I'm Naked!

Among my oldest son’s countless foibles, the one that I must admit causes me the greatest deal of concern and consternation is his apparent inability to function in the bathroom at what I would consider a “normal” level.

I’m positive that, physiologically speaking, all systems are “go.” I don’t believe, that is, that there are any problems with actually performing his bodily functions. My alarm stems solely from the noises and inappropriate disruptions that seem to emanate from the room whenever my eleven-year-old child finds it necessary to visit.

These are not the natural and admittedly humorous sounds, mind you, to which one might think I am referring. I can, along with any male of varying maturity level who is secure enough to own up to his own childish whims, appreciate a good fart—and actively participate in public gaseous eruptions on occasion to the delight of my boys and stern disapproval of my beautiful wife.

My son, however, creates such an unsettling din while in the toilet as to annoy and otherwise cause great stress and worry for his mother and me as we imaginatively ponder what possible wet and bacterial calamity can be occurring overhead. Whether showering or voiding bowel and bladder, a symphony of crashing, stumbling, pounding, squeaking and scraping accompanies my son until, mercifully, the flushing of the toilet signifies an end to the venture, prompting one of we unlucky parents to undertake the odious task of investigating and cleaning up whatever manner of destruction and fecal/urinary/watery pollutants that are left behind.

One recent occasion, though, transcended the usual unpleasantness and delved into the downright disturbing. A human being who has lived longer than a decade should possess a basic ability to poop and pee without too much fanfare, and the fact that my boy doesn’t is distressing enough. The following account, however, still chills me to recall and has been the reason for a considerable amount of lost sleep.

My son was upstairs and presumably in the bathroom, though no announcement had been issued as is normally the boy’s protocol. The customary noises began, but seemed at length to continue well beyond the requisite time for even my son to finish the necessary activity and return to his usual play and sulking behavior. I waited. Soon my anxiety over the condition of our tiny little water closet got the best of me, and glancing nervously at my wife, I slowly climbed the stairs with all of the trepidation of a hapless, witless horror film victim. As I approached the tightly shut and secured door of the bathroom, I was halted by the panicked voice of my boy warning me not to come in!

“What’s the matter?” I spat back, fearing that some horrible tragedy had befallen the child. Had he slipped and injured himself? Had he managed to somehow lodge a limb in the toilet or even fallen headlong into the bowl? These options, considering my son’s history of bizarre behavior, did not seem at all unreasonable or unrealistic.

He responded with kind of irritated and drawn-out “Nothing!” that any parent knows automatically implies the contrary.

I grasped the doorknob, determined now to rescue both son and bathroom from their unimaginable fates.

“Dad!” he shouted excitedly. “Don’t come in here!” He was growing more and more frantic with each sound of my pending approach.

“Why not, buddy?” I uttered weakly, gripped by terror and overwhelming helplessness.

His response will echo in my mind for years to come. He replied to my concern and fright as naturally and as exasperated as if I had asked him his name.

“I’m naked.”

I had not heard the shower nor smelled any semblance of soap or shampoo. Furthermore, as I slowly sauntered downstairs, I heard the telltale flush of the toilet. I flinched. As I reemerged in the living room, my wife stared, dumbfounded, demanding with her eyes for me to relay what horrors I had witnessed, no matter how tragically painful. When she could no longer bare my stupefied silence, she enquired…

“Well?”

“He’s naked.” What else could I say?

“What’s he doing?” I could see, reflected in my wife’s eyes, my own unholy imaginings.

“I… I don’t know… he’s just…. he’s… naked.” My voice grew stronger then, as the grim realization of the super-unknown set in, “He’s naked.”

To his credit, our oldest eventually came bounding loudly and clumsily down the stairs, as is his custom, fully dressed. We have promised ourselves, owing to our son’s lack of ability or desire to illuminate the situation, never to speak of this again.

Copycat

Genetics is a fascinating concept. I don’t pretend to know a whole lot about human psychology, having taken just enough college Psyche to fulfill the liberal arts requirement and be able to hold my own in any discussion of nature vs. nurture. I am, however, painfully aware of the implications of both as I am a daily witness to the many ways in which, according to accounts from my wife and in-laws, my oldest son appears to grow more like his natural father (a wonderful human being, to be sure) despite my boy’s lack of paternal memory and our best efforts to steer him clear of such character defects. In this regard, I have the distinct pleasure of not only sharing living space with, but also attempting to raise a young man who has a tendency to behave much like the angrily aggressive, adolescently irresponsible poophead to whom my wife used to be married, so… yay me. To be fair, though, the same can be said, in a not always positive manner, about our youngest son. He, too, is a lot like his father, though I can’t recall sitting down to teach him any of the mildly amusing mannerisms that he has acquired in the first three years of his young life.

He is afraid of the dark. This alone has made the process of transitioning him from crib to “big boy” bed nearly impossible, as my wife and I spent nearly four months either sitting in the darkness of his room until he would fall asleep, or relentlessly returning him, screaming, to his bunk after repeated attempts on his part to join us for the night. Parents, even the most loving, can become quite grumpy and insensitive to one’s fears at 2:00 A.M. Subsequent conversations with my mother revealed what I only slightly remember as my own nocturnal reluctance to sleep alone. According to mom, I would climb into my parents’ bed, arousing the ire of my father, and have to be forcefully escorted to the darkness of my room, where, I insisted, there were unimaginable terrors and creatures waiting to destroy me. Yet, somehow, I survived.

Other characteristics of mine that my little boy has naturally picked up include aggressively biting his security blanket, picking up the pretty bees in the backyard even after a few stings would indicate this being a bad idea, and, most recently, uncannily repeating everything that he hears. All of these are corroborated by my mother as accurate manifestations of her own son’s behavioral antics, much to the delight of my wife, who, when the boy is being particularly troubling, is fond of passing him off as “daddy’s boy” and going on her merry way. I must admit, though, experiencing an overwhelming sense of pride when I notice even the most frustrating of the boy’s behaviors, as I delight in observing my little toddler “mini-me” and occasionally being entertained by the fact that he has adopted my talents. The one, in particular, that has given me no small amount of amusement is his ability to repeat, even at inappropriate times, whatever his little ears record.

I am, and have been as far as I can remember, an incredible mimic. That’s not a boast so much as recognition of ability to replicate sounds, voice inflections, and exact lines from most television shows and films that interest me enough to watch several times. When I was a child, for instance, my mother would request, ad nauseam, that I do my impression of John Belushi, to the slight amusement of holiday relatives, angrily intoning “Well, excu..uuu..use me!” a la the then famous shtick performed on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” I just seemed, as I grew older, to have a knack for internalizing and playing back little tidbits of entertaining or informative sound bites like a human tape recorder.

Now that my son has seemed to locate this feature in his own brain, we spend a lot of time reciting lines from his favorite movies, inviting eye rolls from my wife whenever she is subjected to cuttings from Finding Nemo, Elmo in Grouchland, or Monsters Inc. I am quite pleased to have a little companion with which to finally practice scenes from movies, like the snippets of scripts I used to memorize on the speech team in high school. Most of my amusement, however, simply comes from his tendency to blurt out random phrases at the most inappropriate times, like belting out full verses of “Iron Man” or “The Heat of the Moment” in church, compliments of a healthy diet of Guitar Hero with dear old Dad.

The pinnacle of my delight, however, that is both a testament to my boy’s awareness of context, and my own juvenile delight in profane utterances of children came at bedtime a few nights ago. It is widely discussed and debated in our home whether ghosts, spooks, spirits, and all other manner of previously living or supernatural entities do, in fact, exist. I am adamant in my position that all of it is hogwash, and despite our mutual fondness for television fare like “Ghost Whisperer” and “Ghosthunters,” my wife are at opposite sides of this argument. Our oldest son, ever loyal to mom, weighs in heavily in favor and has a respectful fear of the living undead. This, of course, results in his reluctance to venture to the second floor of our home alone, particularly in the dark.

So, the other night, I asked my oldest to go get ready for bed. He resisted, citing the fact that I refused to accompany him upstairs. After a brief debate, in which I, quite within earshot of the younger son, clarified my stance on spiritual matters, I convinced him to go. Shortly after, as I was tucking in the younger who, alone I might add, had decided to go to bed, I happened to reassuringly assert that all this talk of ghosts and nonsense was just silly. He had, I reminded him, nothing to fear.

“I know,” my three-year-old son replied, “it’s just a bunch of bullshit around here.”
True, true, my man.

Rocking Out

Parenting is more than just sleepless nights, endless work and worry, social disconnection and migraines. Sometimes it’s a lot of fun. For instance, a father can play Guitar Hero and Rock Band, nearly free of spousal criticism, if he has managed to convince his three-year-old son that he is actually playing along on his own toy electric guitar. Once that has been accomplished, the child will request playing time with his father, so as to allow the man to play for his own enjoyment, using “quality time” with his son as an excuse to participate in adolescent recreation rather than simply admitting to blatant male immaturity or a classic case of “Peter Pan Syndrome.” For someone like myself, a man who hadn’t touched a video game since Nintendo introduced Mario Brothers and who still thought that the utterance of “we” referred to the plural subjective case pronoun or at least a French affirmative, it is that rare interlude in adulthood drudgery in which to indulge in what has been a life-long fantasy.

When I was a child growing up in the eighties, though a social retard, I fancied myself a rock star, specifically Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. Despite being the furthest thing from what my peers would consider popular or “cool,” I would perform very long concerts in the shelter of my bedroom, jumping back and forth from the elaborate platform that doubled as a bed, to the floor—sleeves of my brown blazer rolled up past my elbows, as I crooned along to my “Seven and Ragged Tiger” cassette tape to the delight of the imaginary audience screaming their appreciation in my mirror. On occasion, I would play a fairly sophisticated, yet comically childish, electronic toy guitar that I had received as a birthday gift, rocking out in unabashed, fearless, completely clumsy and spastic fashion. My Townsend inspired windmills and scissor kicks complemented the channeling of Hendrix-like gyrations and writhing, as I fluttered about in grotesquely geeky ritualistic maneuverings that, if ever discovered, would serve only to increase my status as social pariah and augment the severe playground ridicule to which I was daily subjected.

Nevertheless, I was a star. The one constant dream I dared to believe in throughout my childhood was the notion that one day I would actually perform on stage, in video, to hordes of adoring fans who would easily recognize my latent coolness.

So, flashing forward to that same boy, now enjoying a completely nerdy, yet non self-conscious existence as husband and father, it is not difficult to see the easy the allure that a game such as Guitar Hero holds. To simulate, with nearly authentic finger movements, the playing of an actual rock guitar, complete with crowd sound effects and a backing band is what I had envisioned but could never quite duplicate in my childhood fantasies with merely a second-hand wardrobe and a Hasbro instrument. But when one has longed for so many years for such a vice as this, the addiction can be so great as to place the user in the hottest of water, the deepest of shit, the doggiest of houses with one’s spouse.

The list of my transgressions concerning the game includes such foibles as ignoring my baby daughter’s cries in favor of a high score, playing way beyond my son’s interest or participation (thus negating the very thin guise of “quality time”), and kicking my oldest daughter in the middle of a particularly challenging and entertaining performance. It wasn’t a kick, per se, more of a forceful nudge, but I learned, through a month-long exile from any mention of or participation in the game, that when my little girl approaches me for a hug, it is bad form to use my adult strength to knock her down, even if I am negotiating a rather tricky solo.

And so, with the introduction of Rock Band into my already growing repertoire of guitar-playing video games, the urge to play has grown ever greater, proportionate, unfortunately, to the scheming and extra work I must perform in order to keep my wife happy enough to allow my playing from time to time. She’s not fooled. She knows that it has nothing to do with enjoying some time with my son. What she may not understand, however, is a historically sad nerd’s need to rock and roll.

But after typing that last line, I must admit that she probably already knows what kind of dweeb she married. Gosh… what a nice lady.

Daddy Doofus

Growing Up

This week, my oldest son will celebrate his eleventh birthday. I’ve been thinking a lot about the boy, particularly this morning, when he (as he occasionally does) intruded upon our tiny little closet of a bathroom to use the toilet while I was in the shower. The young man has bathroom radar. He seems to wait until someone has preceded him to the facility to decide that suddenly his bowels and bladder require voiding. This is a bit of an offshoot from his other domestic habit of needing to accompany any member of the family on any venture to any other part of our home from where he might at that moment be reclining.

If my wife takes the baby up to our room for a nap, he will become insistent, even in the face of his mother’s angry protests, that he must immediately retrieve some random object from the landfill that he and my younger son consider their room. If I grab the newspaper and announce to the household (as I have an alarming tendency to do) that I am going to the bathroom, he suddenly remembers a reason that he, too, must climb the stairs, mumbling some excuse and glaringly daring me to object.

Ever since we purchased our home three years ago, the boy seems terrified to be left alone in its quarters, accustomed as he was to apartment living with his mother for the first six years of his life. To be fair, this is just one in a series of adjustments he has had to make in the four years since my wife and I decided to start our matrimonial adventures and subsequent human zoo. After the initial meeting of Robert and wonderfully entertaining six-year-old son of Robert’s girlfriend, our relationship and all other elements of our lives changed at such a rapid pace as to transform, quite overnight, Robert to Dad, and wide-eyed young boy to son and older brother three times over.

As angry as I occasionally get at the lad, the pressures of family life and fatherhood ever mounting and causing my mood to take sudden plummets into degrees of intolerance and irritability not felt since my early and frustrated twenties, I try to remember that if my entrance into this life of new familial experience is unexpected and uncharted, so must be his. Wonderful as all of our progress has been, strong as our family has become, I must assume that in that strange and bewildering brain of his, there must be some longing for the days when he had his mother all to himself. Never knowing his father and bonding even more closely to his mom than a child with siblings and another parent with which to interact, he certainly couldn’t have foreseen the complete reconfiguration of his place in the family line-up at first meeting with the man who would be Dad.

Back then, even he and I interacted much differently. He was a welcome seminar into fatherhood for me, and I served, I’m sure, as a manifestation of his own paternal imaginings when witnessing friends and relatives with their own dads. We fulfilled specific expectations for one another—happily and enthusiastically embracing the newness of what each of us thought would never occur in our lives.

And now, here we are, not half a decade later, in a much larger setting, surrounded by more family and chaos than either of us could have dreamed. To say that our father and son relationship has been strained at times is a gross understatement. Each of us feels a sort of male competitive drive, the kind of rivalry that occurs when introducing any new male into a primal setting that includes a female. We two orangutans occasionally tussle, if not physically then most definitely verbally, attempting to win the position of alpha male in an arena that includes Playstation tournaments as well as dinner table squabbles and strategic bathroom tactical maneuverings.

But I love that boy dearly.
I attempted to explain this to him just this morning, after seceding my moment of privacy in the shower to his natural urge to poop at that specific moment. I was actually calm and soft spoken. Every now and then, I pick and choose my moments about which to increase the level of my ever rising blood pressure. He was lounging on the couch, a bit under the weather, and I, while preparing to go to work, attempted a little conversation about the cartoons that he and his siblings were watching. Our communication is of late, not stellar, more a series of grunts and growls, but we spoke this morning. I ribbed him a bit. “See,” I taunted, “it’s okay to talk to your stupid old man once in a while, right?”

“When you’re not yelling at me,” he sighed, rolling his eyes in his customary response to my attempts at peaceful negotiations.

“But, you know,” I intoned, doing my very best rendition of “Father Knows Best” half-hour paternal problem-solving tone and demeanor, “I correct you because I love you. If I let you do whatever you want, without trying to guide you in some way, I wouldn’t be a very good Dad, would I?” I inwardly cringed. He would never buy such drivel; I certainly wouldn’t. But he smiled. Yes, I’m positive I saw a definite foreign upturn of the corners of his mouth.

“I know. I love you, Dad.”

Sigh… Happy Birthday, dear boy. This job does have its benefits.

It Never Ends

My father and I have a lot in common. We both have four children. I use the present tense to remind myself that, though three of my four are under the age of four, "the job," as I have come to refer to my status of dad, is never truly over.

My father-in-law brought this to my attention just after the birth of my younger son.

My wife and I have two of each, incidentally: two crazy, screaming, farting, giggling boys and two beautiful, adorable, wonderfully admiring little girls on the younger end. I no longer listen to those parenting veterans who try to warn me of the pitfalls of having two daughters, particularly so close in age as mine are. I have tired of the constant barrage of tales of teenage doom that seem to be the common response of those who learn that I am the father of females. My boys are nuts. That's it. That's all I can really say in the present. Do I believe that my girls will be given to wild emotional fits and hormonal rages of demonic proportions in their adolescence and subsequent years? Absolutely. But I live in the now. I can only comment on what is directly in front of me. And daily, I am met with a kind of primeval savagery and a host of bodily noises from the bodies, mouths and orifices of my boys.

But when my younger of the two sons was born, and I was (at the time) a brand new father in terms of infant care, my older son being the product of my wife's first marriage, I was visibly nervous as legions of visitors descended upon my wife, my newborn son and I in the hospital. Noticing my tension as yet another adoring relative felt compelled to handle the boy who was not yet twenty-four hours old, my father-in-law, one of the adoring visitors who had the insight to keep his distance, simply smiled compassionately at me and sighed "It never ends."

I knew immediately what he meant. I know that for the rest of my life, I will feel protective, proud, and at times afraid of these little people who continue to populate our home at a surprising, yet customarily Catholic rate. It really is the ultimate joke of nature that one enters into such a vocation with not so much as a signature or handshake, but rather with a few rare (and now fondly remembered) moments of privacy with his chosen mate. In such ecstasy, one does not consider the shortened meals and abbreviated sleep that will characterize the rest of his existence--the interrupted conversations, the constant worry and lack of peace that will punctuate his days.

And so a man such as I finds himself the unwitting player in the ultimate domestic farce. I am the bumbling, faltering, outrageously moronic "doofus:" the pretender to my own paternal throne. Parenthood, the most troubling and delicate of all professions, welcomes all applicants without so much as a training seminar or handbook. You simply try your best to emulate the closest approximation of fatherly wisdom and demeanor at your disposal. If the television supplies a less than attractive array of role models, why then you look to your own dad.

And so, I notice more and more the many ways in which I am constantly doing the very best impression of my own father that I can. I dance and dance, trying to convince both children and wife (who seems to have mastered this parenting thing without the slightest effort) that I know what I am doing. And through all of this, I am reminded that the job of shaping the lives and futures of these very dependent creatures never ends.

So... here we go.