Deep in Dadland
Deep in Dadland
By T. Brian Kelly
Greetings to all my friends...
I am sending this e-mail to you to let you know that I
am okay. Don't give away my spot on the end of the bar at
Charlie's or get anyone else to play third base on the team
just yet. I'll be back. I just don't know when.
The reason you haven't heard from me lately is that
I've been hiding out in a plastic fort behind my garage.
There's a small but spirited band of three- to six-year-
olds that are looking for me at the moment. A couple of
them even belong to me. I tried to interest them in hide-
and-seek, but they wanted to play "Vaporize the Alien"
instead. Guess who was voted in as the Alien.
That was weeks ago. I had no idea how obsessive kids
are today. I'm kind of lucky they've been mostly playing
spaceship with the cardboard box this fort came in.
They're not that much smarter than we were at their age.
But they definitely have better cash flow.
I'm a full-time dad now. If one more person calls me
Mr. Mom, or tells me "I look like I have my hands full,"
I'm going to spit up on them. This isn't temporary.
Believe me, I don't miss work. I can't. I work harder now
than I ever did at my job. No sick days. No Monday-
morning water-cooler sessions. No casual trips to the
office coffee pot. As most of you probably know, I spent
the last few years at my old job toiling away at basically
meaningless work in an inhospitable environment, drowning
my creative self in mind-numbing routine. Most jobs I've
had were like that. Except this one.
I was trying to hollow out a small cave of competency
in a sand dune of stupidity, armed with only a plastic
spoon and a Barney Rubble sip cup filled with gin. The
sand dune won. Here I am today. My left leg is fast
asleep. It's been in a full upright and locked position
since last Thursday.
The first kid is easy. You start researching fine
cigars. You practice your juggling. You have nine months
to paint a room (whoa!), learn how to coach your wife to
breathe (duh), and read a couple of articles about
diapering techniques and time-outs in magazines with cute
bald babies on the cover. How hard is that? Everyone
treats you like you won the lottery. Congratulations!
You've just been upgraded to Dad status! You're in the Dad
Club! You get to shop in a whole new aisle at the grocery
store, one you've never even seen before.
When the second child comes along (and the third -
after that, who's counting?) is when you really find out
what you're in for. That's where I'm at now. To be fair,
I wasn't drafted for this duty. I enlisted on my own free
will. I just didn't realize how long boot camp was going
to last.
On the positive side, I think our baby, Bartholomew,
is a genius. He has a vocabulary that is expanding at a
remarkable rate. Today, at the age of only three months,
we're pretty sure he can speak about four languages and six
dialects. We've contacted an early language and
linguistics expert to identify which ones they are exactly,
since to our untrained ears he sounds like either an
extremely intoxicated bull elephant seal or a screech owl
giving birth to a basketball.
Our other boys are doing well too. Kevin is busy
renaming the Seven Dwarfs for a kindergarten thesis project
and drawing their pictures: Sticky, Icky, Greasy, Motley,
Chewy, Hairball and Spud. He's going to present the
drawings to us at his graduation ceremony that's coming up.
Give me a break. Graduation from kindergarten? With caps
and gowns and everything? Frankly, I think this self-
esteem thing is out of hand.
Joey, our younger boy, is delving into a craft project
his mother found in one of those magazines I mentioned
earlier. He's packing leftover baby rice cereal mash into
old ice cube trays and baking them into bricks in the hot
sun. He wants to build an outdoor adobe play hut for
himself and his action figures to live in full time. The
doctors say he's making progress. We have our fingers
crossed.
But hey. Fatherhood is rewarding. Really. It's
truly a beautiful experience when you kneel on a tiny
plastic block while playing "horsey" for two. (Maybe
that's where the baby's learning all of those new
vocabulary words.) Or the wonders of storytime...spending
an hour putting the kids to sleep with about a billion
stories about lost bunnies and lonely balloons, only to
wake them up by stepping on a talking Pooh book in the dark
and having to start over. Or finding a banana that died of
exposure behind the living-room sofa. Or the cordless
telephone in the dog's water bowl. I could go on. They're
right when they say it's getting to be a small world after
all.
As you can probably tell, I'm spending a lot of time
with the kids. I'm learning new stuff every day, even
about my house itself. The only part I was familiar with
before was the backyard and maybe the garage. Now I'm on a
first-name basis with every room, mostly because I have to
clean them three to four times an hour. My kitchen
appliances are not just machines to me anymore. They have
personalities, quirks, tendencies, even habits.
I think I've passed over some kind of threshold. I
went to an open house at the preschool with a Batmen
sticker on my shoulder. A strange woman with a bemused
smiled gently plucked it off me, with the same gesture she
probably uses to brush dandruff off her husband's cardigan
or wipe peanut butter from her toddler's cheek. We all
laughed politely and that was that. I didn't really mind.
She had cracker crumbs in her hair.
Oops...gotta go. I think I hear the pitter-patter of
little feet. E-mail me back with word from the outside if
you get a chance. I'm not going anywhere. I've got
eighteen years or so to wait. So far, so good.
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