Day three of Daddy on Duty, April 2013 installment, and I am exhausted. The baby, Heavy D, after dutifully sleeping through the night for the past couple months, has decided that he misses his mama, and he’s going to wake up every hour, all night long, to tell me about it. Couple this with Lil’ O’s new habit of coming in my room on the bad side of 6:00 a.m., and I’m more than a little foggy today.
This is work. I don’t know how single parents do it. Respect. Bigtime. And then there’s my actual work to do. Doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for, well, anything. The stress is starting to pile up.
For example, I just spell checked a report that I was preparing for a client, and I noticed a few issues, which I’m attributing to an overtaxed mind. Here’s the text of the report:
All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy. All kids and no play makes daddy a dull boy.
So yeah, things are starting to unravel.
Thought I was going to post another clip from “The Shining,” didn’t ya? Well, almost.
On the second morning of my wife’s absence, my three-year-old son, Lil’ O, trotted into my room at 5:45 a.m. holding his two favorite stuffed animals, “White Monkey” and “New Monkey.” You may be shocked to learn that “White Monkey” is a small white monkey. And “New Monkey” was recently acquired. Yes, creativity abounds in this house.
A quarter to six is earlier than I prefer to rise unless there is a fire, earthquake, zombie apocalypse or other immediately life-threatening event occurring. So I suggested to Lil’ O that he return to his room to go back to sleep.
“No,” he said plainly.
“What?” I said.
“No, thank you.”
“What? Oh, um, okay. Nice manners, buddy. Okay, you can stay in here, but please be quiet. Daddy is very tired.”
O climbed into the bed, settled his stuffed animals on the pillow next to me, and commenced staring at me quietly but rather intently. It was a little disconcerting, yet I still managed to doze off.
Several minutes later, I awoke to the sound of talking. And maybe I was part-dreaming, but I swore I heard more than one voice. I opened my eyes and saw O still sitting there staring at me intently.
“Were you just talking?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“To whom?”
“My friends.”
“Oh, White Monkey and New Monkey?”
“Yes, and Ellyat.”
“Elliot?
“No, dad. Elly – AT.”
“Who’s Elly-At?” I asked, looking around.
“A friend.”
“Is he here now?”
“Yes.”
“Um, what is he saying?”
“Oh, lots of stuff,” said O, nodding his head conspiratorially.
“About anyone in particular?” I asked, swallowing hard and looking around the room nervously.
“You, silly!”
Then O giggled and jumped off the bed declaring, “I think I hear a garbage truck!”
Needless to say, I was freaked out. I clutched my wife’s body pillow close, pulled the covers up to my eyes, and whispered to White Monkey and New Monkey, “When I threw you guys down the stairs the other day, you know that was an accident, right? If something goes down, do you have my back?”
Relax, relax. It’s only temporary (I think). She’ll be back next week (I think). She’s just away on business (I’m pretty sure). I’m making these assumptions primarily based on the fact that 1) she left her children here, and 2) she left her body pillow here. No way she’d skip out on me without those items.
Note that I said “away” on business, not out of town. Fact is the wife is spending the week at a hotel on the other side of town. Yes, it’s for work. Yes, she’ll be working these crazy 18-hour days, and will be on call pretty much 24/7. So staying at the venue, even though it’s only 40 minutes away, is probably warranted. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that my wife is living in a luxurious junior suite on the executive club floor of a golf resort all week, attending multiple events with open bars and ample buffets. Meanwhile, I’m sequestered in the house with three small tornados, attending multiple events made up entirely of toddler temper tantrums with less-than-ample buffets of Chinese food leftovers and frozen waffles.
The adventure began last night, when my wife departed in the thick of a spring blizzard that had already coated the area in about nine inches of new snow. Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that this whole thing is going down in a big-ass snowstorm? Yep. Snowed in with three wild animals in creaky old house. You’ve seen “The Shining,” right? You know that was set in Colorado, right? In fact, Stephen King wrote the original novel after staying at The Stanley Hotel, only about 90 minutes from here. What you may not know is the original story was about a dad stuck inside with three small children for a week in a suburban neighborhood during a snowstorm. For dramatic effect, King later changed the scene to a big, isolated hotel, and he rewrote a couple of the small kids into ghosts. Still, the point is clear: If you’re trapped in a building with ghosts or small kids or other insanely scary creatures, sooner or later, you will crack.
So get ready, here we go. It’s Daddy on Duty Week, or The Shining Redux (with apologies to Stephen King). Let the insanity begin!
Every time a horrible tragedy occurs, like the bombings in Boston this week, there’s a litany of voices bemoaning the state of the world. “What has the world come to?” “Things didn’t used to be this way.”
You know what, yes they did. History is full of atrocities, spanning back to the beginning of time. You think the first societies evolved peacefully, without armed conflict over limited resources? If we take the stories of the Old Testament literally, then there were entire cities so morally bankrupt that God chose to destroy them. There was rape, pillage, and plunder by conquerors from Julius Caesar to Genghis Khan. There were the church-sanctioned tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. And let’s not forget the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, or Balkan ethnic cleansing. Right here in the good ol’ USA, just a few decades ago during a time that many still look to as a golden age of American idealism and morality, you could get yourself beaten to death just for looking at a woman the wrong way—if you happened to be a black man and she happened to be a white woman.
Let’s face it; the world has always been a scary place. And man has always been the scariest monster. We’re just more aware of it now. We have 24-hour news. We have a camera on every street corner and built in to everyone’s phone. We have a global network that connects everyone instantly, broadcasting all of our hideousness to the farthest corners of the Earth in milliseconds. We can’t escape reality anymore. We can’t insulate ourselves or deny it. We are forced to be aware.
And yet we keep having children. We keep bringing the gentlest, most vulnerable creatures imaginable into a world of unimaginable violence and pain. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we set ourselves up for so much potential heartache, for such a miserable existence watching our children run the terrifying gauntlet of life?
Because the world is filled with more hope than dread. Because love is a greater motivator than hatred ever will be.
Yes, the world is a scary place. It’s always been a scary place. But hope and love aren’t formed in the absence of dread and hatred; they are the antithesis; they are our validation that we are living for something bigger than ourselves. Think about it: When something awful happens, as it did in Boston this week, what do you do? Do you pull your loved ones closer? Do you resolve to be a better person, to make a better life for those you care about? Hopefully. Times of great tragedy tend to bring us together and inspire us to refocus on our priorities. That can be a powerful action, because most people are more good than bad. For every lunatic bent on mass murder, I see millions upon millions of people who would work their fingers to the bone to make this world a better place for their loved ones. I see millions more who would sacrifice everything they have to save their children from pain. Terrorists will never change that. Sociopaths who bring assault rifles to movie theaters and elementary schools will never change that. Our salvation is within each of us, and the people who deal in fear are ultimately fighting a losing battle.
So chin up. Life’s got more to throw at you, but you’ve got plenty to throw back.
