I do drone on and on

The endless march towards more content continues unabated, and I drag you unlucky few along with me. Oh the grim misery of the dedicated reader when they are fed on nothing but the thinnest of word gruel. No bon mots, no real wisdom, only a tired old crank belly aching about money and repeating himself. You can really taste the sadness.

In the world of the boy, things are pretty much steady. It looks like the ‘landing on his mouth’ incident did do some permanent damage to at least one tooth. It has turned a little grey, and that means the nerves and blood vessels inside have gone to heaven. I really wanted to avoid another trip to the dentist with him, but a professional must judge his malady and make their dread pronouncement. From the research I’ve done, they’ll probably leave the tooth as is, unless it’s infected or causing him pain. I hope it stays in place.

With the pile of snow that fell today, I’m back to my wintertime dilemma. I know the lad loves to play outside in the snow, but I loathe the cold. I hate the wind more than I hate plain old cold, and both at the same time sends me into fits of helpless rage. I will do my best to screw up my courage and get him out and about during the week, but baby it’s cold outside. I should go out and find a snowsuit for the wife so she is more equipped for outdoor frolicking than I am, naturally making her the first choice.

Here’s a little bit of wisdom that I’m trying on for size: If you can’t look back fondly on the fun you had last night, then it probably wasn’t worth your time. I woke up Saturday to a wild and crazy boy and exhausted mom, so our normal plans for the day went out the window. I was also already tired from not sleeping well and being out the night before, so the day was a bit of a drag. When I thought about the reasons for my sour mood, I could not comfort myself by saying ‘I may have stayed out too late, but I sure had fun’ because I didn’t have any. There were moments of near-fun, and I did eat almost an entire big bag of chips by myself, but fattening myself up does not a refreshing evening make. It’ll be the last time I go do that.

The strange thing about fun right now is that  I find myself at the end of the day with a small window of leisure time and nothing to do. I don’t have any games to play, or books to read (though that’s only my own fault. Must go to library soon). It’s frustrating to flip from activity to activity trying to enjoy myself. Maybe this is a consequence of pushing myself to be more productive. Naw, probably just need a new game.

 

Don’t want to be pessimistic but sometimes Dennis Leary is right

“Life’s gonna suck when you grow up,

It sucks pretty bad right now.”

Dennis Leary

I am rarely without a positive and cheerful answer when Max asks ‘why’, but he found one that I just can’t spin, because I don’t like it either. The specific question is “Why can’t you and mom come to school with me?”

Think about it –  if you had a choice, wouldn’t you want to do everything with your best friends? I know being independent is one of the skills I have to teach him, but that means I’m teaching him to be without me, and I am going to miss him. The deeper I get into the explanation of how he will progress from two mornings at pre-school to full days at kindergarten and on and on, the more I feel separation sadness. I guess that a part of me would kind of like to keep him at my side indefinitely. It would make dating awkward for him, sure, but we could cross that bridge when we come to it.

Okay, that plan is untenable. And besides, there are a lot of great things both of us will accomplish on our own, experiences we can have and then bring back to the family to share. I want him to feel comfortable on his own, to be a guy who enjoys his own company but likes meeting new people and seeing new things too. I want his world to be wide open and full of wonder, and that means he needs to learn to be confident when I’m not there. It still breaks my heart to leave him at pre-school and hear him start to bawl his eyes out a couple of minutes later when he misses me, but that will pass. He knows I will always come back for him, and he knows that both his mother and I will cover him in smootches as soon as we see him. If anything, I have to rein in my urge to shower him with sweet treats and toys every time he goes to school. Well, maybe just one more timbit would be alright.

Well that’s certainly a bleak outlook, mister

Let’s chalk it up to being smack dab in the middle of the novel. Chapter 13 has brought with it a malaise of epic proportions (seemingly), an overwhelming sense of monotonous pointlessness. It really reveals how dependant I am on some kind of positive feedback mechanism, and how much of a bummer it is when I get tired of the rewards themselves.

It’s the deep kind of funk when you can’t even imagine what could make you happy, and you can’t point to an obvious issue that is causing you grief. There’s nothing wrong, per se, just nothing going particularly well. But even that kind of generalization is misleading, because things are going well. Max is happy, healthy, learning and growing, and he delights me several times a day. There are elements of my parenting and being a role model that need some sprucing up, but I’m still the best dad for him.

And in the long-term, big picture, things will work out. I should look at this time spent writing as my apprenticeship. Like an apprentice woodworker, I’m going to make a lot of ugly doors before I make a beautiful cabinet. Like a plumber-in-training, I’m going to ankle-deep in poop until I learn to  doublecheck my work.  No one writes a great novel without spending the time learning how, and screwing it up along the way.