The summer of love and hate (Part I)

I started this post when The Missus was away on business and The Boy and I were nearing the end of eight days of compulsory togetherness. Said period of frills-free (no booze, no broads) bachelorhood coinciding exactly with the onset of daily late-morning swim lessons for the lad, beginning about 50 minutes after the scheduled end of his Taekwondo classes, a crazy-quilt of surface street construction delays away.

By the time I began this post, I had been pushed pretty close to the edge. Of course, like the roads to most places you don’t want to find yourself going to, the journey began with high hopes and good intentions.

While business required The Missus to be on the road, The Boy and I agreed to try to hit a milestone every day. Something new, something challenging, that we could then add to the ongoing daily repertoire. I was determined that this would be the summer he learned how to swim and ride a bike. Got him up to grade-level in reading earlier this year (after starting from zero because we waited way too long to start) and he’s already reading books earmarked for third-graders. He still occasionally stumbles over 3- and 4-letter words, but he sounds-out polysyllables like he’s been doing it his whole life. And he gets pissy if you try to help him.

We also took the female-free time to break some bad habits. Specifically, everything we usually did for him just because we’d been doing it for him since he was a baby was re-evaluated and kept or discarded based on his current level of ability.

Turns out he can do an awful lot of stuff for himself these days.

We also turned the TV off during the daytime (except for Colbert with breakfast) and listened to music instead. We got this gizmo that lets my computer talk to the TV’s speakers, so one day we listened to Pink Floyd all day, another day Bing Crosby, another Guns & Roses, another Roger Miller, Tom T Hall… On our last bachelor day this time around, it was Michael Nesmith. If The Boy doesn’t hear Nez here, he’ll never hear it anywhere. But that is a regret for another day.

Mostly though, we just had fun. Stupid, irresponsible (but safe-to-us) fun.

The first night, for instance, we tried a little experiment. We dripped a couple drops of cherry juice on our white Lab’s head to see if cherry stains come out of fur. In our defense, we did not know. It was a legitimate scientific inquiry. For a while, the result was a big “no.” We had agreed to tell people who might have asked that we believed it was stigmata. [Update: The Missus found something, some bleach or astringent of some sort, to remove the spots from the top of Jake’s beautiful, empty blonde cinder-block head. So although technically a valid result for our experiment has been reached, we are disappointed we failed to stain the dog for life.]

I yanked the training wheels, which had never worked anyhow, off his bike, and took him to a local hill to let gravity teach him how to ride a bike.

Might have worked, too, if we didn’t start out almost every day with a new flat tire due to all the steely burrs in the field where we used to practice. Now we never leave the house without a can of Fix-A-Flat®.

I set him to cleaning the yard of the dog’s excreta as well as watering Mommy’s gardens and plants and, you know, whatnot. Taking the kitchen garbage out to the trash. Taking a shower with absolutely zero drama/help from me.

We accomplished so many firsts, big and small, that in my failure to document them as they occurred, many will be forgotten. But I won’t forget the first time he swam across the deep end of the pool by himself.

It was at the local community pool we go to. I let go of him in about 5 feet of water, and he splash/paddled from the middle of the pool to the edge by himself. It wasn’t a stroke that anyone would recognize, but my bar has always been: Stay alive in the water. He’d never done that on his own before that day. And he did it without panicking, even when he spat up about a quart of pool water once he got to the edge.

I have never in my life seen a smile of purer, non-dumb joy than I see on The Boy when he is the pool. And never more so than after accomplishing something he knows is unprecedented. After that, he couldn’t be stopped. Giant leaps into the pool, with me well out of rescuing range when he hit the water, front floats, lots of splashy dog paddling around… I ended up getting out of the pool and watching him play in the shallow end from a deck chair. That was a first for me. Even as I marveled at that fact, he made friends with a little girl and joined her in her game of retrieving sunken plastic pool darts.

Man, it could not have been sweeter.

The next day at Taekwondo, The Boy earned his yellow belt and he actually looked pretty good doing it. He still looks like he’s standing on spaghetti legs in a couple of the ‘stances,’ but he’s getting some real snap and power in his punches and kicks.

The owner of the joint also pulled me into the office and asked me if The Boy would like to be in their Junior Leadership program. They called it an invitation but it felt like a sales pitch to me. But sometimes salesmen are trying to get you to buy something pretty cool, like a Lambor-genie. And I think that’s what they were selling.

The first thing I asked the guy—a huge bear of a man, taller than me and 270 lbs, easy—was if every kid was “invited” to join the Leadership Program. He kinda blanched, then smiled and his manner became more informal. Anyhow, I know they don’t ask everyone. We’ve been there long enough for me to see lots of kids progress through the ranks, past The Boy, without going to Junior Leadership.

It really is kind of a deal.

I talked to the other co-owner, the big bear’s fairly saucy better half, and asked her flat-out what she saw in our son to want him in the program. I was still not sure I was not getting scammed. I said, “When I see him out there, what I see is a kid who is not giving 110%.” Then she smiled and said that The Boy “wanted it” more than a lot of the other kids, and I knew what she meant. The lad is an uncoordinated mess on the mat—when not punching, kicking or throwing—and not focused to my satisfaction, but I would still put him in the top 20% of his peers in terms of staying on point and at least trying to do everything he’s asked.

Then she goes, “And also, he’s tall.” Again, I knew just she meant. If I had started martial arts as a 6-year-old and stuck with it, no matter how clumsy I was when I had started, I would have been formidable by the time I finished. And she’s thinking future Junior Instructors. We got there to test for his yellow belt and one black belt/instructor was swabbing the mats in the Krav Maga (?) room, and another was cleaning the men’s room. Happily, without complaint.

These Junior Leadership kids I’ve seen are impressive kids really have their shit squared away. I talked to The Missus and we’re gonna go for it. We know it’s a gamble, but if it doesn’t pay off all we’ve lost is money we don’t have (yeah, I know, but I really am a hippie that way) and if it does pay off, man, it’ll be so worth it. SO worth it. I will worry a lot less about my kid in the world if he sticks with this.

Every day was full of transcendent moments like that. It should have been perfect, right?

Unfortunately, The Boy was only half the equation. The other half of the mixture—me—is considerably more volatile, especially when you add in stress, heat and road work.

(This is the “hate” part of the piece, where I talk about myself.)

The day I really lost it was the first Thursday The Missus was out of town. Tuesdays and Thursdays everything happened, schedule-wise: Bike riding lessons in the morning before the sun got too hot, race home, clean up and change for Taekwondo, pack bag with everything we need for the rest of the day, race out to Taekwondo and train for 40 minutes, change into bathing suit in Krispy Kremes bathroom afterward, race to swimming, grease up, swimming lesson for a half hour, race home to hit 1:00 deadline but stop at Quizno’s first so I don’t have to prepare lunch; get home and deal with Boy who is in my office by 1:30 complaining that he is bored, make him read me some more of his third-grade book on the Titanic while I answer email and help the kid out with the occasional polysyllable; wish I had time to play guitar or compose a coherent thought before greasing up again to head to the local community pool to practice the morning’s lessons and actually relax for the first couple minutes of the whole day before going home, showering, preparing dinner and either lining up a movie or an activity that will take us both to bedtime.

Sure, it sounds easy enough. But last Thursday I tried to sneak in a trip to the pricey new supermarket between Taekwondo and swimming lessons to buy a cupcake for The Boy. We strolled the aisles, picked up a few items and headed for the check-out. Time was getting a little tight, but even with all the roadwork, I was confident we would make it on time. Punctuality is what I do. After we’d been rung up and I dutifully presented my card, the cashier looked blankly at me. “Uh, we’re only taking cash and checks today.”

If God was truly merciful, He would have erased my memory of the obscenity-laced tirade that followed. If I had a cash dollar for every time I used the word “bullshit” to describe the situation we found ourselves in, I wouldn’t have needed plastic to pay for our purchases. Along the way a manager appeared and told me they had a sign posted about their card network being down. As we stormed out (of course, The Boy bearing mute witness to everything), I looked long and hard for that sign the manager was talking about, but didn’t see it. I was still seething.

A bridge too far, man. A bridge too far. Until the next bridge.

As we were driving away, I noticed The Boy is in full tears. “I [huh huh] really wanted [huh huh] that caaaaake! Weeeaaaaaaaaaah!” 

I realized I was not the only one who had reached his personal limit.

I whipped the car around and snarled, “Then I’ll get you that fucking cake.”

We marched back in—I took a second look for the alleged sign, still nothing—and walked up to the startled, now-scared looking cashier and told him I would pay cash for one cupcake. People parted for us like Moses and the Red Sea. I paid for the cupcake with a five-dollar bill, took my change from his shaking hands, and on the way back out, still could not find their alleged stupid fucking sign.

In spite of my better judgment at this point, we stopped to pick up a sandwich on the way home. I was really in no mood to slow down and make lunch for The Boy. Best I didn’t handle sharp objects right then anyhow. So that is the day Quiznos decided to fall down on the job. They fucked up our straight-off-the-menu order three times, all the while I was telling them it was fine, I didn’t care about their little error, and the line behind us was growing longer and more hostile, then after telling them at least two different times it was a to-go order they served it up on a tray, which we took home with us and finally returned a full week later… on the other hand, I still haven’t dared show my face in the supermarket again.

We finally got home and by late that afternoon, it felt like I was growing peat moss in my lungs.

The next day I woke up with a cold that would have knocked the Hulk to his knees.

That was the last time I lost it, at least until The Missus got back. Even a few days after the supermarket incident, when my wallet went missing for the first time in my entire life and we had to spend the afternoon at the bank and the DMV instead of the pool, my heart rate never climbed above ‘resting.’

I made damned sure the rest of Mommy’s absence went smoothly, even when things weren’t going smoothly, even having to bail on our hiking plans on Sunday due to my cold having taken up permanent residency in my chest, producing a systemic, puppy-like weakness…

Well, I’m all better now, cold-wise, and things have remained pretty awesome since The Missus got back. The Boy learned how to bicycle with her help just a couple of days ago:

Unfortunately, we failed to cover stopping before we zeroed-in on going:

But we worked on stopping today (video embargoed), and even more progress was made. He rode by himself for a full two blocks, in the middle of the street because we are all about safety-first. He’s promised to do it again tomorrow without the whining and whimpering. We watched the video we shot today with the sound on, then off, and agreed he seemed much cooler without all the panicked cries for assistance that he clearly did not require.

He may finally be learning that fear is the common denominator of all the things with which he currently struggling. Once he conquers his fear—like fear of drowning, say—he’s finding he can do the thing, whatever the thing is. He’s promised to apply this new understanding to bicycling tomorrow.

And my unexpected summer cold hipped me to something, too: It ain’t the roadwork or overscheduling or even shitty customer service that lays you low, it’s the stress.

Which is great, because the stress is the one thing you can actually do something about. If I can insist The Boy push past his fear, can I do less than demand that I shrug off my equally debilitating stress? They’re both self-inflicted shortcomings, optional folly.

We’re all learning a lot this summer.