Laid-Off Dad

The bookmark of Damocles

As a single parent, I solemnly swear that this is the last sentence I will ever write that begins with "as a single parent." Because you all know that already. It's chewed meat. Besides, thanks to WTFGU, it has been asserted that I'm not technically a single parent, because my ex-F is still alive. I am a co-parent, who just always happens to have singular dominion over his children whenever they are present.

And when they are present, they tend to clash. Tilt. Engage in absolutely pointless fisticuffs simply because each is within the other's striking radius. It is each boy's default setting. If at any point either of them is not striking the other in a provocative or defensive way, their amygdalae and synapses and whatnot start firing like liquored-up Yosemite Sams. A donnybrook ensues, and it's up to me to find out who popped whom and mete out some Daddy Justice.

Last week the culprit was the 8-year-old, who took something or said something or looked at someone funny or made a crass comment about someone's butt, or whatever. This had been a particularly combative day for the little Katzenjammers, and when I saw R's arm cock for about the 200 jillionth time, a day of stressful armed diplomacy gave way to a new idea that took Daddy Justice to the next level.

R is in a deep phase of femintipathy right now, and all things remotely related to princesses, or ponies, or pastel colors cause him to convulse. For a little rainy-day fun, all you have to do is ask him whether he likes iCarly or loooves iCarly, and watch his face turn into an eggplant.

So while the other kids repaired to the front lawn to re-enact that interminable Colosseum Rip-Off scene from Attack of the Clones, I sat my boy down in a chair, pulled up Barbie's Wikipedia page on my phone, and began reading. In the most unctuously deliberate way I could muster.

Within two minutes, he was writhing.

Within ten minutes, he was playing quite copacetically with his cousins.

Within 48 hours, I had implanted a Pavlovian response that caused him to miraculously roll off his brother if he saw my hand even get near my pocket.

Some international tribunal will probably outlaw this brutality at some point, but for now I'm going with it. Desperate times call for desperate displeasures.

Back in the prattle

When I was younger, I used to parrot that so-clever mantra among New Yorkers: the only thing better than leaving the city is coming back. And it was true, mostly. Right now, though, Leaving has leapt to No.1 on the charts, and Coming Back is down near the bottom, just ahead of Arguing With Verizon.

We've been back since Saturday, but it's taken this long to park my arse behind a keyboard and write about it because I've been grumpy. Re-entry has been hard. After two weeks of beach towels by day and blankets at night, everything here seems really close. The neighbors, the grocery shelves, the air. Just over 1.6 million of us are crammed onto this oblong rock, and thanks to this bedbug epidemic, we've all claimed a few square feet of territory and crouched down, arms outstretched, screaming BACDAFUCUP! to anyone who comes near us.

I need a vacation from this hangover from my vacation.

Zoinks! and away

This past week has been fun. More fun than a laid-off, divorced, middle-aged, nearsighted, bald man can really hope to expect at this point in life. Even the lancing, which wasn't particularly fun, was sort of fun. (T's toe seems to have fully recovered and is freely co-mingling with the other nine, its days of standoffish purplehood hopefully behind it.)

Much of this fun is due directly to Grandma Jellyspoon, Moxie's mom, who has made her annual pilgrimage to New York to give her grandsons a salutary dose of Minnesota Nice. There was also BlogHer, which this year was nice enough to come to me. Thus began a rare week of almost total autonomy, where I could roll out of bed, traipse through my day, then go hang out with some of my favorite webfriends from all over everywhere.

Next year, BlogHer will move to just about the farthest point from me in the continental United States. And I get that. Things to have to even out. I hope to go, but that, as you might imagine, will be a negotiation.

And speaking of which, some of you might have remembered me talking (and undrunkenly so) about a co-parenting blog that my ex-wife and I were thinking of writing. Apparently I wasn't kidding, because it's here. It's called When the Flames Go Up (or WTFGU, for you Twitcentric compulsive shorteners), and that we were even able to name it together has helped quell a lot of misgivings. I don't yet know what it will be, but I do know Moxie and I want to generate civil, helpful discourse for anyone who's lived through a situation like ours. So if you're looking for Jerry Springer Redux, please move on. And throw a chair at yourself.

Also: Please stop calling me brave. Because that totally freaks me out.

I know this might seem like odd timing to launch a blog and then disappear, but now it's time for the boys and me to Yankee Up and vamoose into some New England remoteness. There's not a lot of Internet where we're going, and I don't like the idea of posting using my little handheld keyboard, because it makes me feel like Gulliver in a dollhouse. We'll see how it goes.

So thank you, BlogHerati, for bringing the party home.

Thank you, Grandma Jellyspoon, for coming to town, freeing me up, and saving us a pantload of sitting fees.

And thank you, Moxie, for okaying New Englapalooza II without batting an eye. Moments like that help convince me that WTFGU might actually amount to something.

The case for bacitracin socks

I'm not sure why we're blessed in this way, but my children have a startling predilection for toe infections. TwoBert is currently convalescing from the latest, which makes somewhere between four and 1,000. We know the drill by heart--lance it, gauze it, and avoid the cherry-flavored oxycillin because it tastes like excreted cough drops--but until yesterday we hadn't had to seek medical attention while living in our remote outpost of a neighborhood.

So begins the epic saga of The Plum That Ate TwoBert.

It began Sunday, after a few hours of pool basketball left all three of us with red necks and abraded toes. Everything seemed fine and asymptomatic on Monday, but yesterday T woke up with a purple toe-blister that left him hobbling like a pirate. My first thought was to take him down to our regular pediatrician, but I frankly wanted to explore our new neighborhood's options. In retrospect, it probably wasn't the wisest idea to do this in 90+ heat with a 40-pound wigglebot on my shoulders.

The first place inspired optimism because it has a separate floor just for kids, very pleasant desk jockeys, and PBS Kids on in the corner. But nooooo, they couldn't treat him because I hadn't made an appointment, and you need to fill out this form to change your GP, and how about the ER 40 blocks away? Then I hovered by a treatment room and looked stricken until an RN agreed to an "off the record" look. She bent down and squinted at this pulsating blob and said, "Wow. That looks really awful." Really? "Wow"? Aren't medical professionals supposed to be jaundiced in the face of trauma? Don't they look at a guy with multiple GSWs and a missing head and then phlegmatically scarf down a spaghetti lunch?

The second place was a private, cash-only clinic, and the head nurse said to us, very Russianly, that "zee doctor izz not pediatreeshan but he vill dake a look." Then I saw the doctor, who might have been a very skilled diagnostician ... during Prohibition. He lumbered and trembled and looked like a much larger and decrepit version of this guy, and we sort of fled.

Finally, I did what I should have done two hours earlier and drove him to our pediatrician, who, like apparently everyone else in the office, is on vacation. When the nurse put us in an exam room, I noticed there were lots of other people waiting in other exam rooms, and they had long, gray beards and cobwebs in their nostrils.

The first hour went pretty quickly, while we read books and played Go Fish and did card tricks and practiced the alphabet and rudimentary touch-typing on the room's PC. After two hours, though, I was pretty much out of tricks, and T, getting antsier by the minute, began making fart noises with his forearm. And I thought: this was genius. We could modify the "squeaky wheel" strategy and be the Farty Wheels who made so many obnoxious noises that they'd move heaven and Earth to get us the hell out of there. He started singing songs about poop and butts and farts that became louder and more visceral once he saw I wasn't going to make him stop. We farted with our squishy cheeks, with our armpits, with zerbits on any exposed, hairless flesh that either of us could find.

I don't know if it worked, but we were out of there with a bandage and a scrip within half an hour.

This would be easy to frame as a lost afternoon of frustration and tedium. But it was also six hours alone with my little boy, who, as my aching shoulders will attest, is getting less little by the second. He starts full-time school in the fall. He's obsessed with his bike. He wants more playdates with his "girlfriends." So as far as I'm concerned, yesterday will always live in my mind as a unique moment in time, when TwoBert and I farted our way to freedom.