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.