Laid-Off Dad

An imperfect ten

Over the weekend, something noteworthy happened: This blog turned ten years old.

Decile anniversaries have their purpose, I suppose. They make us stop swimming long enough to look up and assess where we are in the ocean, whether we've made any progress or been swept off course by the riptide. And when you're a Man Of A Certain Age (a show I still miss), it's common to think about how many strokes you have left in you, before the inevitable time comes when the best you can manage is to ride with the current.

I'm happy to say I'm not there yet. I bring up the whole swimming thing, though, because yesterday I began physical therapy on my left shoulder, which recently has decided not to let me swim freestyle (or open a car door) without sending shooting pains down my arm. From what we've figured out, these pains come directly from hunching over a laptop and staring at my phone (which I usually hold in my left hand). As of now, since it's an unnamed thing that is affecting my rotator cuff, I'm applying for a trademark on "French Cuff Syndrome." Look for me on a fearmongering medical website near you!

So, yes. I'm still swimming, even though it stings like a bitch. And when I noticed that my blog was 10, two thoughts occurred to me.

• I've been blogging for longer than I was married, suggesting a phrase like blog longa, matrimonia brevis, which I just made up.
• On the same day as my blog's birthday, June 1st, my older son mowed my lawn for the first time.

When I began this blog, in the dark days of clam-shell phones and TVs as deep as a mini-fridge, R was 15 months old. He was nursing, grappling with object impermanence, and had progressed from mere walking to a type of "speed waddling" that most closely resembled "Fred Sanford with a pressing appointment." And now, that winsome little pip was maneuvering a 50-pound mulching mower. Like a BOSS.

The stock response in situations like this might be to lament lost time, crank up Time Stand Still, and rage against the dying of the light (which I do enough of, anyway). But I didn't feel that way at all.

I felt joyful. Because throughout these ten years, as he and his brother have grown from larvae to tweenolescents, I've been with them. For all of it. I've left jobs and a marriage and New York all behind, but my touchstones are still the boys and this blog. I love all three of them, they nurture and define my life, and I can't imagine the person I'd be without them. 

I'm very happy, ten years on, that I don't have to.

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

Today is 5/12/13, so to all those moms out there, happy Pythagoras Day! And I know what you're thinking. It's a shame that a cruel twist of the calendar would cause Mother's Day to be overshadowed by our culture's universal love of geometry. 

I have nothing against Mother's Day, personally. I'm all for honoring mom, and for giving consumer spending another artificial kick in the pants. I'm all for calling my own mom, to tell her I love her and to please stop voting Republican. I support breakfast in bed, clayed handprints, crayoned love notes, cuddles, kisses, all of it. Motherhood is sacred, and essential, and America, and YES.

But there are two reasons it leaves me ambivalent. For one, I really hope that one day Father's Day can be as big a deal. (Or at least bigger than "Hey, it's June. Let's move some pliers.") And I don't want a handout, either. I want us to earn it, to deserve it, to knock our brains out being the dads our kids need.

Some days, though, the idea seems elusive. I have alerts set up for as much fatherly news as Lord Google can find, and a lot of the stories aren't all that encouraging. You can read only so many headlines about dads with phrases like "shoots son in the liver" and "robs area convenience store" and "watches p0rn on Dad's phone" before you start muttering to yourself, "C'mon, you jags. Do better."

Mother's Day also reminds me of how much of a drag it is not to be in love with the mother of my kids. But I really can't complain (much). Things with Moxie are pretty okay right now. We're friendly, and we see eye-to-eye on most things when it comes to the boys, and that's a lot more than I can say for several friends, whose marriages have blown apart terribly (or are about to). It's just that building a life with someone was one of my primary life goals (even though I had absolutely no idea how to do it), and having failed will always be that little bit of sand in the underpants that won't ever fully rinse away.

I like Pythagoras Day because, unlike life, his theorem is simple, elegant, and eminently provable. Fitting that his day only comes around 11 times per century.

The kindness of strangers

This week, in spiteful defiance of a winter that outlived its welcome months ago, we held our Cub Scout meeting outdoors at a nearby playground. The boys were learning the very important Life Lessons that:

1. picking up litter is a very important expression of civic duty, and
2. many people are careless slobs who drink booze and fornicate near children's playgrounds.

When we arrived, the boys spent about 20 minutes running and yelping and climbing all the things. And just as we were settling down for our meeting, a 30ish woman with a troubled expression and arms crossed firmly across her chest came over to our picnic table and asked to speak with me.

If you've ever spent time on the playground with your kid, you know it's never good when a stranger parent asks for a word. I learned this on some of the tonier NYC playgrounds that are infested with over-earnest helicopter parents devoted to sheltering their children from conflict. So when she pulled me aside, I braced for the worst.

"I just want you to know that I'm very emotional right now, because I'm three months pregnant," she began. "If I start crying, I'm sorry in advance."

Noted. And so we ratchet up to DEFCON 3.

"I just wanted to say that I saw these boys all playing together near the climbing structure, and when my son tried to join in, they all said, 'No, you can't play with us, because we're all Cub Scouts and you're not."

(Emphasis mine, to indicate that as she finished that sentence the tears began pouring forth.)

"But your son ... [sob] ... was the only one of them ... [sniffle] ... who said it was OK and ... welcomed him into the group."

I processed this as my buttcheeks slowly de-clenched.

"Your son was just ... [sob, sniffle] ... so kind. Thank you!"

I have a sense that you could be thinking, in your best Chandler Bing voice, "Could this post BE any more self-indulgent?" And I get that. But I'm writing about it anyway, in part because my sons spend a lot of time being unkind to each other, and it's a relief to see them revert to Jekyll Mode when civilians are involved.

I'm also not in a place to crow too loudly, since I'm not only just half of this parenting effort; I'm almost completely removed from the other half.

Mostly, though, this conversation is sticking with me because it was such a nice surprise. In this era of highfalutin parenting opinions, parents have become experts in bitching about What Your Kid Did. And at the end of a particularly trying day, there really is no better selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor than having a complete stranger approach you out of the blue to tell you you're doing something -- anything -- right.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if your mood has been befouled by the truly nasty detritus that some lazy jagwagon left 10 feet from a trash can, there's nothing like a sweet, emotionally unstable, incipient mother of four to help balance things out.