The barfing has abated and the kids are all feeling much better, but their recovery is coming at the last hour, and they’re all tired, so there will be no school for them tomorrow. One might think they’d all be happy about this, but Alex is grumbling about getting behind in chemistry, Kevin has a spelling test that he knows he’ll ace so he wants to be there, and Rachel just has to be in school tomorrow. She won’t say why, but I suspect it has much to do with a squeaky thirteen year old named Mark.

So far neither Char nor I are feeling sick, and I have fingers crossed that in spite of how much vomit I’ve cleaned up this weekend and how much she cuddled with a sick ten year old we won’t get it. Since they’re feeling better their grandfather is coming over to spend the afternoon with them, and we’ve got an appointment with one of our students (he being a Realtor) to look at a couple of houses. Char did some surfing on Zip Realty and found several she thinks we’ll like, but what sounds good on paper doesn’t necessarily mean they’re be as good in person.

I’m still vacillating on this, but my gut tells me we’re going to accept the offer to buy this land. Char feels like it was meant to be because of the timing (the kids realizing how far removed they are from their friends, plus the mega-medical bill we’ve been presented with) and the fact that we’ve both pondered how big this house really is and how much bigger it will be after it’s just the two of us. And there’s the issue of the other two houses on the property. TK will never move back into his house and other than my niece, I can’t imagine having anyone else reside in my parents’ house. And Erin and Miko have no intention of living (as she puts it) in the sticks.

I have to admit, there’s a perk right there in moving: being closer to the grandkids. Travis is trying to crawl and Toni is full of first grader enthusiasm; I don’t want to experience that as a parent again, but it’s still fun and I miss it. If we move closer, we’ll get to babysit more.

Yeah, I’m partly still trying to talk myself into this.

I’ll try to keep an open mind as we look this week. Char’s mind is made up. Hopefully we won’t wind up butting heads over this.

Kevin heaved his guts up last night. Rachel was throwing up at 11 this morning, and now Alex is gritting his teeth because barfing would be a sign of weakness and he refuses. They’re all laying down; Kevin is in our bed curled up with his mother, Rachel and Alex are in their own rooms and want nothing more than to be left alone, but as tough as Alex thinks he is, I invaded his space to put a bucket by his bed. He can grit those teeth as hard as he wants but sooner or later the nausea is going to win.

They were supposed to spend the night with their grandfather, but he’s already been called and canceled on; he wants to come over and see the kids, but I really don’t want him exposed to whatever this is. Mostly because he’d find a way to blame me for it ;)

If the kids are better by Monday and if Char and I don’t wind up sick, while they’re in school this week we’re going to do some house hunting. We can’t make a decision on selling this place until we know what’s out there and if we can find something that would suit our needs. And then we need to agree on what those needs really are. Whatever we find, if we do wind up moving it doesn’t have to be the last place we ever live; once Kevin is out and through college, we can go anywhere we want, and right now a tropical island with bright white beaches sounds really good.

One of the things that amazes me about my kids is how easy school seems to come to them. Alex works his ass off and studies without parental prompting, but he doesn’t struggle. Rachel seems to just flow through school, and other than needing occasional help (usually from Alex) with math concepts, she grasps the information being handed to her. Kevin is just enthusiastic about everything; he’s the kid who looks forward to the start of school every year (owing to being somewhat of a social butterfly, which also gets him into trouble every now and then) and he’s engaged in what he’s learning.

We get the typical moaning and groaning complaints every morning when alarms begin to go off, but once they’re awake and dressed, all three kids are (or seem to be) eager to get out the front door and get to school. They talk animatedly about favorite subjects (and frequently over my head) and do the work they’re supposed to do as soon as they’re in my office at the dojang after school.

It amazes me because school was never that easy for me. I fought my parents on homework, I annoyed my classmates with somewhat disruptive behavior in grade school, and I didn’t grasp a lot of what I was being taught. I couldn’t focus; I wanted to learn but I didn’t know how, and the fact that I survived grade school without being held back is still somewhat puzzling.

I was that kid, the one you didn’t want to have to sit next to because he was going to fidget, talk out of turn, get up when he was supposed to remain still. I was the kid who got you into trouble because you whispered a reminder that Sister was going to beat the holy shit out of you if you didn’t shut up and sit still. I was also the kid who fidgeted during Mass, and in early 7th grade was punched in the face by a nun because along with my fidgeting, I stuck my finger in my mouth and touched the Host because it was stuck and I was choking on it.

This was the final incident in a long line of incidents for my father; I came home with a swollen and bloody nose and the next morning he withdrew all of us from the parochial school and enrolled us in public. It had been years of listening to complaints about not only my behavior, but complains about my sister’s social tendencies (like Kevin, she talked far too much in class) and my brother’s surliness (he was born in a bad mood and never got over it.) He was tired, but punching his son was it, and he was no longer willing to take on double and triple shifts to pay the tuition if they were beating up his kids.

Public school was not much better; I was the new kid, I was small for my age, I was mouthy, and I was terrified. I missed social cues on a constant basis, yet did not realize I was annoying those around me, and assumed their attentions were offers of friendship. I annoyed one person to the point of retaliation: she made it her goal to drive me insane by the end of the school year, yet I didn’t grasp that was what was going on. She was including me, therefore she liked me. It did not permeate my brain that the attention was not what I perceived (although my persistence did, over time, wear her down.)

And I still struggled with school work. I understood things on a fundamental level, but I wasn’t hearing most of what the teachers were saying. By the end of the year I’m sure I had exhausted all of my teachers and I’m almost convinced that my favorite, Mrs. Cheshire, got pregnant and took a leave of absence simply to avoid having me as a student in 8th grade.

When the start of 8th grade rolled around I didn’t have the usual nausea that I had most years; this would be different because I had friends at this school, and even if the teachers hated me, at least I had friends to fall back on. I was the one they picked on, but I didn’t mind, because they liked me, and I’d never experienced that.

Because I suffered this delusion, I had the nerve to talk to the girls I liked. Eventually one of them liked me back. And admitted it. This girl seemed to understand my lack of focus; she had a little brother at home who was a lot like me, and she had an idea how to help me survive school. This was decades before the word “multitasking” was in the vernacular, but she grasped that that was exactly what I needed to do in order to absorb information.

Over the next five years, she was the reason I began to do well in school. She organized the people I assumed were my friends into study groups, and convinced them that I was not the pain in the ass they believed. I was just a kid who couldn’t focus, and a kid who needed to be able to walk around the room while learning. I was the kid who could filter information if I was dribbling a ball on the floor. For an hour or two after school, we did homework together. They let me wander the room, poking my fingers into everything, lay on the floor tossing a baseball between my hands, anything I needed to do in order to hear and comprehend what was being said to me. They recited math problems and wrote down my answers; I only needed to re-do it in my own handwriting later.

English class became a joy; she read books out loud to me, and I was able to retain them. I learned to like history, I was able to pass science classes, and eventually many of my teachers were willing to give me oral exams during my lunch and study hall periods. Over those five years, I learned to organize myself enough that when I entered college, I could sit still through my classes.

Even today, I have trouble focusing on one thing. I rarely watch TV because of this; I’m not a TV snob and I don’t think it’s a low brow activity left for those lacking in the intelligence to immerse themselves in fine literature. I just can’t sit still long enough to watch it. I love reading, but five pages into most books and my mind is wandering and I’m getting up to do other things. Char reads to me frequently, if we’re interested in the same book, sometimes if we’re not. She stretches out of the bed and reads out loud while I do other things; I poke around online, I sift through dojang paperwork, or I work out.

It’s the only way I know how to do things: more than one at a time.

When I was in grade school and junior high, no one thought anything other than I was a pain in the ass. My parents were frustrated that I refused to sit still and refused to cooperate with my teachers. No one understood, until 8th grade, that I couldn’t. My life was, and mostly is, like living inside a television where someone else has control of the remote, and they spend a great deal of time changing channels.

It was in my mid thirties when I finally understood what was “wrong” with me. My ex (yes, she was the girl in 8th grade and beyond) had mentioned in an offhanded way many times that I was classic ADD, but we always laughed it off. I should have known; when I was studying for a BA in Justice Administration I minored in psychology. I basically understood about attention deficit disorder but never thought that was me, not until on a whim Char pushed me towards the shrink that counseled people where we worked.

As a child, it seems, I was “extremely scattered,” yet as an adult I’ve developed coping mechanisms; I’m naturally drawn to activities that either come with frequent changes in a given time span (such as TKD) or activities that require hyper-focusing (such as riding a motorcycle.) I don’t fidget when I have a kid in need of my full attention or when my wife has things on her mind; I can be there mentally and physically when intimacy is an issue. I don’t know why I can focus for my family, but I’m not going to contemplate it in case I screw it up. For the most part, I’ve structured my life to accommodate my inability to sit still, but when I absolutely have to, I now can.

Make no mistake, this is not by sheer willpower; I cannot will myself to sit there and watch half an hour of TV with my kids. I can fall into a book on my own now, but that’s rare. I’m fortunate that Char doesn’t take it personally that when she’s talking to me I tend to look away, pick up a pencil and paper and scribble something, or surf online. She knows that I’m listening, even if it doesn’t look like I am. And I think I manage singular focus when it matters the most.

Still, I watched the kids drag their books out after dinner, and while I cleaned up the kitchen they started on homework, and it struck me as odd that they can just sit there and do it. I watch them like this all the time, but this time it hit me that I could never manage that when I was their age. And their ability to do it amazes me. The fact that they enjoy school blows me away as much as it pleases me. I’m hoping that this will help take them much farther than I was able to go in life.

Writing this? I can sit here and write without getting up. I won’t be able to go back and read what I’ve written without getting up a few times, but I can sit and write without fidgeting, squirming, picking up something else to do, but I don’t know why. I just go with it.

Right around the time Char and I got married, I was informed I would be transferring from one office to another halfway across the country; I had several months notice, so we took a week off and headed for the new area to check it out and to look for a house. Both of us were astounded at the price differences and realized we could afford to build the house we wanted instead of picking some suburban cookie cutter that we were sure we’d outgrow within a few years.

This was when we were still talking about having a large family; we bought more land than we would ever need and we bought it away from the general population. It meant driving for goods and services but we agreed it would be worth it to have that amount of space and a house big enough for up to ten kids (granted, we were still in the talking about how many phase; my standard answer was ten, hers was to roll her eyes.) We had the house built while we were back home and then moved, driving across country, when Char was nearly seven months pregnant.

(Don’t do this unless you want to find every damned rest stop in existence between your point of departure and your destination.)

Over the next couple of years TK built a house on the property, and we built another for my parents. Sadly, my mother died not too long after moving here, and TK’s marriage exploded nastily last year, so both houses are sitting there, empty. A few years ago we moved my dad into this house, because he could no longer stand the quiet, and he needed more hands on help. He died last year, and I can’t imagine letting anyone else live in that house.

Living here, where it’s quiet, has been terrific for the kids. They have room to roam, space for dirt bikes, their friends can come here and if the weather is nice we can kick them out of the house and they can spread out. But the older they get, the more they hate living so far from school and so far from their friends. Excursions have to be planned, and because of my work schedule and Char’s teaching at the dojang, they’ve never spent as much time at other kids’ houses as they would have liked.

They grumble about it, but until recently I’ve ignored it. We live where we live, and they can deal with it.

Char and I both read a book recently, and one of the things the main characters complained about was the idea that they had this huge house and their kids were all adults; it wasn’t going to be long before they were the only two living there, and the quiet was going to echo in all those rooms. It hit us: we’re never going to have ten kids, and long before we’d like the kids will go off to college and then onto their own lives, and we’ll be left in a house meant for a large family on land that will at some point be too much for me to maintain by myself.

I still hadn’t thought much beyond that, because there’s time before Kevin goes off on his own. But a few days ago someone who has wanted this property for years (and has made a few less than stellar offers) contacted us again. And the offer this time is one I have to give serious consideration to. The timing is fortuitous; it comes on the heels of us realizing how big this house will be in eight or nine years, on the heels of adolescent complaints of distance between where they live and where their lives are, and mostly on the heels of another major medical bill of which we’re responsible for a huge chunk.

It should be a no-brainer, but I’m not rushing to say yes to the offer. We’ve lived here for 14 years; our kids have reached all their firsts here, and both of my parents died here. There’s a lot to hold onto and part of me doesn’t want to let go of it, ever. Part of me thinks overthinking it is insane. Another part is enjoying torturing the people making the offer, because I’m certain they presumed we would jump at it.

Yes, the torturing part is a definite bonus.

I woke up at three thirty this morning when Ian rolled over and slid his hand across my stomach. His eyes were half open and I assumed he was either just snuggling close or he wanted something, so I asked him what he was doing.

"Looking for Narnia."

He closed his eyes, pulled me close, and I didn't hear another word out of him.

He doesn't remember this, either, but I sure as hell want to know why he was looking for Narnia in my navel.

Motorcycles don't do well when left sitting in a garage, unridden for weeks at a time. Old gas turns to sludge in the fuel lines and the batteries drain; ideally you ride for a minimum for 30-40 minutes at 45 mph+ at least once a week (for these reasons if you're looking to buy a used bike, a newer one that's got some miles on is better than a 5 year old bike with only 1500 miles.) It's also much better for your skills if you ride regularly.

Char and I both ride, but I haven't been on a bike since before her accident. Primarily, I didn't ride because the idea terrified our daughter, but she doesn't seem have have the same fears about her grandfather riding, so he took each of the bikes out for a long ride a few weeks ago, but yesterday I wanted to get them our and charged back up and wasn't going to call Brad to do it. Theresa was over and I was obviously not needed, so I took the chance and spent a couple hours riding.

I joked afterward that if Rachel noticed the bikes had been moved, Grandpa did it. Damned if she didn't go into the garage later and note the likely two inches difference in where I parked them.

So yes, I smiled and said that Grandpa had gone for a ride.

Technically, this was not lying. I am someone's grandpa after all, and it made her happy. I do have to get her warmed up to the idea that I am going to ride again, and chances are her mother will, too. Hell, we have to get all the kids used to it. They might not be interested in their dirt bikes anymore and that's fine, but Char and I enjoy it far too much to give it up.

Hey Thump

It takes 5 pounds of hamburger, 2 packs of hot dogs, 16 ears of corn, 2 bags of Cheetos, and at least 2 gallons of Kool Aid to feed 9 kids. I surrender.

Was not drunk when I went home last night; wasn’t even buzzed. We split a pitcher of beer early on but it was offset by the two pizzas we ordered, and after that it was ice water and diet Coke. Clear heads are needed when trying to push TK into working up the nerve to get off his ass and talk to the women who were clearly checking him out. We never did convince him to ask for phone numbers; he seems to have this odd notion that the woman he’s dated two or three times lately might not appreciate that.

I’m not sure dinner and a movie constitutes a relationship and he really ought to play the field a little bit, but we never could get him to budge.

I was willing to be dragged out last night not only because Char’s father was going to be there but she’s managing the stairs on her own somewhat now. She can walk down them (it takes a while but she gets there) and she only needs someone when she’s going upstairs, and that’s mostly for confidence. No one has to physically help her, but she has the sensation of leaning backwards and is more comfortable with someone behind her. As long as Alex or Brad is around, I’m not as worried if I leave the house for a while.

And a sure sign that things are next to normal: each of the kids has two friends over, and the noise level in this house is insane. I’d complain, but it appears they’re all staying for dinner, which means I can throw burgers on the grill and not have to choke down something “healthy.” Char’s not exactly happy that the kids have had so much fat-laden-protein-dripping red meat lately, but she can’t argue with the fact that Kevin sprouted an inch in the last two months.

If they get their way, I may become the permanent cook.

It's Boys Night Out; the looming question is how drunk will Undr be when he gets home?

• Just tipsy
  
• Too drunk to be of any use to me
  
• There will be a trail of vomit up the stairs
  
• He'll be stone cold sober
  

He had to be pushed out the door and only went because my father was here; we'll see how late Dack and TK convince him to stay out.

We had a meeting last night with the dojang’s booster club (basically a group of parents who do things like bake sales to raise money for scholarships and charities; they originally wanted a say in how the dojang was run, but hell no) to discuss the reality that we were closing the school on Saturdays for the foreseeable future. TK and I expected opposition across the board; after all, these people are paying money to have access to lessons for their kids at reasonable times, and they’ve always had Saturday classes available.

Out of thirty parents, only one had issues with this; the rest of them were somewhat relieved, because this eliminates one weekend time-suck. Most of them have more than one child at the school, and those kids are spread out over different ranks, and therefore don’t have class together; some of the families are there in three hour blocks, and it’s too much for them. The consensus was now the kids can sleep in and they can get more done with their weekends. This is a relief. It won’t solve our money-flow issues, it won’t even come close, but it’s a start.

Inevitably, we’ll have only two choices: move to a smaller space and sell this building, or close the school and sell the building. I can bridge the money gap for a while, but I’m not willing to so do long term, and TK understands this; he pays his bills from his teaching income, but this was initially an investment for Char and I and as an investment it’s no longer viable. We’ll wait before making any final decisions, and may close for one more day a week until we have a more clear vision of where the school is headed.

If more students withdraw and fewer new students come in, we won’t have a choice. If the economy takes a sudden turn and inactive students return, we may be able to just move into a new space (minus the amenities that make this building attractive but expensive) and keep things running. If we do that, however, it becomes TK’s baby entirely, and my kids will simply be his students. I’ll teach a few classes a week as time permits.

At some point, when Char is sufficiently recovered that she won’t need someone nearby all the time, I’ll be expected to find another job, go back to school, or stand out in the yard for 8 hours a day so that I am not always here. I don’t know; I think it may be time for her to re-enter the working world and leave me home to be a house husband and stay at home dad. That sounds fair. ;)

One kid in the front seat, one in the back, and instead of talking to each other, they texted. I get that the phones are new, but I think I may have to put a limit on when they can text each other.

Specifically, not when they're 3 feet away from each other.

Besides, I think they were talking about me.

Char and I had just gotten done in the pool when TK stuck his head in to tell us the school principal’s secretary was on the phone. Not even eleven o’clock, not two weeks into the school year, and Kevin had been sent to the principal’s office. One or both of his parents was expected to come pick him up; he was dismissed for the rest of the day.

This pissed me off for a couple of reasons. Sending a kid home for whatever offense isn’t punishment, it’s damn near reward. He’s 10; he doesn’t care if he can’t make up missed work from the rest of the day. And if it wasn’t a suspendable offense, handle it in the office and send a note home. Char handled the phone call; had it been me I may have said something to make everything worse, so we were headed for the school like it or not.

Kevin was sitting in a chair just outside the principal’s office and as soon as we got there we were all ushered into her office, where she looked at Kevin and told him he could tell us what he’d done.

I punched a seventh grader in the nuts.

I admit up front that my first thought was not why? but Well, that was probably as high as you could reach.

Char had the presence of mind to ask him why. Well, we were waiting for choir to start and he was talking to Rachel and I wanted to ask her something and when I walked over there I heard him say he wanted to touch her boob so I punched him in the nuts. A perfectly rational explanation coming from a ten year old. I didn’t know how to respond to that without sounding amused and without becoming overly verbose, and just looked at the principal. She was gritting her teeth to keep from laughing.

Char was cool as a cucumber and asked him why he didn’t just let Rachel handle it. Because it’s my job to punch boys who bother her when Alex isn’t there to do it. Sure, he admitted, Rachel is capable of punching boys all on her own, but she’d be all nice about it and not go for the groin.

It seems the school has a zero tolerance policy on fighting; normally Kevin would have been suspended for the remainder of the week, but sending him home to face his father’s (supposed) wrath was deemed sufficient. And the kid who wanted to get up close and personal with my daughter? He’s out until next week, and the principal seemed sure that his weekend would not be a comfortable one based on his father’s reaction to the news his son was asking random girls if he could grope them.

I can hardly fault him for wanting to protect his sister, but because he didn't witness any actual groping and reacted to what amounted to a stupid request, he didn't get to sit on his ass all afternoon. He spent it as TK's little bitch, doing anything TK said, which included dusting every little nook and cranny in the offices and vacuuming everything that had carpeting. But when school let out, we let up, and he was done for the day.

No one is telling him to not protect his sister, or anyone else. Just be a bit smarter about it. And damn, we have clean offices now.

Instrumental instruction begins in grade 5 at the kids’ school. The older two started piano lessons when they were seven, and weren’t interested in what the school had to offer; Kevin, on the other hand, was never interested in the piano. His musical inclinations have been limited to playing with Rachel’s karaoke machine, but when offered the chance to learn something at school, he begged to be allowed to take the musical aptitude test.

Of course we allowed it; Char and I both had visions of him learning to play a trumpet or saxophone, even a trombone. They also offer guitar, and he would enjoy that. I signed the permission slip and he took the exam this morning.

Drums. They want to teach my son how to play the drums. He can use the drums at school during lessons, but expect us to rent or purchase a set for at-home practice. Char signed the permission slip before I could protest but the noise.

This is revenge for every time I talked back to my parents, isn’t it?

I’ll humor Char and wear the Speedo in the pool when we’re in there alone; I won’t wear it when there are students around or when our kids are there. Today, however, I left my shorts at home and only had the Speedo in my office, and thought we’d be done before Brad picked the kids up from school and brought them to the dojang.

I was off by about ten minutes. Rachel walked into the pool area to tell us they were there just as I was getting out of the pool. She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and then asked, “Water cold, Dad?”

Char is still laughing.

The dojang is bleeding money. I admit, I have not paid enough attention to its finances over the last few years, but the bills were being paid and neither TK nor Char brought to my attention that anything was operating abnormally (not their job to do my job.) Then I quit my job and started poking my fingers into things because I am a bit bored sometimes and I really should have been paying attention all along. I don’t pay attention well. I do best when I have several things at once to keep me occupied and can easily be distracted by shiny objects or by my wife blinking three times in a row.

Mostly as a way to stay out of my wife’s hair and as a way to avoid stepping on the last nerve I seem to be able to find without much effort, I opened the books. I think the last time I paid close attention to what was coming into the dojang and what was going out Kevin was probably still in diapers. It’s been a break-even proposition from the start, at least until the last year. Fewer new students are signing up. A few long-time students have quit, either because they’ve moved away or they got bored. That accounted for a slight drop, but there was a huge gap to track down.

The simple thing would have been to ask Char what had changed but that would have defeated the purpose of not annoying her. I was floored when I finally found the main culprit: the dojang’s insurance nearly quadrupled. After picking through the fine print and legal-speak, it seems that the reason is the pool and the weight room. The insurance company knew we had both from the outset, but someone recently decided those were hefty liability issues and if we want to keep them, we have to pay exorbitant amounts.

Apparently, too, Char and I have been paying this out of pocket. It’s not an issue of affordability, though it could eventually become one, especially given my employment status; it’s an issue of good business sense. Losing this much money does not make sense from a business standpoint. If it were any other business, I would close down without a second thought. But the dojang isn’t just a business; we’re teaching valuable skills to people, and it’s more like a small community than a capital producing asset.

The solution would be to remove the weights and fill in the pool, which I would do if Char didn’t need the pool right now. Even then, that would cost quite a bit to do and the expenditure would not likely be recovered for years. There would still be a considerable shortfall. I’m not sure I want to continue to pay hefty sums out of pocket in hopes that the economy will improve enough to bring new students to the door, and while I’m pondering the idea that closing one or two days per week would help, I’m not convinced that will be enough, either.

I suspect the answer is not going to be one any of us like, especially TK.

One week into the school year and the kids are already snowed under with homework. Except for Kevin. He enjoyed telling the other two that it took him ten minutes to finish his math and vocabulary homework and had the rest of the weekend free to do whatever he wanted. He was less thrilled with the news that, being the only offspring available, he was going to help me clean litter boxes, scoop dog poop, and vacuum. Yes, I will use my children as cheap manual labor.

After church this morning Alex and Rachel sat at the kitchen table with books open in front of them, and it occurred to me (not for the first time) that I am very glad I am no longer in high school or junior high. Those kids have twice as much homework as I ever did, and Char doesn’t remember having to spend hours every weekend on it, either. They were still plugging away at lunchtime and when I forced sandwiches on them (I fail at lunch; Char actually cooks for them on weekends) Rachel said that Alex spent so much time helping her figure out how to order fractions (good thing she didn’t ask me) and drilling her on the composition of cells (I know there’s a nucleus in there somewhere) that he had forgotten he needed to go to the library to get research materials for his own homework.

If I remember right, in 10th grade I was reading books after which I wrote a basic book report. He’s doing a paper on Shakespeare’s sonnets and the vocabulary and etymology of the times.

I honestly don’t even know what “etymology” is and can only spell it because he wrote it down.

He didn’t need to go right then because he has six weeks to get this paper done; I, however, wanted to get him alone. If we’re going to allow him to date, I didn’t see any reason to wait to tell him, but I also did not want to have this discussion around Rachel and Kevin, just in case I was able to steer him onto the subject of girls in general.

The local library apparently is not open on Sundays; we wound up going to a bookstore instead. I think that worked out better for me, since I was able to wait in the attached Starbucks knockoff, where I paid $4 for a damned soft drink. It was also a good place to talk to the kid and pry into his private life. We live in the boonies, far enough that the kids’ friends can’t just show up to hang out. I’d like to know a little bit about the people they hang around with in school, not just the members of the opposite gender that have them drooling.

I started with cell phones; after much deliberation (he does not need to know that his mother basically said “get them their own damned phones already”) he and Rachel will be allowed to get basic cell phones; they can text but they cannot access the Internet with these phones. If I find out they have, the phones go away. When he was sufficiently pleased with that news, I added that we felt he would need to have a phone on him the first time he took a girl out and she was pleading with him to take her home already.

It took a few moments for that to sink in. Fine, he can date, but with limits. No girls that are as much older as the one he tried to sneak past us in May. I’d prefer for now that he stuck to his own age, perhaps a year younger. I’ll grit my teeth and not say anything if she’s a year older. He gets driven to and from these supposed dated by either his mother or myself. No Grandpa, no Dack or TK, no elder siblings of his intended date. If I call his phone while he’s out he’d damn well better answer it. Grades better stay up.

He has no trouble agreeing to everything I want. Now. I expect a backlash when he actually has a girlfriend.

I’m still looking for a graceful way to get out of him what he may or may not have done with the sixteen year old before we found out about her. There was no actual dating but the school they attend is on a sprawl of land with plenty of places for horny teenagers to do what horny teenagers will, and as much as he will protest that it’s none of my business, at his age I think it is. I trust my son, but I was his age once and I know I would have done anything my girlfriend would have agreed to. Alex is not afraid of girls in the least; I wasn’t afraid of my girlfriend but anyone else? Terrified.

Tomorrow after we pick them up from school we’ll go get them the phones, and figure out something for Kevin since this will undoubtedly feel unfair to him (he’s 10; he does not need a cell phone, period.) Alex is trying to be mature about it, all very “well this is good news” when I know inside he’s squealing as much as Rachel did when he passed it along to her. On the ride home he left me with something else to chew on: we’re allowing him to date at 14. Sixteen and a half months from now, Rachel turns 14.

I’m not sure I can be fair in this.

Her hangover mostly abated, Char decided tonight was a good night to offer babysitting services to Erin and Miko. Essentially this meant “bring the kids over, Grandpa will suffer diaper duty and will intimidate his granddaughter into eating broccoli and I will play with them.” I don’t mind diapers and I don’t mind staring down a 6 year old until the vegetables are gone, but I expect something for it and being the one to play with them would be nice.

When our kids were told their cousins were coming over, they couldn’t have been happier. They learned quickly that if I have to cook for a 6 year old, it’s going to be hot dogs and macaroni & cheese with a broccoli chaser, something that turns Char’s stomach (Do you know what’s in hot dogs? That’s not even real cheese! How can you feed them that?) And they started making plans for activities with the 6 year old that did not involve either Char or myself.

Basically, I was down to feeding through intimidation and diapers. Play time with my granddaughter was usurped, but hell, I could hold the boy hostage.

Except that Alex got to his baby cousin first and I don’t think I held him for more than 5 minutes in the first four hours he was here. I waited for the first dirty diaper to rear its ugly head, but Alex took care of that. He handled the bottles. And he wandered through the living room carrying the baby and announced that he really wanted one of these. From the other side of the sofa I heard Char mutter I am tying your dick in a knot until you’re twenty five.

Considering he can out walk her run right now, he wasn’t worried.

Char and I didn’t actually get any time with either of the grandkids until an hour before Erin and Miko came to pick them up, and then it was only because Rachel wanted to make cookies and they handed the baby over because they knew their attentions would be divided.

I think it struck both of us while we sat on the sofa holding a very sleepy baby: Alex turns 14 in less than three weeks. Erin landed on our doorstep when she was just shy of sixteen, and shortly after that Miko was sniffing around, trying to convince me he was worthy of dating my niece. He had a brand new driver’s license and a POS car, he barely had peach fuzz, and he wanted to take my niece places.

I did not relent easily. Aside from the circumstances under which we assumed custody of Erin, I had never parented a teenage girl; Char wasn’t that far removed from those years and was perhaps more sympathetic than I, but our parental experiences were limited to someone who spoke monosyllabically and ran around with gummi worms hanging out of his nose.

Miko was patient. He spent an entire year not dating Erin, but hanging around our house, allowing us the time to get to know him and trust him. I don’t doubt that there wasn’t a whole lot of tonsil hockey being played when we weren’t looking, but he was respectful without being boorish about it, and I gradually warmed up to him.

Char made the decision, finally. She caught me when my defenses were down and pointed out that their prom was four months away, and it would probably be a good idea if I let them go on an actual date before then. Whatever Erin had done before she came to live with us didn’t count; she’d earned our trust and deserved to have it shown. I relented; as long as he had her back by curfew—and I was a son of a bitch about what time—they could go out.

He never failed to have her home at least half an hour before curfew. The night of their junior prom, while we waited in the living room and I grudgingly said he could keep her out until 2, when the venue they would be at officially closed, he was man enough to look me in the eye and tell me he knew what I was most concerned about, and he would absolutely not try that.

I got no promise the next year while he waited for her to get ready for their senior prom, and I do not want to know; what I do know is that he has always treated her with respect, and he has always treated my relationship with her with respect.

Alex is in his sophomore year; it’s a year early, but in a few months he will be at a point in school where Erin was when Miko first began working overtime to be allowed to date her. If we hold him to my anger-inspired declaration that he’s not dating until he’s sixteen, he’ll be a senior. He wouldn’t have that experience of being stared down by someone’s father for his junior prom, and he won’t have the opportunity to prove himself, either to a girl’s father or to us, before he’s very nearly out of high school.

The greater question becomes whether or not we risk stunting him socially because I had a knee jerk reaction to his sixteen year old girlfriend, or we hold fast because I don’t want him making hormonal mistakes when he’s too young to have a clear head about them.

Char reminded me that I gave Miko a chance just by letting him hang around here; Erin wasn’t ready to actually date for a long time after she moved in, but I did let the little hornball stay for hours on end. Alex is at least as mature as those two were, so why not give him the chance?

I’m not sure I’m happy about it, but she is right. And I appreciate that she’s trying to make it seem like this was my decision when we both know who made it. Alex won’t be able to drive for two more years, so chances are he’ll have to avail himself of Dad’s Taxi, but we’re going to allow him to at least put himself out there.

I don’t get hangovers. It doesn’t matter how drunk I get; I sleep it off and by the time I wake up I feel just fine. Char gets hangovers. She doesn’t drink often so when she does she gets drunk easily and she pays for it the next day. Because she doesn’t enjoy this, she’s usually my designated driver and takes the wheel even if I’ve had only one beer. It doesn’t matter to her if I had the beer three hours before with a meal. I am not getting behind the wheel after a drink, and I’m fine with this.

Since she can’t drive right now she had the option to have a drink or two tonight. We met Dack and Theresa for dinner and then went to shoot some pool; there was a margarita with dinner, and then one when we got to the bar where we usually go for a few games of 8-ball and 9-ball. While she humiliated Dack at 9-ball she decided that tonight she would forgo any pain meds and have another drink.

She’s a big girl and knows how she’ll feel the next day, so I didn’t say anything. My main consideration was that she didn’t seem to be in pain and she was having a good time. She killed us all in a few more games and then Dack and Theresa had to leave; a few more games between us and one more margarita, and we were ready to go home.

Yeah, fifteen years ago we probably would have closed the bar down. But we were home by ten o’clock and sat down on the sofa to watch a little TV before going to bed. She managed to remain upright for about 5 minutes, then stretched out with her head in my lap, and even manage another 5 minutes before mutating into Mz. Horny Hands.

Hell, there were no kids around and there wasn’t going to be any kids for at least 12 more hours, she could do whatever the hell she wanted. I was worried she might roll off the sofa and onto the floor, which would have caused immeasurable pain, but she was determined to get busy in the living room, so I suggested we ease off the sofa and onto the floor, and she heartily agreed.

She had to get up before I could. She lifted up on an elbow, started to swing her legs over the side, and threw up into my lap.

Who says romance is dead?

With dojang attendance low right now (I give it 2-3 more weeks before the kids are all back in the swing of school and are back in training) TK and I decided to cancel tonight’s and tomorrow’s classes. Besides, he actually has a date and if there are no classes to worry about he can pick her up before 9 p.m. and it doesn’t look like he’s just trying to hook up. I sure as hell didn’t mind the idea of not scrambling to get from Char’s PT to picking the kids up from school, getting food other than fast food in them and then getting to the dojang.

Char was awake by the time I got home from taking them to school and told me she’d called to cancel her PT for today. She’d been contorted enough yesterday (and probably somewhat reticent about facing boner boy)and if we felt like it we could go get in the dojang pool, but since we weren’t having classes tonight, she thought it would be a good time for us to just take a down day.

With no appointments we were actually able to take the dogs out back and play with them, something the kids do but they don’t run Tank as hard as he likes, and they over work Stoner. Char sat in a lawn chair and tossed a ball for Stoner and I took Tank for a short but hard run. Alex works on Tank’s obedience training but he’s not as firm as he should be (that’s not a complaint, because he at least does it without being told to and he knows it’s necessary) and over the last few weeks I’ve noticed Tank doesn’t listen as well as he should. He’s like fur covered five year old; he understands right from wrong but if he can get away with something (like taking food from Kevin under the dinner table) he will.

Tonight Brad is taking the kids bowling and is keeping them for the night (his giant ass TV trumps our big ass TV) so we’re going out to dinner and then whatever else we can think of. I’m straining my brain to remember what the hell we used to do when we were dating, before we caved in to hormones. And she’s dumped this all on me, so I have to figure out what the hell she might like to do.

I’ll probably blow it, but I’m guessing she’ll expect that.

Char’s PT was done in the pool today, and after some actual swimming, the kid working with her helped her stretch out. In an effort to keep her hip from locking, much of the stretching they do with her involves contorting her legs into torturous positions. In the warm water (94 farking degrees, who can swim in that?), it doesn’t seem to hurt as much as it does otherwise, and she can be pushed pretty hard.

Because I don’t tend to look like I’m going to bite someone’s head off when she’s in the water, I’m allowed in the pool with her. I stood off to the side while this kid helped her stretch and watched, because paying attention means I can later help her when she’s in the dojang pool, and face it, if I get through the session without losing my shit, it pays other dividends. The kid helping today looks about 21-22 and is thin and wiry, and I could break him in two without much effort, and I think he realized this. Char wasn’t having any problem with the stretching so it wasn’t bothering me, not until the expression on his face went from practically bored to surprise and his eyes went wide.

Char was concentrating on getting her leg stretched enough to get her knee to break the water and wasn’t looking at him or at me for that matter so she was a little surprised herself when I told him I thought he was done for the day and to go swim it off. I think he was a little surprised that I didn’t grab him by the hair and launch him through the air, but what the fuck was he supposed to do? He’s a kid, and she’s hot. It’s not like I blamed him but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let him keep working with her then.

She’s mildly amused now but I think she won’t be working with him again.

After that she had a doctor’s appointment. She complained about the cast getting in her way in the pool, so they cut it off and gave her two splints, one for typical use and one for in the water and said she can shower without either if she wants. The bone isn’t completely healed but well on its way. And the MRI results were finally back. There was nothing significant and he thinks her pain is probably cyclical because she didn’t make the best use of pain medication. He doesn’t want her to increase what she’s already taking but has her on gut-busting doses of Ibuprofen twice a day and hopefully over a week or so that will break the cycle. He also suggested she try acupuncture, which surprised me a little.

Based on her progress he also thinks she might be able to drive within 3-4 months. She can start trying to figure out what she wants and Santa might stuff it into her stocking. She was more interested in how long it will be before she can ride her motorcycle again but he wasn’t as optimistic about that and frankly I’ll be glad if it’s not until next spring. It’s going to take that long before the kids relax about the bikes; they won’t even get on their dirt bikes right now. I’m going to go ahead and prep them for winter, except for my bike. I might be able to sneak a ride or two in when the kids are in school, but if not Brad will ride it for me.

If the kids are still freaking over the idea of us on the bike by next spring, we have some serious debating to do. Ride anyway, or give it up. I’m not thrilled with either idea.

Attendance in the dojang is evidence of the start of the school year. Yesterday I taught a class with a single student (8 years old, and when he found out I was going to be his instructor, he burst into tears. Hopefully he now knows I’m not out to kill each and every student.) Today I had a class of just 4, all junior high aged kids and none of them wanted to be there.

I don’t exactly blame them. Alex was at the dojang but was in my office with his nose buried in homework and he never made it to his class. Between fatigue from having to get up early in the morning to getting back in the homework groove the classes normally filled with kids will probably be light for the next couple of weeks. That’s fine with me.

I’m not thrilled with having to get up at six in the morning, either.

Tomorrow when I drop the kids off (parochial school, they’re all on the same campus) I have to go into the office and do battle on Alex’s behalf. Last year he took geometry and had taken algebra in 8th grade; this year in spite of what he registered for, he was placed in pre-calculus and when he pointed out to the teacher that he was not ready for this course he was informed that it was a department decision and he would do just fine.

If Alex thought he had a remote chance of passing that class with higher than a C he would gut it out, but two days in he’s crying uncle. He needs to take algebra 2 first. Or he says he does, I’m taking his word for it. I looked at the textbook and it doesn’t look anything like math to me, but I also never made it past geometry.

I won’t admit it to Alex, but if that school was run by nuns, I’d send Char in and hide behind her. I survived parochial school up until 7th grade, when Sister Hubert Humphrey (I no longer remember her real name, but that’s who she looked like) cold cocked me in the face for sticking my finger in my mouth during communion. I still have a healthy fear of nuns. Priests I’m fine with, nuns make my junk shrivel.

Training in a martial art can give you grace of movement. You learn to be aware of your surroundings, how to move, and how to react. So yes, if you’ve made it to 6th degree and trip over your own shoelace and face plant into the pool fully clothed, I am going to laugh my ass off at you.

You cannot, it’s been pointed out more than once lately, “shrink” your own wife. I don’t think that’s what I do; in any case, I’ve never practiced clinical psychology so technically… I think it would be more accurate to say I’m a general pain in the ass, and go overboard trying to figure her out because I don’t want to repeat past mistakes. I don’t want to make assumptions and be wrong enough to make things worse. I do it anyway, and for that I will grab hold of the stereotype and blame gender.

My impulse is to fix things, even when I clearly understand I can’t. I want to understand how things and people work. To that end I drive my family a little bit nuts and they’re usually tolerant of it. Char knows me well enough to distract me with something else to contemplate when I’m getting on her nerves, but like she said, at three in the morning combining my tendency to over analyze with her current sensitivities (and I’m the first to admit she has every reason to be overly sensitive these days, with or without my marital cooperation) those two things aren’t a good combination.

I keep trying to put myself in her shoes: in pain, stepping back from daily routine, having to rely in someone else for help with everyday tasks, dependent on others for transportation and having to give up teaching TKD; she’s doing it without much complaint, she hides the pain from the kids, and truthfully I don’t think I could do it all. I’d be whining and more temperamental, and I’m certain my sense of self would take a giant nose dive.

I wish we could go back and start that conversation over, at a time when we’re both awake and thinking straight, but trust me, I get that I added to her list of things she has to deal with.

Here’s one of the wonderful things about my wife: while I’m still chewing on things, she’s over it and has moved onto something else. She forgives my stupid shit long before I can stop worrying about it. Considering the sheer amount of stupid shit I drop at her feet, that’s an amazing thing.

Another thing about my wife: she has no problems issuing ultimatums. Most of the time it’s for my own stubborn benefit and in spite of whatever misgivings I have, she’s almost always right in the things she puts her foot down over.

In that I don’t think I’m much different than our kids. I do and say some of the most monumentally stupid things, but at least they have age as an excuse. She balances me, and I learned a long time ago that if she gets to that point, it really is in my best interests to do what she says.

Resistance is futile. It gets me out of the doghouse early, anyway.

I could be, and probably should be, absolutely furious that Ian not only wrote but actually hit submit on that post, but I’m not. As soon as I read it I understood why he wrote it, and I mostly (not completely) understand why he posted it. He’s obsessively private about things that most people have no problem sharing (don’t ask him where he lives or what he used to do for a living, because his hackles go up and he’s instantly suspicious why you want to know), but he’s also very open about whatever happens to be brewing in his brain. In this relationship he is the more emotionally charged and he chews on everything. While he’s chewing, he writes. He has volumes of journals stored in a box in the closet, and doesn’t care if I read them.

When he’s not writing he wants to dissect everything. He has to know why I feel what I feel, and he has this need to understand everything. Sometimes, I just want to get angry with him or hurt without having to explain it or figure it out, and this just happened to be one of those times. The truth is, yesterday morning we both said a lot of hurtful things to each other, far more than he wrote about. We both own apologies. He’ll take the blame for it, but I started it. What I don’t want to do is endlessly dissect it.

For the record we did talk it out last night and we both agree this isn’t really about sex so much as it is about sheer frustration. Maybe a little about sex. I think his post made it seem like a much bigger problem than it really is. I’m a little over sensitive right now and taking things the wrong way, and he’s trying too hard to figure me out. At three in the morning, those aren’t good combinations.

I’ll be here for the time being.



Please send cookies and milk.

It’s after 4 am and I’m wide awake again. I had actually been asleep (since we decided that I would quit my job, I’ve been sleeping almost like a normal person) but Char woke me at 2:45 with the completely from-left-field-question, Have you ever considered adopting another baby?

After we adopted Kevin we discussed this at length. When we first got married I was positive I wanted a houseful of kids; if you asked me how many, my standard answer was “10” and it wasn’t as much of an exaggeration as it may have sounded. I wanted a big family and Char was not opposed to the idea; we had intended on having more kids.

Rachel’s birth was problematic, and during Char’s pregnancy we learned that she should not have gotten pregnant again after Alex was born. She had a bilateral uterus, and while she had managed the pregnancy with our first, a second child was not in her best interests; her doctor failed to mention this gem to us, and we went about life with assumptions of several pregnancies as easy as the first had been.

Rachel was due in March. In January Char was admitted to the hospital with the intention of long-term monitoring and keeping her pregnant as long as possible. On January 25th, her uterus basically split, and Rachel was born in an emergency c-section. Everything came together that day as if it was pre-ordained; I was in the room with Char, her doctor was less than 100 feet away at the nurses’ station, and she was in an OR in just minutes. If I had not been right there and her doctor had not been right at hand, chances are I would have lost them both nearly 13 years ago.

The disappointment I expected both of us to feel never surfaced. We had a 17 month old son and a beautiful newborn daughter, and neither of us cared that we were not going to have a houseful. We did not consider adoption seriously after that, because we had adjusted our notions of the ideal family and considered ourselves to already have that.

Somewhere around July the next year, Char’s father called with the surprising news that her cousin, her 13 year old cousin, was pregnant. This followed a scare from my niece, who at barely 16 needed someplace to live because for a few overwhelming weeks she thought she was pregnant, and my sister threw her out (my sister ranks right up there with my brother.) We began talking about adoption then, because Erin did not think that at 16 she had any business being a mother; when she realized she was not pregnant, just unfortunate, we stopped talking about it until the call from Brad.

Char’s cousin did not want to bring a child into her particular circumstances and she knew she was not mature enough; she would have had support from her mother, and we would have provided financial support if that’s what she needed, but the environment was less than ideal, and she wanted us to adopt the baby. She knew Char was married to “that guy” and had escaped their neighborhood, and she didn’t want to give up the baby to a total stranger.

Before we even knew of his existence, everyone else had decided that we were unquestionably Kevin’s parents. It didn’t require much discussion on our parts. When she got off the phone with her father and relayed to me what he’d called about, we both looked at each other and what we saw reflected back at one another was I hope to God you want this because I want it more than anything. Call it providence or serendipity, or whatever it might be, but it felt like something that was supposed to happen.

While we prepared for his birth, enduring all the legalities of adopting him and transitioning Rachel from the nursery into her own big-girl room, we began to discuss again the possibility of having the large family we had originally wanted. It seemed likely that we would be able to adopt one or two more, if we were patient and if we threw all of our resources at it. And the day Kevin was born, when we saw him for the first time and it felt every bit as much like seeing Alex and Rachel for the first time, we both decided that we wanted two more if possible.

Then Rachel hit the terrible twos in spectacular style, and one day we looked at each other and admitted, we can’t do this that many times. Alex had been stubborn at two; Rachel was a pint sized tornado spinning through our lives with a temper that matched her ability to scream, and she was, to be honest, so hard to handle that there were days we weren’t sure how we’d managed to get from morning to night without putting fists through walls in frustration.

We had three kids; that, we decided then, was enough. We knew that eventually Rachel would outgrow the terrible twos and that Kevin might be as easy to deal with as Alex had been, but we didn’t want to deal with another tempestuous, and often aggressively physical demonstrative toddler.

We also knew what was coming: the teenage years.

So my reaction when Char woke me up with the question about whether or not I had considered adopting again was Hell no. I love my kids, my daughter is one of the grand highlights of my life and I treasure every day with her, but from 2-4 she convinced me that the three kids we have is enough (she knows this; she takes pride in hearing stories about throwing applesauce at a bus boy in a restaurant and about the time she had a full blown, screaming, body flopping, arms and legs flailing meltdown at a church luncheon, where upon a frustrated priest seethed Shut her the fuck up.) It’s funny now, because she’s grown into a smart, funny, kind, and generous person who rarely raises her voice, even when her brothers are picking on her.

But Hell no was my reaction an hour and a half ago when asked if I ever considered adopting again. And I wanted to know why she woke me up to ask something she already knew the answer to. I suspected it had much to do with pain medication clouding her brain and lowering her inhibitions enough to bring up something she possibly really wanted, but no; she thought that by distracting me when I was mentaly fuzzy I might be more willing to give consideration to something she felt was a more pressing matter.

To quote a friend, file this under TMI. The easily offended and embarrassed won’t want to read any further. This is as personal as I’m ever apt to be.

Go here instead. It is more amusing than anything I have to say from this point on. The train wreck that follows is not amusing; it is mostly self indulgent personal catharsis and I think the only two people who would care about it anyway are the only two who have read through this already too-long post anyway. If you want the rest, you’ll need to click through.

If you do you’ll walk away thinking two things about me: I am an idiot, and I am a fucking moron. You'll be right.

I tend to forget sometimes that people in my life know other people in my life; complicating that is that some of the people in my life forget that they know other people who used to be in my life and that those other people might be lurking online and reading their blogs, and hence will eventually find mine.

Is that convoluted, or not?

I’ve known Thumper since seventh grade; as a result, she’s known my ex-wife as long as I have, and they used to email occasionally. As it tends to happen sometimes, their communications waned and eventually stopped, and Thump didn’t think much about it. Kathy, however, continued to read her blog.

Thump mentioned my blog, Kathy followed the link, and as a consequence learned that I sometimes think of her as being batshit crazy. She emailed Thump, Thump emailed me, I emailed Kathy; it could have been a rerun of eighth grade when we passed notes back and forth via other friends, stopping just short of the cliché of Do you like me? Check yes or no although it might be reasonable to assume that notes these days would substitute the word hate for the word like.

I may have mentioned that I do not hate my ex-wife. I may not have mentioned that there were a few times post-divorce, and after I married Char, that she opened her home to us when we needed a place to stay while visiting my parents (to remove some of the creepiness, she stayed elsewhere, but was very generous in letting us crash there, down the street from my parents’.) She and Char even went to lunch together and without me while we were there. After I moved my parents here, however, we had fewer reasons to communicate, and eventually got to where we rarely heard from each other.

When Kathy contacted Thump it was only to ask if Char was doing as well as we were implying; it was not to complain about anything I have said about her, although she would be within her rights to take umbrage over the fact that I did refer to her as batshit crazy. I cringed when she mentioned it, because it was not exactly fair; she might have been a bit crazy but she was never crazy, not in the stereotypical, malicious, I-hate-your-sorry-ass way.

She has retained her sense of humor over the years and does not take offense. Still, I apologize for it; she doesn’t deserve to be presumed as a vindictive and partly insane ex. Our marriage was what it was and ended when it was supposed to. We’re both happier where we are now than where we were twenty years ago. Leaving me was not an act of insanity on her part; it’s only the timing of telling me she had filed for divorce that has compelled me to describe her as crazy.

So to be fair, I am publicly apologizing for telling the world that my ex is bat shit crazy. She’s not, and it was wrong of me to say she is.

Nine or ten years ago I had a whim to put a pool in the backyard. The whim was fueled by an evening spent playing pool and drinking beer with my father and father in law, and I determined (around beer #6, I think) that not only would we have a pool, but I would do all the work myself. I had no idea what that might entail, but I was determined, and actually painted off the area where this pool would go, and started to dig a hole.

Two and a half feet down, with an area roughly four feet by four feet dug out, I changed my mind and made a wood form for the hole, filled it with sand, and created a play area for the kids.

I was reminded of this at eight o’clock this morning by a grumpy, “If you’d actually finished the pool, I could stay home and sleep in, and I wouldn’t have to go with you in order to swim.” I didn’t earn any points by pointing out that she’s not swimming, she’s walking, and had I created the pool I envisioned it would have been too deep for her to manage that.

Even with the cast on her arm, she can still flip me off.

Honestly, I had not expected her to want to go to the dojang this morning. I only had one class to teach and Alex intended to skip his in order to stay home with her; she had other ideas and fully intended to work out during Alex’s class. She waited in the office during my class, and when I was done we hit the pool.

No Speedos were involved.

She doesn’t fully understand why she froze in the pool yesterday; Alex was walking along beside her and they were talking about the start of school next week, and how last year when she dropped the kids off on the first day she mortified Kevin by kissing him goodbye where he friends could see. The notion that on the day of the accident she could have had any or all of them in the car with her hit her hard, and she froze. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak, and she couldn’t tell Alex to just give her a few minutes and it would be all right. She was barely aware that he had gotten out of the water and couldn’t tell me how long he had waited to go get me(just a few seconds; he knew instantly that something was wrong) or how long it took for me to get there (less than thirty, I think). The only thing she knows for sure is that thought pricked at her for just a moment, and it was as painful as any of the physical pain she’s endured lately.

She’s just now starting to recover pieces of memory from the accident; she can recall the squeal of the other driver’s brakes, and she can distinctly remember the thought “God, no.” But in spite of not remembering everything, she grasps what the outcome would have been had any of the kids been in the car. She should not have survived; anyone else in the car would not have. And just the notion is tearing her up inside. It was enough to stop her in her tracks in the pool yesterday, and enough to make breathing a concentrated effort.

Today, however, we walked the pool for an hour and a half, and she was fine. When Alex’s class was over he joined us in the pool for half an hour of lap swimming. Afterwards Dack drove Rachel and Kevin to meet us for lunch, and we were able to discuss with them some of what their mother might go through, and what to do if the same thing happens again (get Dad or Grandpa, because one of them is always going to be close at hand for the foreseeable future.)

This afternoon I sat in the living room working on the dojang budget and she was in the kitchen with the kids, helping them bake cookies. There was a lot of laughter coming from all of them, and other than the fact that there are actual cookies in the house right now and I might even get one, it was a slice of ordinary. It could have been any other pre-accident Saturday afternoon.

Except, it’s not. That other shoe is starting to fall and it’s like we’re watching it in slow motion, hoping that it lands gently. I’d catch if it I could.

I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop; it didn’t seem likely that Char would get through the entire process of healing without some emotional wounds erupting. Physically, she’s done very well, and on the surface anyone looking at her would assume that emotionally and psychologically she was healing just as quickly.

Physical trauma is easier to recover from; you let your body do the things for which it is designed, you rest when you need to and push through the pain when appropriate, and eventually it will heal as much as it is capable of healing. The mind is trickier. The wounds inflicted upon the psyche are often so deep that they’re almost invisible, and it can take a long time for them to surface.

I did not realistically expect that there would be no emotional fallout from the accident and I have been trying to keep a close watch (without being overbearing) on her moods, things that frighten her and things that startle her. The first indication that those ghosts were beginning to filter through came a few days ago, when we approached a busy intersection and a car approaching from our right did not slow until the last possible moment. We were already moving; she saw the other car out of the corner of her eye and flinched hard, and as soon as I’d driven through the intersection she asked me to pull over.

Had any of the kids been with us, she would likely have sucked it up, but they were at home; I pulled over to give her time to regroup and the only thing I could possibly do in that situation was to hold her until she was ready to push on. A few minutes and a few deep breaths later, and she said she was fine.

Today I was on the dojang’s main training floor working on self defense tactics with a small group of students when Alex barreled through the door in soaking wet shorts. He didn’t have to say anything because I knew he had been helping his mother in the pool and he is keenly aware of the rules regarding appropriate dress outside the locker room and the pool area; that he had run in half dressed and wet was enough to push me off the floor and towards the pool, leaving Alex to deal with getting TK to finish the class.

She was still in the pool, rooted in place halfway down the lane she’d been walking in. She couldn’t take another step and felt like she was choking on her own breath. It wasn’t quite a full blown panic attack, but it was viscerally paralyzing. I know enough to understand that this might be the only level of emotional backlash that she’ll suffer, but also enough to understand that this could be the tip of the PTS iceberg.

My gut reaction is gender-typical: fix it. Do anything to make it better, even though I know I can’t. At this stage all I can do is ask her what she needs from me, and do it, even if it means jumping into the pool in a TKD uniform.

You're never too old to learn something. Tonight, I learned that just because your kid has never before gotten a kick past your ability to block does not mean that he will never get a kick past your block. I also learned that any future sparring I do with Alex would be best accomplished while wearing a cup. I am also not sure I appreciated hearing him tell his mother that he "dropped me like a bag of trash" and that I very nearly puked on the dojang floor. Ow.

My father in law has been a tremendous help over the last six weeks (and yeah, it’s been six weeks today. It seems like it just happened, like the horror is still hanging over us like a nightmare that won’t go away, and it seems like it happened months ago.) He sucked it up when I know he felt like he should be the one sitting by Char’s bedside night after night and let me be with my wife. He’s taken up my parental slack, being with the kids with I couldn’t and when Dack and Theresa had other obligations, and he’s stood back and let me do the bulk of caring for and helping Char.

I know that hasn’t been easy for him, and I know it feels contrary to him. Char is his oldest daughter, but she’s really the only one he has a strong relationship with. She’s Daddy’s Little Girl, as much as Rachel is mine. They have the relationship that I pray I’ll always have with Rachel, and I know there were times when he wanted me to just go away and let him be Char’s father.

He could have asked me for anything, and I would have done whatever I needed to in order to give it to him. All he wanted, he asked for today. And all he wanted was to spend some time alone with his daughter. No kids, no husband hovering nearby, just him and his little girl.

Rachel and Kevin went to a movie with Dack and Alex went to the dojang with TK (he realized recently that he can test for his 2nd degree in a year, and he’s being proactive in his training and tackling it head on, without any prodding from me.) Brad and Char had the whole day together; they went to lunch, he took her to rehab, and afterward he sat with her at home while she slipped into a nice Percoset fog.

She needed the time with him as much as he needed time with her.

Me? I finally went to start taking care of loose ends. I saw Char’s car, with the idea that I would see if I could get any of her things from the trunk, but it’s not possible. And there is no way in hell I will ever let her see that wreckage or pictures of it. I saw a lawyer; we’re not suing the other driver’s estate but I want our asses covered in case they try to find some way to sue us. I spent time with my accountant. And the last thing I did before going home was go into work, where I handed in my resignation.

I officially quit.

I’ll be held to several nondisclosure agreements, but they’re not holding me to my contract; if I hadn’t quit I would have needed an extended leave of absence which rendered me useless anyway. My gut tells me that Char is going to need someone on hand for at least six months, and while I could hire someone or even rely on Brad, I don’t want to. She doesn’t want me to.

And I want more time with my kids. Alex starts his sophomore year next week, Rachel starts eighth grade, and Kevin fifth; I feel like I’m running out of time with them and being gone in 5 week chunks wasn’t cutting it. I’ll take Char’s place in the dojang for the time being, which gives me all the time she needs from me, and I can spend as much time with the kids as they’ll tolerate.

The more time I have to be here for them, it means there’s more opportunity for Brad to have time with his daughter. I can be a grownup about it. I can share.

While Char is progressing nicely and healing seemingly well, she’s still in an incredible amount of pain most of the time. She hides it well, well enough that the kids have no idea, but it’s wearing her down. Today she had a MRI of the left side of her body; they’re looking for any obvious causes that may have been missed before. From the outside, you’d think she was 90% healed. Her incisions don’t have that wild raw look anymore and her facial swelling is gone (though her nose is still very tender and probably will be for a while). The bruises have all faded. But still, she’s admitted that most of the time it’s barely within her ability to control, and we need to know why.

We should know by the beginning of next week.

She spent three hours lying still while getting the MRI, and I assumed afterward she would just want to go home and take a nap. But, she wanted to go to the dojang and walk in the pool. I walked with her for a while, and then Alex and Rachel did; Kevin intended to help but cannonballs from the side of the pool were about all he could manage.

No, I did not wear the damned Speedo with the kids there and I won’t if there are any students around. I lost a female student once because of tight Lycra shorts; I don’t care to repeat that.

School starts next week and I think Char will get most of her pool workouts done earlier in the day; the kids are helpful, but… It’ll be more productive if it’s just the two of us, I think.

And he said I'd never get him to wear a Speedo :)

Because someone asked

Kevin has known, from the time he was old enough to have a basic understanding of what it meant, that he was adopted. Neither Alex nor Rachel remember life without him; he was, from the day we brought him home, their baby brother. As they’ve gotten older there has never been an instance of one of them verbally slapping him with anything remotely like, “You’re not my real brother.” Alex is as protective of Kevin as he is of Rachel, and he has been since the day he got his first look at his newest sibling and started calling him Bebin. (Alex had a few speech issues for his first 5 years; he was 3 before he stopped calling Rachel “Pickle.” But that’s really apropos to nothing.)

I took the kids shopping for school clothes and supplies yesterday and somewhere in the midst of it all Kevin wondered out loud how tall Alex had been at his age, and when did I think he was going to catch up to his big brother? In his young eyes, if his brother was six feet tall at not quite fourteen, then sooner or later he would grow just as much. Right?

Kevin’s birth mother is barely five feet tall and I don’t think his biological father is much taller. He’s never asked anything specific about them before, and had no clue; genetics, however, are not the stuff of which ten year old boys ponder, and all he was focused on was his sibling bonds.

Even Rachel, he pointed out, is kind of tall. So is Mom, she’s almost as tall as Alex. So when, he wanted to know, could he expect to stop being so small?

I have expected questions about his birth parents, and I’ve been prepared to answer them. Char and I armed ourselves with as much information about them as we possibly could (his birth mother is Char’s much younger cousin; long story short, she was only thirteen when she became pregnant with him. It isn’t exactly an open adoption, but she gets updates about him through Char’s father and has seen pictures.) We knew what we would say to him if he asked why his mother didn’t love him enough to keep him. We felt confidant that we would be able to assure him that he is every bit as much ours as his brother and sister, and that we love him the same.

I didn’t expect his first real difficulties to be about his physical size. I tried to explain to him that because of his biological background he probably would never get taller than Rachel is right now, and I waited for his understandable outburst.

What I got, in the middle of a crowded McDonald’s was, Well, that fucking sucks!

No, I didn’t get on his case for it. Alex and Rachel both started laughing and I simply didn’t care about how horrified anyone else might be.

I also did not know what else to say to him. The odds are not in his favor when it comes to height; I’ll be surprised if he reaches 5’6” but I also don’t want him to feel slighted because of it.

Alex told his little brother, “I’m probably going to hit six-five or six-six,” and that’s when I nearly lost my temper. It mattered to Kevin, and I didn’t want Alex rubbing salt into an open wound. But before I could say anything he continued, “You don’t want to be that tall. Dad won’t even admit he’s taller than six-three because that would make him a freak. I’m gonna be a freak.”

Rachel chimed in with, “I might get taller than Mom and for a girl, you just don’t want to be that much taller than all the boys. If you get to be my height, you’ll be normal, Kevin.”

Girls, Alex added, are going to love you. You won’t be too tall and you won’t be too short, and they already think you’re cute.

By the time we finished lunch, Kevin was mostly pacified. I do, however, expect the questions to start rolling in, but now that I understand they might not be what we expect, we have a whole lot more to think about.

This is different. It’s not even 1 am and Ian is already asleep. Usually he’s the one who crawls out of bed and sits at the desk, and I’m pretty sure he’s awake until 3 or 4 most of the time but he fell asleep shortly after midnight. I’d be there with him except I fell asleep this afternoon and now I’m wide awake.

It’s good he fell asleep easy tonight. He’ll need the rest, as tomorrow he’s taking all three kids shopping for school clothes and supplies. They’ve already been warned about pushing for things that aren’t on the school-approved list (uniforms, that makes it mostly easy) but tonight Alex and Rachel were lobbying for cell phones and I’m thinking they’ll use the time alone with Dad to plead their cases.

We are horrible throwbacks to a pre-technological era if you take them at their word. They are the only ones in school who don’t have cell phones and the only kids no one else can text. Ian’s magic answer for all requests like that is “when you’re sixteen” but tonight Alex fired back with something we hadn’t considered…when he’s sixteen, he’ll be a senior.

At the beginning of summer he had a girlfriend, and we were more than a little surprised when we met her and discovered she was 16 years old. Ian put his foot down and told Alex he wasn’t dating anyone until he’s sixteen. Lots of drama ensued (near growling and door slamming that resulted in the loss of someone’s bedroom door), but neither one of us stopped to think that by not allowing him to date until he’s sixteen means he won’t have much of a social life until his final year in high school.

We have some reconsidering to do.