Laid-Off Dad

Faulty joists

A strange thing about being divorced is that lots of people like to talk to you about what it's like being divorced. I mean, is it doable? Can you really split up and survive in New York? Right now, nine friends are involved in marriages that are either ending or teetering. And it blows my mind.

I don't have a problem with people asking for advice, since I got tons of it from people who were where I am now. When the floor falls out from under you, you need to know it's OK to live in the basement for a while. And it feels good to pay some of that forward. But nine? Is the floor that weak? And are we able to gauge its weakness only after we've fallen through?

I feel like a hothouse orchid for saying this, but I really had no idea. I grew up around intact families and TV shows about intact families. It all seemed so effortlessly permanent. You got married, and that was it. My parents are still together, for better or for worse, and I was the oldest kid who did everything to please them. I did the work, got the grades, and stayed out of trouble. All so my little brother could distance himself from me and become the cool one. The self-taught musician who has spent his life coloring outside the lines. He's also taller, and better looking, and he still has a full head of hair, the little punk.

And you know why I can call him a little punk before a worldwide webience? He's also too cool to read blogs.

When people ask my advice, that's fine. But when they say I make divorce "look easy," I feel my esophagus cramp. Some days are fine, and some are rottenhard; the only reason it might look otherwise is that I don't write about the rottenhardness. The ways to make divorced parenthood as bearable as possible are pretty simple: Pick your battles, always think about the kids, and have faith that soon a less fecal day will dawn.

You should also be prepared for how it will change you as a person. Like the other day, when I was trying to park the car downtown, on the way to meet a friend who wants to divorce his wife as soon as he gets a job. I circled forever until I found a perfect spot--except for the ripped-up cobblestones in the street and the "No Parking: Construction" sign taped to a tree. And without even thinking, this little orchid sprang out of the car and ripped that sign down and shredded it. I left the car for the rest of the day, and when I got back to find the car still there, ticketless, I kinda went all Tiger-Woods-Y'all right there in the street.

This rebel thing is pretty exhilirating. Do you suppose it'll make my hair grow back? 

Return to the Urban Playpen

The new masthead says it all: New Englapalooza was a complete gas. Five states in 10 days, clear(ish) weather, gracious hosts, sweet corn, sunblock, and a car with enough sand in it to gag a bedouin. The boys are starting to look the way boys should in summertime: tan lines, freckles, and bug bites.

Oh, yes. The bugs. We've had a really wet spring in the northeast, so the bugs have had an extraordinary opportunity to grow large and conversational. They're like pets, coming and going as they please. But when you show enough temerity to invade their space, which is Everywhere Else, they are not shy about exacting their pounds of flesh, a few ounces at a time.

The masthead is a silhouette of Robert, the Seven-Year-Old Wrecking Machine, on a rope swing in New Hampshire. I owe that swing a debt of gratitude, because after Day 8 Robert announced he was ready to head back to the city. Because he missed sitting around watching Star Wars and building LEGO warships. Dad the Ogre had to state calmly but firmly that we had a plan, and we were sticking to it. I understood, though, because eight days is one of the longest stretches that Robert has ever been out of Manhattan, and he's already taking on telltale characteristics of the Entitled Applecentric. On Day 4, he lamented that there was no place to get a "good bagel."

Enter the rope swing. It was Robert's first encounter with one, and he began slowly, gingerly gliding into the lake from the second step. By the end of the day, however, he was up at the top step, flinging himself outward, limbs splayed, blaring out the Indiana Jones theme. Suddenly, we were leaving too soon, and Dad the Ogre had to take him back to the city. Where the only rope swings presumably have someone's neck in them.

So now we're back. And it's no longer 75 and breezy. And I no longer have a designated spot to park my car. And I'm feeling very grateful, because I'm not sure how many times the three of us will be able to take off for such a long stretch. But the good news is that Mama has a new full-time job, so the boys will be with me all day, every day, for the next four weeks. Look for us to be out and about, marveling at how docile the bugs are.

Token testicles, redux

So. Show of hands: Who's going to BlogHer this weekend?

I'm disappointed to say I won't be, but not because of anything approaching a bad experience. Believe the BlogHerbole: it's truly a blast. It's gotten much huger than my first one in 2006, but frankly, it would be hard to top last year's Community Keynote and book signing and Haus party and and andandand. And besides, as part of our incredibly Byzantine divorce negotiations*, Moxie is going instead. Whereas I get to supervise the boys as they use their new sand spades to move the entire New England coastline two feet to the left.

* Kidding. I've been to two of these things now, and interloped at a couple of BlogHer Businesses. To be four up on her at this point seems a little out of whack.

If you're interested in re-living the magic, here's my brief baritonous bit from last year's keynote. And once it's over, you can peruse all the other speakers who came together, as Eden so writely wrote, to "kick 10,000 pounds of ass":

I'm still very proud to have taken part in it, to have been backstage for all the laughter, the sniffles, and nervous gulps of gin. And I'm prouder still to see that more men (who will be busily playing with their vaginas) will be speaking this year. There's even a men's panel! (Be sure to observe proper protocol and sip your drink every time you hear "fart," "wiener," or "Heywood Jablome.")

If you're fortunate enough to go, the best way to enjoy yourself is not to assume you'll see everything and meet everybody. You won't. But you can still take things an hour at a time, scarf CheeseburgHers, summon the Fail Whale, amass crapswag for your kids--and meet a whole lot of very interesting, wordnerdy people who are working just as hard to navigate the BlogHerati (and adjust their Spanx) as you are.

Have a great time, and put up lots of posts and tweets and yfrogs and vimeos and bloggerdramas for me to peruse afterward--assuming the boys remember where they buried me.

Feel good time

This morning, as I sit here convincing myself that scrambled eggs have less cholesterol than fried ones, I can't tell you how unbelievably great it is to have the kids in the neighborhood. I just can't tell you. I will try to tell you, naturally, but I'm reasonably certain that I just can't do it. It's amazing. Stupendous. It's as if a magic CO₂ siphon descended from the sky and re-bubbled my seltzer. I'm sort of frothing all over the place.

Last night I walked the kids over to my apartment for a Daddy Supreme, watched a little baseball, and when Mama came by to pick them up she stayed for a bit and watched "Grease." TwoBert shook his booty to "Summer Lovin'," and Mama and I took turns explaining to a quizzical Robert why Danny is such a dick at the bonfire.

Earlier this week, I spent two days cleaning out the old apartment, burying 17 years of my life, and I can't say I was terribly ready for the experience. Weird flashbacks to 1992, when the former super, a puffy-eyed Croat with a strangely cylindrical head, showed me the place.

Also earlier this week, I went to see the New York Philharmonic in Central Park and was seated next to my friend's au pair, who will be here all summer before she returns to Germany in September. We were managing a conversation through crummy English and crummier German when I mentioned that I was in Berlin when the wall came down. And she said something like, "When the wall is falling is when I am being born!"

Whereupon I made the point that I have shirts older than she is. Und ve laffed und laffed.*

She might have thought I was joking. Sadly, today's outfit proves otherwise:

* Note: This is not real German. It is fake German, imagined by me as it might be spoken by Sgt. Schultz.

The boys and I are headed out for a 10-day New Englapalooza. See you in August.

The bad is crummy, but the good is pretty great

Well, here we are again. Three weeks into another writing drought. The sad truth is that there hasn't been a lot of time to write since Bridget the WonderSitter, who has looked after the boys for most of TwoBert's life, left us. She finished school and uprooted herself to America's Wang, leaving behind the greatest city on the planet in favor of stultifying heat and giant, flying cockroaches. So for the past four weeks I worked on a project from 8am to 1pm and boywrangled from 2 to 7; Mama, vice versa. When dinnertime came it was amazing either one of us was able to stand, much less form a sentient thought.

The boys are enjoying the hell out of their summer vacations, and finally, wonderfully, mercifully, so am I. My project is over, and the boys and I will celebrate the end of the second-wettest June in LOD history with a trip to the beach, where the boys will spend hours hurling themselves at the waves and counting their wipeouts.

But there is better news. Tomorrow, Mama and the boys are moving to my neighborhood. The new apartment is larger, cheaper, and closer, and I'm sort of over the moon about it. Because the trip to see my boys is going from a 10-mile ride to a 10-minute walk.

I hope I don't sprain anything from all the fist-pumping.

Then and now

About a week ago, a Canadian reporter e-mailed to ask me a few questions about being a laid-off dad. I get these every so often, in spurts and drizzles, mostly because lately a lot more people have a lot more time to do things like Google "laid off dad." And I am the first thing you see when you do that. (Although I'm a little more proud of being listed as one of the things LOD stands for, right there with Large Organic Debris and Laparoscopic Ovarian Drilling.)

I don't normally answer these requests, because I think I've said all that there is to say about it. And truthfully, now that I've been working at my current job for five years (a record!), I'm not sure I remember much about the experience anymore. I mean, I wrote some of it down when I started this blog, but frankly, the memory is fleeting. Part of that stems from the last couple of years, which have taught me to keep my nose pointed forward.

Anyway, I answered this reporter because she knew all this. She'd done her research and realized I'm not laid off or married anymore. And when I left work and called her up, I ended up chatting for about 30 blocks. A very small subset of this chat appears here.

While I was talking, it hit me that my blog had turned six years old. (Well, technically it hadn't, because I hadn't written since before the birthday, June 1.) That's a long time. One blog year is like 20 dog years, so by that metric I've been writing since Reconstruction. In that time, blogs have emerged, erupted, plateaued, cratered, and been eaten by Twitter. She asked if I got to know people through my comments, and I had to admit that for the first year I didn't have any. I was just an HTML nerd hand-coding and FTPing my stuff through my dial-up ISP, while my thenwife made tallow candles by the hearth.

So anyway, now it's official. LOD is six. Cue the confetti.

All hail the TwoBert quadrennial!

It's a glorious Memorial Day here in the Double Hundy, and my sleepy neighborhood is just starting to bubble to life. For some reason I woke up this morning, unbidden, at 6:30, and when I got to my local I found a new installation by an artist named Scott Weiland. I asked the barista if it was the Scott Weiland, and she had no idea who he is.

Which gave me pause.

I mean, it's one thing if a younger person is blissfully ignorant of a band that consumed your soul as a kid (like that time someone asked me, "Wait. Sting was in a band?!?") But now I've reached the point when college kids don't know about bands that came after my Prime Influence Time. And a whole new generation younger than I is being introduced to cultural irrelevance.

You know what? I just don't mind. I'm actually feeling pretty robust lately, thanks to the 10-mile run on Friday and the 32-mile bike ride on Saturday. I suppose I could finish the weekend triathlon by jumping into the Hudson and swimming to Poughkeepsie, but I won't. Because that's what everyone would expect me to do. And last I saw, they don't sell Advil by the crate.

Weeks tend to fly by lately, in a way that makes me feel I'm trying to cross the track at the Indy 500. And somewhere in the haze and burnt rubber, TwoBert turned four. It's strange to think that the spring I spent dreading his home birth (and suppressing ignorant visions of blood-caked walls) was more than four years ago. Stranger still to think that his mother and I have been estranged for more than half his life. But that's another post.

No. Today we celebrate little TwoBert, who isn't so little anymore. He is older than Twitter, and the Kindle, and the Colbert Report. And he is forming into his own little manchild, who wants what he wants and will leave no crotch unsmacked in order to get it. He's crazy for superheroes (as Robert never was), and he likes every food Robert doesn't. When I make them dinner I'm tempted to set a family-style platter in front of them and watch them savage it, Sprat-style.

TwoBert's other quality of interest is his love for the standard past tense, in defiance of all irregularity. Sometimes he'll throw five or six of them in one sentence: "Daddy! You throwed the ball and I swinged and hitted it, and you catched it, but I runned to first before you getted me out!"

Just one of the reasons he has bringed me so much joy.

The Fourth was with us (also the Second and Third)

It blows my mind that Monday was Star Wars Day ("May the Fourth be with you!"), because I discovered this after the boys and I spent much of the weekend watching "A New Hope" two and a half times. They wanted to see it a full third time--after Robert's mudbath that some observers might call a baseball game--but I restricted the viewing to cool stuff, like droids battling and battles droiding, so we could conjure LEGO battles of droids battling and battles droiding.

The first viewing was Friday night, when the three of us settled in on drizzly, grim night. The boys sat rapt, squirt guns blasters wedged in their pajama waistbands, while Luke used the force to fell a ginormous, planet-sized space station with his two little popguns. One of the most ridiculous plot points in all of explored space, if you ask me, but still a crucial protein strand in our collective celluloid DNA.

By the second viewing, our third overall, we'd gotten pretty familiar with all the specific dialogue. So an impromptu sort of MST3K episode broke out. Witness these little gems:

• Robert, after Luke gazes off into the two setting suns of Tattooine: "Does that mean you can get two sunburns?"
• TwoBert, after our heroes plunge into the Imperial Trash Smasher: "Princess Leia should not be walking in the garbage because she is wearing a dress."
• Robert, after Obi-Wan slashes the arm off the belligerent snoutface in the Mos Eisley cantina: "OK, note to self. Don't mess with the old guy."

By viewing number three, we were playing along with our LEGO ships and drawing huge explosions and rolling around avoiding certain blasterdeath. The downstairs neighbors might have called the National Guard.

To celebrate May Fourth, I bought both remastered trilogies for $30 each on Amazon. The Force is strong with these children. Perhaps by the time he is 18, TwoBert will follow through on his promise to change his name to Darth Vader.

We make it harder than it has to be, and I can't tell you why

About four weeks ago, the song that titles this post pulled up a chair and sat right down in my brain. The hypnotic guitar riff at the end just plays endlessly, on an ear-to-ear loop, and I've often caught myself singing the refrain out loud, wincing in Timothy B. Schmitt's falsetto. I even tried to Blip it, but for some reason Blip has yet to embrace its all-too-important 40-plus, folk-rock-enthusiast demographic. (BlipFAIL!)

The symbolism is pretty blunt, because behind the placid exterior of a neglected blog lies an existence that is anything but. Family Version 2.0 is experiencing a few bugs, and we're back with the mediator trying to re-jigger something that I thought we had jiggered just fine only six months ago. I'm optimistic we'll be able to sort it out, because I have to be, but it still frustrates me to see all this time and effort and money so needlessly misspent. It's like we're sprinting in circles in a huge bowl of heavy cream, churning up a frosting that will ultimately engulf us.

For a real-life metaphor, look no further than the light-saber battle in Washington Square Park that the boys and I attended on Saturday night:

The boys just about jumped out of their shirts when I told them about it, since they've been hitting the LEGO Star Wars pretty hard lately. But we should have paid more attention to the "all ages" in the fine print; the crowd was mostly college kids and hipster dudes. As usual, Robert assessed things frankly: "Dad, this is pretty lame. It's just a bunch of grown-ups in the dark beating each other up for no reason."

I know, kid. We're working on it.

I, haus-herr

So OK, the week started off with a yuk- (and yuck-) worthy anecdote. But believe me, it was no trouble. I'd looked forward to Solo Week for a long time, mostly because seven years of parenting has taught me that I really like this stuff. I like getting the boys ready for school, and mingling with other parents at drop-off. I like giving TwoBert the Big Daddy Squeeze right after he gets up from his nap. I like all the mundane household cleaning and erranding. I don't know what that says about me as a man, and whether I fell off the bed a few too many times as an infant, but dammit, it makes me happy.

After the clog was dislodged, everything absolutely did all go downhill from there. And by downhill, I mean it was great. I don't get why people refer to "downhill" as a bad thing, since there's no such thing as a "downhill battle." But then again, I don't get why people substitute "hopefully" for "I hope," or say they "could care less" about something, or use terms like "verbage" and "foilage" and "intensive purposes." But that's just me, your friendly neighborhood SAHD wannabe/usage nerd.

We had a few revelations during the week. I'm happy to report, most importantly, that Robert seems to be over A-Rod. I offered him his A-Rod t-shirt to wear to school, and he roundly refused, adding: "Why don't you give this to some jerk who likes him?" This could be an all-important step toward curing his Yankophilia. And TwoBert, ever the philosopher, is impressed by my beard and wants to know why I can't grow one on my head.

But the week's signature flourish came when I Netflixed Charlie Kaufman's latest, "Synecdoche, New York." After I'd finished cleaning my ex-wife's bathroom, I saw a character (and this isn't a spoiler, given the film's complexity) become obsessed with cleaning his ex-wife's bathroom. I was sucked into meta-reality, wondered openly whether anyone was staging my own life, and spent the next half hour scrubbing my brain parts out of the living room carpet.