

The end of summer means feeling Robert's iron grip on my fingers and wonder if I'll ever play the piano again.

The end of summer means taking a few dozen pictures of him in front of his new school before he finally turns away in a huff and refuses to pose anymore.

The end of summer means walking him to his new classroom, seeing him run to his friend Eric, and watching them size up all the building materials along the back wall.

The end of summer means marveling at a little boy who is youngmanifying before my eyes, as in stop-action photography. It means looking at Lightning McQueen, and all the hero worship he embodies, and thinking about the actor who tried to kill himself last week.

The end of summer means thinking about the veneer that parents build to protect their young children from cold, hard reality, and acknowledging that it's just starting to flake off.

The end of summer means throwing away that nasty old pair of blue shorts, because they make me look like I have no ass.