Defending Dads

Sometimes, you wake up and know instantly that things are not looking good for the day.

There are the feelings of hopelessness, the boredom with the whole situation, the question of why to get up and go through the motions for yet another day.

Before the kids, you had the freedom to drop everything and drive to Tijuana, Mexico if that’s what you were inclined to do. Now, the first thing on your mind is how far behind in support payments such a trip might leave you.

The feeling of being trapped stems from the fact that, in a sense, you are. Someone started a family with you then decided she had changed her mind. Done. She’ll hire a lawyer who will present you to a judge as the devil himself and just like that, a family court in any of the 50 states will casually funnel a significant portion of your paycheck into her bank account until your children reach maturity — and permit you to even see those kids once in a while! As if that weren’t a raw enough deal, you won’t have a thing to say about how your money is spent. Tough luck, sucker. No one forced you to have kids or get married.

Dude, it’s OK. Such feelings are perfectly normal. What you’ve got to realize is that the control the courts have taken from you can be recovered with that you exercise over yourself.

Without question, you will experience instances of intense emotional turmoil over time. These come from a sense of helplessness to change your circumstances. When confronted with these awful feelings, you’ve got to remember that they are temporary. With determination, you can work through them. Eventually, you won’t feel a thing. You’ll find a way to make enough money to cover what you’re losing to child support, you’ll have your moments with your kids and if you choose to, you’ll even risk a new relationship.

It’s a waiting game, the most important one you’ll ever play. Look at the situation as would a single, childless man who lost a job he didn’t really care about. There will be a short period of anxiety before he dresses up his resume, hits indeed.com, signs up with some employment agencies and within weeks, he’ll be working again. In no time, the job he lost will be a distant memory. He’s moved on.

Yes, you had other, grander plans, but this is what people do to each other. Sometimes, it’s easy to blame things on declining standards of morality, but the truth is, the bible, written before life expectancies exceeded 40 years, tells the story of Cain and Abel. The human condition dictates that any relationship involving homosapiens is a crap shoot. Finito.

Ride it out, brother. If you keep your cool, you and the kids will win in the end.

Neither of my kids is yet 10, but they each have this strange fascination with TV shows that can’t be found on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel.

They’re into Hoarding: Buried Alive and stranger yet, American Greed!

Hoarding isn’t too bad. Pack rats don’t typically exhibit violent or salacious behavior. Plus, it teaches the kids the value of picking up their rooms.

American Greed, on the other hand, has gone from telling tales of pyramid schemes to unlicensed plastic surgery.

A couple nights ago as bedtime approached, the kids finished their showers and rushed down to the family room to kick it with me. They found me watching the introduction to an episode of American Greed that chronicled the rise and fall of a pair of illegal butt enhancement operations. When I grabbed the remote to change the channel, they begged me to let them keep watching. I was flabbergasted! Am I raising a couple of investigative journalists?

While I try to be vigilant about what I expose the kids to on TV, I don’t want to be overprotective nor do I want to frustrate their curiosity. We watched American Greed together. Thank God the remote control has pause, fast forward and mute buttons!

The kids draped themselves over me and, within minutes, were totally enthralled with the program. It seems some transgender guy in Florida set up shop in a motel room where he regularly injected industrial silicone into the buttocks of wannabe models and other vain women. The transgender then passed his trade secrets down to a female friend who opened up her own shop.

To my chagrin, the kids heard the word “transgender” and immediately peppered me with questions about its meaning. Of course, I dodged the queries like Barry Sanders did linebackers, but OMG! Then, out of nowhere, my daughter, the human dictionary, told my son that a transgender person is someone who has undergone gender reassignment surgery. He, in turn, asked me what gender reassignment surgery was!

“Can’t explain that now, baby boy. We don’t wanna miss the show.”

As for the show, as any reasonable person might expect, the injection of industrial silicone by amateurs into the buttocks of ignorant women willing to blow a month’s salary and risk their health did not have many happy endings, pardon the pun. Some women were horribly disfigured, others died.

Pause. Fast forward. Mute.

“Daddy! Why did you skip that part?” I heard.

“Umm, it was inappropriate for you guys.”

“Really? What were they doing?” Follow up questions, even?

“Stuff that you guys aren’t ready to see,” I said.

“When will be able to see?” they wanted to know.

“When you’re older.” Like in grad school.

The new direction American Greed seems to be taking caught me off guard, but I learned my lesson. I mean, how many pyramid schemes can they cover before every show seems to tell the same story? But disfiguring, potentially lethal butt injections? I think we’ll switch back to Teen Titans Go before bedtime effective immediately.

If there is a bright side to my faux pas, I doubt that my baby girl will EVER consider silicone butt injections!

My maternal grandmother passed in August of last year. What a life she lived. None of her six children resides in the New York City area. That leaves the job of finalizing her affairs and closing up her home to you know who.

Her home? Thirteen hundred square feet, three bedrooms, two baths and 41 years of memories. Pictures of people long-gone line the misshapen walls. Furniture older than my children occupies space in the rooms. The faucet in the tub leaks rusted water. The cupboards hold food that no one will ever eat. My grandmother’s vacant bed lays visible from the end of the curved hallway.

The children had little interaction with their great grandmother. They have no understanding of who she was or the struggles that characterized her life. I have done my best to see to it that their childhoods are nothing like my grandmother’s, my mother’s or mine. The day will come, however, when they will need to hear uncomfortable truths in order to appreciate the gifts bestowed upon them.

For days now, I have suffered mood swings and anxiety for which I had trouble identifying the sources. The closer I come to Mother’s Day and the tasks at hand, the clearer the issues become.

I’ll drop the kids off at school Friday, then head to New York. I don’t know quite what to do as this will be the first time I close up the home of a deceased relative, but I’ll figure it out. Thank God for the internet, huh?

Happy Mother’s Day? Not necessarily, but this has to happen.

My grandmother’s name was Ruby Henrietta Russell and she was the primary maternal figure in my life. God rest her soul.

Waking up this morning was easy. Sure, it’s extremely early in the morning, but I hear Michelle Obama does this every day.

Waking up with that “fire in the belly” as they say is an indication that things are moving in the right direction. A good night’s sleep is crucial to that sense of well being and I got a great night’s sleep. I was able to relax in a way that had eluded me for several nights. What gave me that peace of mind? Two beautiful conversations that proved to be a trail of burning gasoline leading to a box of dynamite.

Yesterday, as I do at least twice a month, I hit up my folks in Texas. My stepmom picked up. We had a great talk. She told me that she and my dad are in good health, still active and generally enjoying their retirement. Toward the end of the conversation, I mentioned the work I was putting into the blog. Her response absolutely delighted me.

She said she had missed a few days but had taken the time to catch up. Naturally, I asked what she thought. She told me that I should keep doing exactly what I’m doing. She didn’t know it, but she had laid down that trail of gasoline. At that point, my dad the Grill Master summoned her to dinner and we terminated the conversation.

Half way into Mad Max: Fury Road, my dad called. We had a great talk. He brought up The Maw and every point therein that struck a chord. We guffawed through a discussion of our common experiences. He didn’t know it, but he had dropped a match on that trail of gasoline.

Having ridden out a week of subpar moods, the lift I got from Texas got me to thinking. Since I started the blog, all the feedback I’ve received, including that from my kids, my favorite columnist, my therapist, a published author and several good friends, has been overwhelmingly positive. A seasoned editor has agreed to work on Damned Good Sense, a manuscript I’ve been working on for years. This is all a better cure for anxiety than anything GlaxoSmithKline has on the market. I fell asleep by 9:00 PM last night.

Oh, and remember that box of dynamite?

Kaboom!

This has not been my finest week with the kids. It wasn’t terrible. Just not what it should have been.

As I tell the kids, not all the time we spend together will be like a life insurance commercial, where we’re running around the backyard under a perfect sky, spraying each other with water hoses while laughing hysterically. I tell them we’re still going through transition and I am under tremendous pressure to keep things moving. Sometimes, that pressure keeps me awake at night. Other times, it’s inspiration to write. The upshot is that a bad night’s sleep affects my daytime mood, which takes away from them.

What I want them to take from these discussions is that we’re all human and subject to varying moods. These moods are affected by all manner of circumstances, but we each have a responsibility to keep them in check. I am grateful to have the self-control to speak honestly with my children about my state of mind when they behave as children do, and that no fits of temper were involved. Our bond is based on the kind of gentle honesty that I hope fosters in them the freedom to tell me what they are really thinking, even if I won’t like it. I don’t punish them for their honesty and they extend me the same courtesy.

I don’t delude myself that they never try to deceive me for whatever reasons. It’s human nature to do that from time to time. My only hope is that they keep it real when it counts. I know I will.

The thing about living on a revolving planet is that, as long as we’re healthy, every 24 hours, we get a chance to fix what we screwed up the day before. I am going to use my current 24 in service to prepare for my next visit with the kids.

One of my many blessings is a keen awareness of the brevity of life. The kids are growing up so, so fast. Every day, hour and second is precious. I need to have my head right when they’re with me because this is all the time we’ll ever have. I got no problem steppin’ up to meet that challenge and they need to see that.

Seconds after I picked them up from school Wednesday afternoon, the kids exclaimed almost in unison “Daddy, there’s a fund raiser at Barnes & Noble tomorrow night!” I thought “again?” But my frustration with the frequency of the fund raisers is trumped by my confusion as to why the funds are being raised in the first place. My God! Is someone running for office?

I have thought my way out of many corners, but when it comes to these school-related, well, things that get the kids all worked up, I’m woefully out of my league, flat-out flummoxed. Tonight, I learned that I am not alone.

I drove the kids to a space in the Barnes & Noble parking lot. Before the doors could close on the minivan, they were sprinting to the store. Once inside, almost immediately, they encountered friends and classmates. For the moment, “Daddy” became as distant a memory to them as their first pacifiers.

It was bedlam. Kids were running this way and that, heedless of the boundaries to the children’s section of the store. A glance in that direction revealed a concentration of people who occasionally burst into applause. Many held up phones aimed at a small stage. Apparently, recitals or readings of some type were taking place.

As I attend more of these things, faces are becoming familiar. In the past, I would have said nothing, but I’ve begun to chat people up. I have no choice. If I don’t start asking questions, I will spend the next ten years chucking up cash at these things simply because it seems to be what’s done around here.

I spotted one neighbor who looked at least as impatient with the whole affair as I, but a bit more certain of his role. I braced him: “What are they doing here?”

“Some kids are up there reading,” he replied.

“Your kid reading?” I asked.

“Yeah. She’s already done.”

Just then, a pair of women walked up to us, one of whom demanded of my acquaintance whether he had seen his daughter read. He replied jocularly that he had not, but he would be sure to do so at the next opportunity. His interrogator good-naturedly admonished that he would have some explaining to do later. The ladies walked off, and as they did, he said to me “they only bring me to pay for dinner, anyway. That’s what I’m good for.” I chuckled and shook my head. No mathematical equation could be a greater truth.

As my kids placed their books of choice on the checkout counter, I noticed a registration desk near the exit. It was attended by one of my son’s former teachers and some other ladies. Considering that the event was shutting down, I couldn’t work out why they were still there. After purchasing the books, was I supposed to make a donation as well? By that point, it mattered not a jot. My patience was shot and I wasn’t about to go for the okey-doke twice in the same night.

I want to congratulate the organizers of the event: They managed to raise my blood pressure in direct proportion to those daggone funds!

Get your kids the heck outta here. I mean it. Is there any better way to open young minds to global possibilities than to get them out of their regular element?

You can’t miss what you never had, the saying goes. That is until you find yourself surrounded by people who have had what you never had. Having spent much of my youth on the less cosmopolitan streets of New York City, I walked smack into that reality the day I took my first office job.

I have to accept responsibility for this rude awakening. My mother, who had lived for several years in Europe, tried her best to raise my level of consciousness. Unfortunately, she was perceived by many in our circle to be pretentious and haughty. I was already playing down my academic potential. I didn’t need our people lumping me in with her. That would have been bad for my “rep”.

Imagine already living in the gutter and trying to work your way into the sewer. That was me. But as I approached 20, I felt the pull of vague ambitions that I couldn’t reconcile with my need to be accepted around the way. I was walking a fine line. Then, I got a tip about a job in the Financial District.

Wow.

At 17, I was hired to be a messenger at an international law firm with plush offices in a skyscraper overlooking New York Harbor. Though I lived not 20 miles from my new job, I might as well have been fresh off a Greyhound from Missouri. The better office buildings in Manhattan are architectural marvels. The lobbies of these places can be tourist destinations on their own. I felt privileged to walk through the revolving door to the elevator bank. And once I stepped into an elevator, I realized I had also stepped into another world. I was to experience a culture shock that could level San Francisco.

Once broken in, I became aware of my utter insignificance to the legal staff. This was mildly humiliating, but understandable. I had been comparing the smatterings of conversation I picked up walking through the offices to what I heard in the messenger room. The legal staff were the New England Patriots and we were, at best, high school junior varsity.

The chasm between the legal staff and the messengers was not just a by-product of education, race, salary or job description, it was about the fields of vision inherent to each group. The legal staff had been groomed from childhood to have greater expectations of and for themselves. Many of them had grown up elsewhere, did not necessarily come from money and were graduates of big and/or reputable schools. Doubtless, they spent their late teens doing internships or studying abroad. They were always talking about places they had been and where they planned to go whether for vacation, education or business.

We messengers on the other hand were largely street kids with maybe GEDs, attending public college, high school drop outs or worse, burn-outs just playing out the string. The concept of recreational travel, much less for education or business, was not even a bad joke for most of us. Our conversations typically centered around our neighborhoods, crime, sports, women, sneakers, clubs and, for some, baby mama drama. Lots of laughs, not much thought.

My mother’s attempts to sophisticate me left me uniquely conscious of the vast differences in thinking and vision between the groups. I hated to admit it, but she had been right.

There we were in that messenger room. Our perception: We were slick, street smart city kids who saw school as a distraction, a day trip to Great Adventure as a dream vacation and the well-dressed men and women rustling papers in their offices as brainiac hicks faking our genuine New York funk. Our reality: We were letter jockies hustling for peanuts, most of whom had little to no knowledge of life beyond the subway lines. We were the real hicks because we blithely lived beyond invisible walls of our own construction in a city of 8,000,000 where billions of dollars change hands annually, if not monthly.

Planes, trains and automobiles, people. Get ’em out of here, where ever here might be. Get ’em thinking globally…while their young.