The Boys and the Like

I cannot compel you enough to know how amazing it is to have these boys right now (and here's hoping for forever.) Quin has entered a stage of constant, delusional smack talking, and Otto is emerging from his little brother shell as the most excitable commentator I've ever known. You've most likely heard Dick Vitale during March Madness, well imagine if he were small and cute and trying to tell you about the fox he saw outside our window. He's got this thing where he has trouble getting off the first word.

Dream big burger boy.Here's an example:

"May...maybe...maybe...maybe...

...maybe..." and this gets increasingly louder as if each attempt is turning over a new and more exciting revelation. When the rest of the words are finally assembled, he rolls: "MAYBE...MAYBE...it's a mommy fox AND SHE WANTS TO EAT A MOUSE!" Sometimes that last louder bit is accompanied by stabbing his fist into the air. As if getting that together is the gold medal achievement of the day, and being just 3 and the younger brother to a communication juggernaut, it is a huge deal getting something out into the open.

Of lawyers and liability: Two very different animals.Quin, you see, is full of disarming little missives about how much bigger and smarter he is than Otto. It may be MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE a well-planned counter offensive to Otto gaining in size. So after Otto's fox epiphany, Quin will reply to conversation that had not existed in the room. "I'm five, and go to five-year-old school, but Otto's just three. He'll be five one day, but by then I'll be seven." Otto is left hanging, his fist stuck in the air; his rising star snagged on Quin's reality check.

This is not to say that Quin is mean or mean spirited; it's just how he rolls right now. He's a package of older brother responsibility of which he takes very seriously, along with a ridiculous amount of childlike fantasy. We've never seen him tie his shoes in anything other than a mound of knots, but he insists that he teaches the other kids at school how to do it. There's a lot of pressure knowing everything, I guess. And if he is teaching them how to tie their shoes, other parents must be doubting the school system. Of course I've been delusional all my life, so at least his self misperceptions are mostly benevolent.

One of my delusions flaking away like old wood paneling is that "I'm good with people." Enough people have told me that that I actually started to believe it. I've had my moments with intercommunication, but I got it in my head that I'm infallible. This despite daily tourettes-like attacks on myself for interactions gone wrong. "Sweet Christ, Jared, why did you have to keep talking?" I'll berate myself with self-inflicted interrogation over small talk gone awry. And it happens most often after I try and communicate with Quin's kindergarten teacher. Another delusion I've harbored, or that has harbored me, is that I'm good with teachers. I like teachers and Iove what they do, and that sentiment has traditionally spilled over into good relations with any of the kid's instructors. Now, however, I have no idea how to work myself out of a tailspin with Mrs. K, as I'll call her.

She's experienced and runs a tight ship with the 19 kindergartners that tromp their way into her daily life. I respect and admire that, but I thought that I'd get some kind of free pass as the parent of a new student--like maybe MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE there'd be some kind of recognized achievement of a father delivering his child straight into the classroom. No, no there's not. My extra effort to get Quin to school was met with a scolding. I got scolded in front of the kindergartners. "You don't need to come into the classroom," she said, pointing where I could find my way out. I understand. I was still in a preschool frame of mind where you get your kid as close to the intended target as possible so they don't get lost chasing a butterfly, but not in "big kid school," as Quin calls it.

Smack talk will wear a guy out.

The upside to getting rebuked in front of your son's class is that you feel like you have an opportunity to redeem yourself. The downside is that I've been trying to redeem myself. Each effort has been met with disappointment. And it's a thing I have, where if someone gets the upper hand, I have a hard time getting the words. The latest effort to impress Mrs. K went off much like Otto trying to articulate his dinner announcements, and was inspired by delusions similar to Quin's. I'd found the Christmas gift we'd wrapped for Mrs. K and thought getting it to her better late than never would help bridge our communication gap. Instead of taking risks with improvised communication, Quin and I wrote a note. And instead of taking it directly to her, I figured I'd drop it off at the office where she could be surprised by it later.

I have said that there is a tiny version of me in my head. He's in a glass bubble, and I can barely hear what he says. Often he's screaming at the top of his lungs and beating on the glass, doing whatever he can to stop me. Like when I told that joke on the radio about "Color Fest" in Mancos, Colorado not actually having any people of color. And this would be the case when I dropped off her gift in the office. The receptionist kindly pointed out that, "There's Mrs. K with her class right now!" The implication was that I could just hand the gift to her myself. And the little guy in the bubble was screaming something.

I burst out of the office and into the line of Mrs. K's children. In doing do I disrupted decades of teaching experience; the successes and failures, the late nights lying awake and the early mornings making it work. I'd walked right into the teeth of Mrs. K's delicate routine--one in which interruption does not seem to be an option. The children, who had been lined up single file in a crisp response to her rigid rules, broke ranks and gathered around me. Quin greeted me but with concern. "Sweet god, what are you doing?" begged his tiny face.

Mrs. K did her best to smile. You know the smile you see when patience has been lost and stabbing someone is illegal.

"What can I do for you," she asked above the growing din of children's voices. The bubble guy mumbled, "Don't apologize. Don't explain. Just give her the gift and get out."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Didn't mean to interrupt your class but---"

'Daaaaaad," Quin said in the agonized twisting of the word.

And I spiraled. I do. Especially in the dark light of the in-lieu-of-stabbing smile. The kids voices grew, some wanting to give me high fives, a thing I'd started that has grown to be a bane around any group of small children, especially at Otto's school where one kid missed my hand and hit another kid in the face.

"We got this gift..."

"OK, OK, fine," Mrs. K said with a stern delicateness. "Hand it to me and thank you."

Bubble guy was trying to end his life with a shard of glass.

"Anyway, we got it and never got around to giving it to you--" And the thing is I get to a point where I can clearly hear myself failing, but the words aren't stopping, like something is broken. And then, turning inward watching myself, the external part goes unfiltered. So I chattered, and Mrs. K demanded I give the gift to Quin so he could give it to me. And that's bad. She had to bring in a five year old to help me out of the situation. I could hear myself finishing up something about how excited we were about the gift (Santa earrings) when I came back to awareness and the class was in line and marching its way down the hall. Quin waved and smiled.

"Good," I thought, "I still have him on my side." And I think next time I'm just going to give her a high five.

Despite his father, Quin has truly found himself at big kid school.

While we wait: something I wrote during a seminar at a conference

Here I am at a conference in the Orange County Hyatt. Several partitions have been folded away to make room for our presence. Each quadrant, on its own, gets four light fixtures. We have 16! I'm looking up at one. They look like giant jellyfish--a giant jellyfish that has had its tentacles used to make rock candy. And they are brown. I'd like to think it was a local couple who landed on this design, and after hitting the craft show circuit, got enough attention to have their product picked up by the Hyatt. I've imagined them in their modest home near the beach. It's not on the beach because they sold the place they inherited from her mother because: A) they were tired of the kind of people moving in and B) they were broke.

But there they are savoring tea and Quinoa, and having just done yoga, feel relaxed to the point of being tired. Then everything changes via the cheap Chinese circuitry of their Cricket cell phone. They never use it, so when it chimed the factory chime, both were equally surprised and suspicious. The man jumped to get it. He felt a little satisfaction at the opportunity to protect his wife. Just a few nights prior he'd been drinking with a friend and saying he wished he had a dragon to slay because getting this business off the ground was a whole lot harder way to impress her.

A dragon, however, would have killed him as he had trouble answering the phone. The small, slick, hinged device nearly snapped shut and hung up on the guy from the Hyatt. Turns out the slick guy named Chad envied their lifestyle and wanted to promote their work, and would have called back anyway. So they danced around the room and didn't at all mind that they'd broken a vase. They hugged and pulled away to look at each other. From this moment--after the apologies for things said during leaner times--began the new era. The hiring of down-and-out friends. The niece who made the website and the story in the regional newspaper. Soon the brown, rock candy squids dangled from hotels everywhere, even the big Hyatt in Portland. Things were not always easy, especially firing some of their down-and-out friends, but they hired Chad to consult them to success.

That's what I'd like to think. I'd like to think these light fixtures weren't secreted from a dingy faraway factory. I'd like to think that. But I already did. Because Chad finally got them to come to their senses and ship manufacturing overseas. So now I sit under this alien invasion, brown shards of plastic crowding the light out of oval openings. They're frozen in attack mode. They left so many light years ago with a mission they've now forgotten. They're just stuck there, detached and feeling quite dumb. And somewhere there's a lady picking up the pieces of a broken vase.

Sinking: The Painfully Frustrating Story of our Boys and Swim Lessons. Part 2

I appreciate everybody reading and tweeting and facebooking the swimming lessons story. To thank you I'll give you even more to read. Well, it's a long-in-coming update, and probably why my blog has ten readers: I'll start something and then never finish. "Hey, today I was visited by Jesus!" and then I never get back to share the results. (BTW, he was totally cool. Stoked on legal weed.)

Quin and Otto are now in their fourth week of swim lessons. Sarah and I have moved on from merely celebrating their participation to cheering them on as they use the kickboards. We don't cheer, actually. At least not out loud. We save it for the night time when we lie in bed, Paco providing his celibacy wedge between us, and chatter with cautious excitement. But during lessons, we sit in the shadows and watch from a distance. If you were to see us you'd judge. "Look at those parents, tapping on their phones and ignoring their children. It's why we're all obese [gay] [pregnant] [fill in your pet issue here.]" That's OK, judge away. I used to judge the very same people as Sarah and I appear to be. But it's who we have to be. If we emote even the slightest, the boys revolt. Little bastards. Beautiful bastards. So Sarah and I sit like Jackie Onassis and her nondescript boyfriend with vague smiles at the passing parade.

We call it our vacation. In the humid warmth of the pool area, the kids' splashes lap at the fading memory of our 2006 trip to Tahiti.

Proof that this is actually happening (we need it for ourselves, too.)Proof that we have some work to do with pictures.
This is huge though! For one, we've reached that all-important phase in parenthood where we don't give a damn. I'd like to offer the case in point where Quin had a major meltdown in a grocery store in Granby. I'll start by saying that the whole ordeal ended in threats of a violent death. Before that though, there was Otto who wanted to ride in one of those grocery carts with the car on the front. We hate those, and want to kill the inventor. OK, I'm getting to the threat of death sooner than I wanted, but as we strolled to the sounds of our screaming children, my gentle wife and I joked about how we'd brutally torture and kill the person who'd  thought another goddamned chunk of noisy plastic would somehow benefit our lives.

But back to the action. Otto said he wanted to ride in a car. Quin said he did not. We were on vacation so I said, "What the heck kids!" Otto silently loaded himself into the petri dish of thousand snotty children (decked out to look like a police car) and we were off. Well, all of us except Quin, who was crying because he wanted to ride in it too. This piece of crap, however, was a one-seater. We offered him an opportunity to take turns, and all kinds of other pansy parent concessions, until we found ourselves in a busy store with a screaming, inconsolable child. Unlike most parents, I enjoy this. Because in my new I-don't-give-a-shitness I like demonstrating to the child that he can cry all he wants, even in a public forum, and I will simply ignore him. Now there are those who might scowl at me and wonder why I'd have a crying kid in a store. To those I would say, "buy condoms." That's right. Don't be mad; be grateful. Rubbers are right over by the pharmacy and when you're done you can even beat the prophylactic against the wall to make sure they're all good and dead.

However, to the others who smile and nod, I say right on sister. You know--we all know--that we have reached a higher plane, where not even the squeals of God's precious cherubs can perturb us. And it is on this plane where Sarah and I sit, tapping on the tools of our dignity's demise, and occasionally chatting the way I imagine the Romneys would at a grandson's fencing tournament.

From those seats though we have had to contain shrieks of glee as the boys get on their kickboards and tadpole around the pool. They are learning the basics of swimming, and all we have to do is not screw it up. We're excited about the prospects, but only quietly and to ourselves.