Laid-Off Dad

Social dysbarism

So it seems I didn't post to LOD this weekend. I think everyone in the world is OK with this, because frankly, after 24 straight days of bloviation, I was sort of sick of myself. It was time to put down the bellows in this wordsmithery and do something radical. Like socialize. 

For you see, like the great Colossus of Rhodes, which mythically stood akimbo while Aegean merchants gazed up at its junk, I am a single parent with a foot in two very disparate worlds. Half the time, I'm a parent navigating a bedtime routine; the other half, I'm walking the streets of Manhattan, legally acquitted from any sort of childrearing whatsoever. It's a defensible lifestyle, given the dual opportunity it offers, but decompressing from one to the other is a tricky business. You need to learn to pace yourself during transition, or you can get the social bends. 

Friday was a typical example of this. I spent the day with TwoBert before I corralled Robert from school and saw Toy Story 3 as part of a birthday party. Moxie and I swapped the boys at the afterparty, and before I knew it I was at a table of childless people trying to keep up with their ridiculously unburdened lifestyles. I spent about half an hour with my face in my dumplings before I could construct a lucid thought that didn't involve This Darling Thing My Kid Did. 

It's been a kid's age since my weekends could turn on a dime, and it's still cool to pretend I can still flit from flower to flower without a moment's thought. But when my kids came along, my DNA sort of changed over. I became a planner. A shepherd. A dad, whose mind is seldom far from what his kids might be reading, or building, or poking with sticks.

I'm getting better at my single man's repartee, and if I'm out long enough, I can reinhabit the Ghost of LOD Past and remember when I had only me to care about. Every so often, though, when I cross the street, I catch myself instinctively reaching back for TwoBert's hand.

Planting my flag

While serving as TwoBert's wingman on a playdate the other day, I found myself involved in a discussion about blogging. One mom started off saying she didn't read blogs. (I mean, really! Who has the time?) And if she did, she sure wouldn't bother with a blog about raising kids. (I mean, I'm already living that life, yknow? Why rehash it?) And if she did read blogs about raising kids, she sure as hell wouldn't want to read a daddy blog. (I mean, what am I supposed to read about? Seeing their kid a half hour per day and griping about changing diapers?)

As usual, I was conflicted. Naturally, I was disappointed that this is this woman's experience, one that is shared by too many other parents with absentee partners. However, I also wanted to wave my sunscreen- and popsicle-stained palms at her and say, "Dude. I'm right here. And there are tons of other fathers out here, whose hands I would gladly shake were I a little less sticky. How's about taking a stroll outside the gated community of Head-Up-Your-Ass Estates? Hm?"

I know daddy bloggers aren't the usual case. Not by a long shot. We are a stark minority among parent bloggers, so much so that we are often just lumped in with the mommies. Not every dad has the option to care for his kids as much as we do, or gives much of a shit about washing clothes, checking homework, packing lunches, and the usual crudgery that punctuates parenthood as we might. Fewer still are the men who will make the time to write about it, with vowels and everything.

Nevertheless, it gives me a hot pain in the nethers to spend a few days singledadding my boys, taking care to listen to this and scrub that and pry apart the other things, and feel pretty happy about it, and then walk into a Buy Buy Baby and see this on a onesie:

 

This, dammit, is why we need daddy blogs.

In which I am truly Solomon-esque in my starch dissection

Like good little New Yorkers, the boys developed a taste for takeout Chinese early in life. And when we moved to this neighborhood, despite the dearth of choices, we found a place that made a delicious version of their favorite dish, chicken with broccoli. However, it took over an hour for the food to get here, and it was often wrong, and when was wrong it took forever to convince them to bring the right food. Which took another hour to arrive.

Then one time, they asked us to return the wrong entree.

Let me re-write that. They wanted the food. Back. At best, it seemed like a questionable business practice. At worst, it was a supremely nasty idea to contemplate. They've been dead to us ever since.

Using my signature fatherly pluck, however, I resolved to recreate this dish at a fraction of the cost and waiting time. As is so often the case, invention was the daughter of "Fuck You."

It didn't take long to perfect the Daddy Supreme, which comprises marinated chicken breast sautéd with broccoli and served with--and NOT over--white rice. This soon became a crucial dish in my repertoire, not least because it's one of the few that both kids will eat in its entirety. But there remained one problem: the dreaded rice portion.

As TwoBert matures, he is developing into a very competitive second child who will scratch and claw in order to Get His. And whenever I used to dish out the rice, he would study me with the gimlet gaze of a line judge to make sure he got as much rice as his big brother did. Robert's technique was a little subtler, as he would wait until the plates hit the table before decrying the very thought that a cantankerous pipsqueak like TwoBert could receive more rice than he. The back-and-forth would go forth and back until my skull split open and my brains spilled onto the table. 

And then, one day, I got smart.

I was plating the Supreme one night when I happened to see my two-jigger shot glass sitting in the dish tray. I molded the rice into silos of fun and placed the chic-and-broc around the perimeter, creating portions that were both 1) identical in size and 2) vaguely weapon-y looking. 

And thus, Daddy's Chicken with Rice Bombs was born.

It's been a weekly staple ever since, and it's given me the courage to attempt my latest brainstorm: sculpting light sabers out of chocolate ice cream.

Four-wheeled restraint

Since my last day of work, I haven't set foot on the subway. I've spent the last week or so ferrying the kids to and from school by car, starkly renouncing one of my long-held beliefs that car-based lifestyles are for schmucks. Especially in the city, with its alternate-side parking, and Byzantine rules of parking, and the complete lack of any parking anywhere.

Despite all this, I have to say that above-ground transport has a decided advantage when it comes to boy transport, because we cannot go anywhere on the subway without some sort of skirmish, or slapfight, or I WANT TO SIT ON THIS SIDE OF DADDY AARRRGH. In the car, I can strap them into their corners (and, in extreme cases, empty the trunk into a big pile between them) until TwoBert passes out from his extreme carcolepsy.

One thing I must constantly keep in check as I drive is my unfailing intolerance for flouters, and oblivioids, and most anyone else in general. This is difficult in my neighborhood, which is full of gypsy cab drivers who think nothing of cutting off six people in order to park diagonally on the sidewalk. Come to think of it, they pretty much think nothing, period. I like to think I've gotten used to it, but I often have to remind myself to chill out, especially when I've got kids in the back.

This afternoon TwoBert and I were headed downtown to pick up Robert from school. And as I was approaching an intersection, at which I had the green, this guy just started crossing the street, right to left, without looking anywhere. He didn't look addled or homeless; his clothes were clean, and he had on new sneakers. I kept thinking, he's gonna stop, right? He sees the Big Red Hand, doesn't he? No he didn't apparently, because he just walked right into the intersection against the green, hands in pockets, face forward. Begging to be hit like seven-pin.

I braked hard to avoid picking up the spare, and all he did was look mildly to his left. Like having a car bearing down on you at 30 mph was the order of the day. And as he crossed toward the driver's side, I sort of left my body, and forces outside my control took over. I rolled the window down and somehow simultaneously processed that I had to say something to this freak while at the same time preserving TwoBert's tender ears. 

So I yelled, "You ... jaycock!"

I don't know where that came from. Perhaps it organically conflated itself from jaywalking and somethingsucker, but that's what came out. The Jaycock himself looked back a little quizzically, but he shrugged and loped off. TwoBert, however, was intrigued.

"Daddy, what's jaycock?"

"I don't know. It's a word I made up."

"Why did you say it?"

"I just sort of felt like it, I guess."

Two minutes later, as I was turning onto the highway, TwoBert said, "Fezzypoop!"

And then: "I like this game!"

Assimilate and winnow

For the first 43 Father's Days in the history of me, my father was always within a hour's drive. This made it easy to facilitate our tradition of 1) barbecuing Dad's rosemary chicken and 2) barking at some neighbor kid to stop using our goddamn garage as a backstop. 

This spring, however, my folks scraped up 33 years of memories (plus several large pictures of boats) and moved it all to New England. This is mostly a good thing, since the youngest neighbor kid is in his late 50s. But it also meant that, for the first time, Father's Day with my dad's physical presence wasn't possible. And I'm a little frightened about trying to explain Skype to him, as my parents are still navigating their new cable channels. Food Network is like a Mars probe to these people.

Anyway, before they left they made sure to offload a few dozen crates of my childhood--pictures, letters from camp, everything I ever scribbled on anything ever. Because my parents, to their very great credit, are terrific Keepers of Keepsakes. And now I get to show Robert some of the stories I wrote when I was his age, and he can dismiss them as puerile and jejune.

The point is, between my parents' abscondage and my job's gone-dage, I've got a lot of my past and recent present stacked all over my little apartment, which might best be described as the Laid-Off Labyrinth. And the minotaur at the center eats orphaned tube socks.

My kingdom for a less complicated kingdom.

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Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald

One thing that informed Robert's attitude during his playoff baseball game was that if his team had won, the championship game would have conflicted with his best friend's birthday party. Losing the game, therefore, at least saved me some Sturm and Drang.

Yesterday, however, Robert came home from school obdurately opposed to attending the party. Because his best friend "brags too much about his writing."

I really hope one of them gets to review the other's work some 30 years from now, so that media wags will know that the feud started here, over five pages about 11th-century kung fu warriors.

Is this the right room for an argument?

When I was a kid, one of my favorite short stories was "Obstinate Uncle Otis," about a guy who simply refused to acknowledge anything he didn't agree with. Someone would complain about that new building spoiling the view of the mountains, for example, and the always laconic and ornery Otis would respond, "What building? I can see the mountains just fine."

I think of this story during most conversations I have with TwoBert, who is right right right all the time. Whereas Robert might sit and ponder the riddle of the Sphinx, TwoBert would shake the Sphinx by the lapels until its nose fell off.

A classic example of this is the Word Game, where each person says a word that begins with the last letter of the previous one. T and I have just started playing on long subway rides while R buries his nose in a book with disgust. One of our latest rounds went like this:

Me: Down.
TwoBert: Town.
Me: No. What does "down" end with?
T: N.
Me: And what sound does N make?
T: NNNNNNNNNNN.
Me: Good. So does "town" begin" with NNNNNN?
T: Yes.
Me: No it doesn't.
T: Yes is does.
Me: No, it begins with the "tuh" sound. What letter makes the "tuh" sound?
T: T! For TwoBert!
Me: Right! TwoBert and town. So it doesn't begin with N.
T: Yes it does.
Me: No it doesn't.
T: YES!
Me: Nnnnnope.
T: YYYYEEEESSSSSSS!

And so on. And it takes every fiber of Robert's self restraint to keep from getting up into TwoBert's grille and calling him a "hapless oaf"--the current epithet on the hardscrabble streets of NYC.

The cool thing about Otis's story is that one day he is struck by lightning, and the things he disbelieves in--like that building--start to disappear. Then Otis has a bout of amnesia, forgets who he is, and disbelieves himself out of existence.

A fate that Robert increasingly wishes would befall TwoBert with each passing day.

Diametric ends of the bread spectrum

Today has been weird since the get-go. We didn't exactly charge out of the blocks this morning; TwoBert insisted on taking another shower, because 1) he had gotten "REALLY REALLY DIRTY!" overnight, and 2) now he is "ALL GROWED UP!" We hit some massive vehicular snarls on the highway and, just as I was making my last turn before parking at Robert's school, we nearly ran over Ira Glass. Yes, I was moving briskly, but the dude was wandering in the middle of the road looking for a cab and oblivious to the many cars that quite legally could have ended his American life.

T's school year is over, but Robert, public-school sucker that he is, has two weeks left. So the little one and I have been spending lots of time together, on our own. I've thought recently that, throughout the life of this blog, TwoBert has gotten the greens end of the carrot. As second children often do. You might not know, for example, that when he was a toddler we had lots of "accidents" involving me being "struck" in the "plums," in a brazen attempt to preserve his role as Darling Baby instead of Forgotten Middle Kid.

We're approaching the Single Dad's Summer of Zone Defense, when Daddy squares off against two entirely different sets of tastes, wants, needs, and thought processes. This gap can be boiled down the the essential Big Apple litmus test: the bagel. Robert insists on plain, and TwoBert won't eat anything but an everything.

It's the Alpha and the fecking Omega, baby! Pray for me.

You can't spell "metastasize" without TEAM

I played a lot of sports in high school, but I didn't get a whole lot of playing time. (Am I right, high school classmates that are my new Facebook BFFs 4EVER?) In fact, if the game wasn't close and the starters were ready to come out, you might have heard a cheer rise up: "Clear the bench! Put in French!" Which you can take as either endearing or derisive, depending on your interpretation of the adolescent mind. (OK. It was derisive.)

I got four varsity letters, and three of them were presumably for 1) being a senior and 2) remembering my uniform. The one letter I actually earned was for golf, for which I actually started more than half the matches and actually helped my team actually win a few. And let me tell you, a letter with a golf bag on it looks completely bad-ass on one of those leather-sleeved varsity jackets. 

I was a spindly punk, but I also never that fire-in-the-gut competitive edge. In fact, I sort of went the other way and derided people who did. One guy in particular was my JV varsity coach, a real tool with a pockmarked face, pornstache, talent for trouser hockey. He used to stand with his hand in his too-tight sweatpants and bark cliches at us while we ran windsprints or lay-up drills. And my buddy Rich and I would crack wise, saying stuff I wish I could remember because I'm sure it was overflowing with withering and pitiless wit. To the point where the coach took us aside and called us "cancerous agents" and benched us for the rest of the season.

Cut to: senior year soccer. For three years I had been coached by our history teacher, a sweet guy whose main claim to competency was that he was Hungarian. Practices were easy, and we got shellacked every game. Senior year, however, we got a new coach, a former all-state player who knew what he was doing. He ran us mercilessly, mile after weary mile, until we all prayed for the sweet release of death. I was killing myself like everyone else but not playing much because 1) he wanted to win and 2) I didn't really care. So for the last game of the season, I turned my jersey inside out and wrote "log ₃ 9" on the back in masking tape, because I knew Coach didn't know a logarithm from a log cabin. I spent the rest of the afternoon running laps around the field until I honked like a seal.

I'm telling you all this because last night's Little League playoff game gave me a flashback moment. The game was sort of uncomfortable from the beginning, because the two coaches obviously didn't like each other. And our coach, a normally even-tempered bloke who had never coached with such high stakes, started getting agitated by errors and other standard 8-year-old goofballery. By barking at kids for swinging at bad pitches or overthrowing the cut-off man, he was sort of dipping his toe in a tributary of Dick Pond.

Late in the game, when it was still tied, Robert got on base with a single. However, the next batter flied out and Robert, oblivious to his coaches' urgings to get back to first, was doubled off. He trotted off the field and didn't seem to care much. But his coach caught him smiling and said something about it, and Robert shot back with "I don't care about this game! I hope we lose!" He spent the rest of the game on the bench, and the team's loss ended the season.

I'm really conflicted about this. I'm glad that Robert seems centered enough not to make winning the fulcrum of his emotions, and poised enough to call bullshit when he sees it. But I also don't want him to doubt his abilities, as I did, and turn to wiseassery as a coping mechanism. I can't fault the coach for benching my kid, but I can't fault Robert, either. Because dude, that was me.

I figure for now, screw it. He's 8. There's plenty of time to watch this mole and see if it grows any larger. But I hope at some point he discovers a desire to strive and succeed as a part of a team, instead of spending his teen years feeling excised.