Laid-Off Dad

Stranger in a strange land

The last week has been an exercise in odd nostalgia, since Renta is out of town and I've been living in the old place with the boys. Out of a bag, on the couch. I lived there 16 years, and it's only taken a couple of months for me to feel like a stranger in the apartment that still has my name on the buzzer. Nothing is where it was (I'm careful not to say "where is should be," although I'm thinking it), so when it came time for me to ride herd through the morning schoolprep, I jury-rigged my own temporary workstations. Otherwise I'd find myself ferreting fruitlessly through mountains of crap looking for a clean pair of 3T underpants.

The first night, Monday, you might have seen two winsome children and their strapping, fuzzy-headed caregiver dancing and jumping and whooping it up like it was VE-Day. We'd spent the last half hour or so cruising the nabe for a parking spot, and we'd decided that the best way to get on with our lives was to try our luck up by my place, where parking is about .002% easier, and take the subway back. We'd come to grips with having to surrender over an hour of our afternoon, yet I was going all "Life Is Beautiful" with it. It'll be an adventure! We'll make up a story of the three Jedi knights who ventured northward to the walled fortress of NoMa!

We all pretended to be excited, but deep down we all knew it sucked. But then, just as I began to accelerate out of Trawl Mode, there it was--a fine, wide swath of nothing, with no driveway, no hydrant, no cut curb, no debris. Suddenly furloughed, we sang and do-si-doed and celebrated with a large sushi meal, with extra everything. Then Robert clocked me in the World Series of Uno.

It's a good gig, this ultimate sitting. Reading at night, snuggles in the morning. But it surprised me how foreign the place already is. It's one thing to come here every day and hang with the kids until she gets home, and it's quite another to navigate Her Kitchen and Her Bathroom and Her System.

Three nights is enough. I'm looking forward to getting back to my place, where I know where all the 3T underpants are.

Troth and consequences

I've been struggling lately with how to refer to my boys' mother. Calling her my wife was always so easy, you know? One syllable, done. Wife. Even among monosyllables, it has a nice, staccato ring to it. Like the slash of a machete. Makes you think of a Peruvian laborer, hacking his way through a cane field. Wife!

I'm a big fan of the one-syllable reference. Throughout our marriage, I never called her by her full name, because it has two syllables and is unabbreviable. It still feels a little weird using it now. It's like having to say "Kentucky Fried Chicken." Or the "Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive." Instead, I had a shorter nickname, an endearment. Like "dear" or "hon," only a little less 1958.

When I refer to her in the third person, I still call her my wife. Because she still is, sorta, until the paperwork is final. It's nothing to do with pining for the past. It's just easier than "boys' mother," or "that one." I guess sooner or later I'll go with "ex," because it's simple and descriptive. No need to reinvent the wheel.

"Ex" is too simple for the blog, though. The blog offers me a chance to play, to use words that sound dopey and inscrutable in conversation. So I was thinking about how to name her here in a singular, yet neutral way. "Soon2bX" will expire soon. "Baby mama" is too long and a bit derisive. "BM" is shorter, but indicative of poo. I tried eliding "boys' mom" into "zmom," but that was too close to Adrian Zmed, who starred on TJ Hooker, which she is not. Mombert is OK, though it sort of overworks the Bert suffix, which has already been done. To death.

Other thoughts drifted into biology, or scatology, or libel. No good on all counts.

So I'm playing around with some more words, and I came up with Renta. A nice mixture of parenting, schism, impermanence, and couture, all in one go!

Yes, I agree. I need a new hobby.

I am Archimedes! Behold my junk!

Two nights ago, through a divine swipe of serendipity, I found myself with a free night during Spa Week. And as I lay prostrate on that table, being wrenched and pummeled by a woman half my size, I had an epiphany: I shouldn't need this this much. Having time for me, to do something utterly devoted to Me Maintenance, shouldn't seem so exotic and rare. And right when the massage therapist (whom I'd very much like to marry someday) stuck her knuckle in my hipbone and made my toes vibrate, I decided that my garden has become too overgrown, and I can't see my house from here.

It's time to feel more at home in my own life.

The five-day CoYombus holiday weekend was a step in the right direction, because I resolved to ignore all the Things Pending and devote my time to fun with the kids. I don't want to sound too Pollyannish about this, since single-parenting two young dynamos is as true a test of stamina as anything. You think Magnus ver Magnusson is a tough guy because he can pull a semi with his teeth? Ha. Bullshit on Toast. But even though their interests are approaching diametric opposition, my children are really terrific company when they're not trying to give each other brain damage.

It was the height of Peeping season, so we made like good New Yorkers and helped clog the Thruway on the way to an upstate apple orchard. There was a corn maze, a bike track, an apple slingshot, and acres of trees to climb. And what was the star attraction? A massive dirthole. So in the face of gorgeous autumnal splendor, three boys spent almost an hour scrambling frantically out of the Sarlacc's gaping maw:

The next day we went to Wave Hill, which is a ridiculously beautiful park that I'd never visited before because I am a hapless idiot. The park has Family Art Projects every weekend; this time, an artist showed slides of Antarctic animals and helped kids sculpt models out of this awesome air-drying clay, which you can color with markers and which when dried looks good enough to eat:

So in conclusion, there's nothing like a little fun (and a spine rearrangement) to break one out of a funk. From now on, I will write my book and I will write my blog, because writing is fun when it isn't completely harrowing.

And I'm even going to blop again. Unless McCain wins, in which case being kept alive and slowly digested by Sarlaccan stomach acid over several thousands of years will look pretty good.

A disunified theory of commutation

This new life phase can be rife and rippling with frustrations and regrets, but if there's one thing I can count on to drive me clear over the guardrails of sanity, it's my new commute. Time was, I got on a local subway, it took 25 minutes, I got off, boom. Done. A routine you could set your watch to, if there wasn't a Mysterious Package, or Police Activity, or Half An Inch of Rain on the Tracks. But now I live in the outer regions of Netherwhere, which lies two subways and a bus trip away. And the permutations of failure are exponentially more manifold.

Sometimes the express leaves on time; sometimes it just sits there, expelling fumes like a ponderous, farting manatee. Sometimes the express has concave seats that welcome the buttocks; sometimes convex seats that splay them unnaturally. Sometimes the local waits across the platform; sometimes it goes missing for weeks. Sometimes the local is the filthiest conveyance known to man; sometimes it's the second filthiest. Sometimes the bus waits 15 minutes while the entire state of Rhode Island gets on; sometimes it's only Delaware. Sometimes, the bus door has closed, and when you knock extra nicely and beg ingress, the miserable gastropod behind the wheel fixes you with a blank stare and floors it across the park.

On any given day, my commute can last anywhere from 40 minutes to a day and a half, and the part of my brain that craves normalcy more passionately than a border collie is starting to feel the strain. I mean, I like adventure as much as the next guy, just not at oh-butt-early o'clock.