Category: Single parent

She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

Coping with Girl Scout Camp

I work a 9/80. This means that I work nine weekdays out of ten. I am supposed to take off every other Friday. This past Friday, I put in a full day of work so that I could deal with my job instead of my feelings about my daughter heading off to camp tomorrow.

I called my ex-wife to hassle her about a document that she has until August to give me, but I’ve been asking for since mid-February and even filled it out for her in June. All she had to do was sign it. She hasn’t so, I’ve been hassling her. But I think I am just hassling her to hassle her. I’m getting off topic…

For maybe the 1000th time, I reviewed all of the documents that I need for my daughter’s camp. I helped my daughter pack. I put her name on everything, but I also made her pack herself, just so she’d know where it all was. Last weekend, we spent 3 hours at Gander Mt. looking at rain coats. I got matching high-visibility rain coats for both kids.

I also had a mini-anxiety attack.

My son is also going to Florida with my ex for two weeks, in order to visit the grandparents. When my daughter comes back from Girl Scout Camp, I will put her on a plane to also be in Florida with her grandparents. I’m used to the grandparent visit, but I still have the feeling of amplifying cycles of panic; the feedback loop of shouting and crying that drowns out my internal monologue until all I can do is bite down on a pencil and grab my knees until my body stops shaking.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Girl Scout Camp because my Boy Scout Camp experience had some terrible elements. No, nothing like that. C’mon, not everything is a Catholic priest! Here is the story:

I earned the swimming merit badge at Boy Scout camp, in the summer between 5th and 6th grade, only to watch helpless as the Scoutmaster lost the paperwork and repudiated my achievement. When you earn a merit badge, you get paperwork was in triplicate, attesting to what you’ve done. Over several weeks, I brought my Scoutmaster one of the original copies. I did not make any duplicates. After I had given him all three copies, he said he never remembered me coming to him on any previous occasions.

People sometimes ask me why I didn’t make more copies. People ask why I didn’t just do it again, since now I could swim. That is not the point: This was my Scoutmaster. He was supposed to be responsible. I trusted him. I trusted him, despite other previous incidents when I was at risk and bad stuff happened to me. There was the time I got lost on a hike because a 5th grader can’t keep up with a former marine and a bunch of big high school boys with years of hiking experience, There was the time I passed out at the Memorial day parade because I was standing at attention in a wool “Smokey the Bear” hat and long sleeve dress with the troop’s bass drum strapped to me under the 85 degree noonday sun, after leading the 1.5 mile parade march. There was the time when I got really sick, after my Scoutmaster let me pitch my tent on top a puddle of water that I didn’t notice but he did. After all those previous times, I thought that he was “building my character.” I couldn’t pretend that there was a character building lesson within losing my paperwork and pretending like he couldn’t remember me submitting it to him.

So that it’s clear: the swimming merit badge was hard. I was very proud to have been able to swim so far and tread water for 15 minutes. When all evidence of that accomplishment disappeared in a wiff, the Scoutmaster gave the exact correct impression that he did not give a shit about me.

As a denouement, my father, saw fit to blame my quitting Scouts on my mother’s “brainwashing” and make it an issue in their divorce. The judge decided it was one of the reasons that “the best interest of the child” was to teach me a lesson and write a paean to how willful, obstinate, and terrible I was rather than ordering my abusive father to stop holding my college tuition for ransom and/or to deal with his self-annihilating anger.

Despite this bad experience, I love to sing the camp song from Boy Scout camp. And at random times, I will do the camp cheer. And I can tie knots. What knot do you use if you have two lines of different widths? What knot do you use for a tent pole when you want the line to be adjusted as needed? What knot do you use when you want a fast knot to tie two ends of the same line together in order to secure an object in a manner that is quite secure? If you don’t know the answers to this, and furthermore can’t tie a sheet bend, tent-hitch, and square knot: I think less of you. I really do. Seriously, you must be completely incompetent with anything practical.

Immersion in work, bickering, and obsessing over details are not the only ways I cope.

I took the kids out for Denny’s and Baskin Robins last night. I took them to the Museum of Natural Science today. I cooked them breakfast and dinner. We played Lego Harry Potter for the Wii and watched both Toy Story movies. This also made me feel much happier.

I tucked the kids into bed, then came out here to write this entry. After I am done, I am going to check on them, and kiss them. Then I will have a glass of water and go to sleep.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I received the above quote as a motivational message for Monday morning. I did find it somewhat motivating. But, I see a lot of danger in this quote, especially with parenting.

In the contemporary context, there are two pitfalls with this advice; things that happen when this quote is misinterpreted, which strike me as especially unhealthy.

#1: “The purpose of life is not to be happy” does not mean that being unhappy is indicative of a life well lived. Being unhappy could indicate that one is not doing enough to be useful, honorable, compassionate, or significant. Being unhappy also could indicate a rotten attitude.

#2: Happiness not indicia of spoiled children. Happy children have developed the skills to set realistic expectations and to cope with unmet expectations.

This is normally the point in an essay were the author says “I will discuss each of those in turn.” Except that I’m beating around the bush.

Let me describe the big fight that married people have. I alluded to this topic a few posts ago, so I’ve been beating around the bush for a while now. Picture this:

A couple. An important decision will be made.

The decision tends to be something major like having kids, where to live, or even about whether to get married in the first place. But there is no fight over the decision. The scope and scale is too broad and pervasive for either person to fully apprehend. Instead, there is a fight about having scrambled eggs.

The birth of this conflict originates from one person feeling unhappy because of unmet needs. These unmet needs arise from having unaddressed reservations about the decision. Those reservations metastasize into resentment. But the core element of the whole conflict is unmet needs; long-frustrated desire.

Desire has a lot of versatility, it can attach itself to a range of things: everything from longing for sex with attractive strangers to longing to pierce a sunny-side up egg yolk with a crisp triangle of buttery toast in order to soak up its yellowy goodness. The point is the intense feeling, not the object of infatuation.

The instinct that I see, particularly for Americans, is for people to dwell on whether the decision that got made (about the desired thing) was the right decision. But because the object of desire doesn’t really matter, I also believe that the decision doesn’t really matter either.

The longing, the coveting… that is the problem.

If you aren’t “done” wanting to have sex with lots of different partners, then the solution, for many Americans, is to treat monogamy as a “fixable issue.” The thought process goes something like: I am so clever, and this is the land of the free. Therefore, maybe freedom and ingenuity can combine in a way that will allow the decision itself to be re-engineered such that we can obtain an outcome wherein I can have sex with other people and not have any consequences.

This deeply American idea — that one can have everything both ways, frequently turns into challenging premise of there even being a decision to make. Eggs are so versatile! Why can’t one egg be scrambled and the other be sunny side-up? Freedom!

But a spouse is not a short-order cook, and the person thinking up this idea isn’t motivated by “civil rights.” Rather, the main motivation for these mental gymnastics is a deep conviction that one ought to be entitled to have every desire fulfilled. Such is the present condition of the American psyche.

I mention this, on Independence Day weekend because I am reflecting on the time I spent in England. I noticed that the ambition to satisfy every desire is an aspect of American character that the English find particularly vulgar. I am sure other countries do too.

This sounds like a set-up to say that one must learn to cope with disappointment, but my idea is apparently more radical than that. It certainly got funny looks from my ex-wife, my ex-therapist, and others.

Making a decision means changing what you want, as part of committing to that decision. It is not okay to choose scrambled eggs and still want a runny sunny-side up yolk.

When I say, “not okay,” I mean morally. It shows disloyalty of the heart to long for things fundamentally antithetical to the nature of what was chosen. The solution is not to try to have an “open marriage” or a “chaste marriage.” The solution is to choose scrambled eggs or runny eggs or heterosexual monogamy and then to also choose to be content.

I hear the objection: “Oh… but that is living a lie”

The hell it is. People have free will, and people change their minds about what they want all the time.

“Oh… but nobody should force me to want or not want something”

More accurately, hypothetical stupid straw man with whom I am arguing for rhetorical effect, is that nobody should have to force you to have feelings strong enough to overcome your contrarian desires.

Given the MMTL context of this blog, I may sound like I’m making an argument condemning gay ex-spouses for being gay. Not so. People don’t choose to be gay, any more than they chose their gender, eye-color, or handedness. To move the analogy from brunch to baseball, you can force a lefty to bat righty, but its just better if you have the person swing the way they are supposed to swing in the first place. Sometimes you can’t figure that out because certain leagues have ridiculous constraints about where and how to draw the batter’s box, either by putting it on only one side of the plate, or by having one side called the Batter’s box, and the other side called the “Ballplayer who is committed to hitting but refuses to be on the correct side” box in the vain attempts to play ball while also satisfying misguided baseball purists who have a hang-up about the so-called “traditional meaning of the word Batter”.

Stop blaming America, Cranky, this is about your lesbian ex-wife.

I concede that it is about my ex-wife, stupid straw man. But it is not about my ex-wife being a lesbian. I never fought with her about “the gay thing”; there were no “Get thee back into the closet!” pronouncements. I didn’t know she was gay, and finding out didn’t change the her personality. This is, and has always been, all about selfishness. My ex-wife being an astoundingly selfish person was something I knew about from “Hello.” I knew it, but I made excuses for her, all throughout the 13 years that I knew her.

So I guess, what? It appears that I am still making excuses for her. Did I just rationalize that she was an extremely selfish person, but that the flawed moral character of America is really to blame? I think I did. And I think I just lost an argument to the rhetorical straw man which I created.

In your face, Cranky!

GE Quietpower 3 won’t drain. How to fix it.

I couldn’t get my dishwasher to drain. The water stank of cat food and it made me very very unhappy to stick my hand into the dirty muck and disassemble the thing that spins around and the thing that catches food in order to clean out the bacon grease. In the middle of this putrid horror, my son asked for me to make him a snack. I yelled at him.

After running the dishwasher a few more times, the water was clearish but still wasn’t draining. I went for a swim. After a few minutes, The blue mid-afternoon sky got a bit cloudy, and there was some thunder. The lifeguards kicked everyone out of the pool, but it seemed evident that the storm was distant and heading even further away. But the safety protocol was to wait for a period of time to confirm that the danger had passed.

While waiting my daughter chatted with a friend about she too might like to summer lifeguard, one day when she was old enough. There was a handsome boy who seemed to be in charge, and every few minutes my daughter would ask the male lifeguard when she could go back in. After 15 minutes, the lifeguard said “25 minutes.” After 45 minutes he said “24 minutes” and then gave a sidelong glance to his friends, who laughed.

I went ballistic.

I’m not sure if it was the arbitrary exercise of power by this 17 year old punk or the fact that the laughs were at the expense of my little girl who admired this unworthy piece of garbage. And I’ll tell you what: The fact that my dishwasher wouldn’t drain was certainly part of the anger. Both the dishwasher and the kid were these banal, unfair, indecipherable blockages; impervious and ruining everything.

“Hey you.”

Yes sir?

“My daughter isn’t an annoyance for you to laugh at. Her safety is the reason why you are here. And if it isn’t then you should be either.”

I…

“You got that now? No? Well, one way or the other, that’s going to have to change. Let’s go kids”

After that, I took the kids to get some queso and quesadillas. Then we came back and played the “Toy Story 3” video game for the Wii. Then I told the kids to go to bed, and entered the headline of this post into google. At first, I found all these ad hoc sites that blamed GE for making a bad dishwasher.

Then I went to the GE site and found this:
video from GE

The video turns out to be a little vague. The most important revelation, however, was that the problem wasn’t to be solved by attacking the filthy dishwasher part of the dishwasher drain head-on. Rather, there was a logical and less disgusting, but non-obvious solution in the air-gapped drainage line that sticks up through the sink and connects to the dishwasher. The video is kind of vague because, it doesn’t mention that this drain line can run through your garbage disposal.

Basically, the video tells you to take off the silver cap from that thing on the back right hand corner of the sink that looks like it should dispense hand soap. Turns out, that thing doesn’t dispense hand soap at all. Instead, it houses some other weird looking thing, called a diverter tube. Stick your thumb or a screwdriver (or basically anything that is strong enough) in the little plastic tab holding the white plastic seal on top of the diverter tube. Then, you’ll find a plastic hose inside the diverter tube (the plastic hose looks like a bendy straw). The way the diverter tube works is this: when the dishwasher is running and would otherwise fill up with so much water that it would go above a the level of the door hinge, and then leak out the seal on the bottom of the door, the water (somehow) instead goes inside the plastic hose of the diverter tube. The diverter tube goes straight up to the countertop (right hand corner of the sink). If the diverter tube gets too filled up, then it spurts dishwater out of that diverter tube, like its the top of an oil rig, but less like a gusher and more like a trickles, most of which goes back down into the diverter tube and somehow drains that way. In the worst case, water shoots out of the diverter tube but drains harmlessly into the sink.

Sounds like it won’t work, right? But it mostly does… unless you get solid bits of stuff inside the plastic hose of that diverter tube. Fixing a clogged hose is unglamorous. I found that the plastic hose is a pain in the neck to get out, but its doable, just don’t be shy. Then once it is out, you can thwack it a bunch on the side of the sink, until the stuff in it gets dislodged. I tried blowing in it and sticking brushed in there. I think if I was a plumbing genius (clearly I am not), I could have gotten underneath the sink and detached the line from the garbage disposal. But, thwacking worked just fine. Eventually the debris clears out, and once it does you can put the whole kit and kaboodle back in.

I found half a dozen unpoped popcorn kernels, pin bones from a salmon, cat food chunks, and more bacon grease. It formed a horrible 3 inch-long block in the plastic hose, preventing it from spurting into the diverter tube. Cleaning out the plastic hose was a huge mess. Bits of food got everywhere and it smelled awful. Once it was out, however, everything worked perfect after that.

I ran the dishwasher and it totally drained, although there were still food remnants in the screen that had to be cleared out, and I saw that my earlier attempts to “fix” it from the front end had dislodged bits of the plastic dishwasher’s assembly that shouldn’t be dislodged. I used paper towels to clean up the food remnants, and used a screwdriver to re-lodge all the parts of the dishwasher that I had moved out of place, into their correct place.

I used some softs scrub and formula 409 to clean off the surface of everything. I also ran a tray of ice cubes through the insinkerator, then I ran the dishwasher again a few more times. With each run of the dishwasher completed without there being any stinky standing water, I felt my anger melt away a little more. Finally, I decided that everything looked good, so I took a shower.

I also decided to send an email to the community association’s management company to complain about the lifeguard who had been rude to my daughter.

The kids hadn’t gone to bed, of course. The whole time I was fixing the dishwasher drainage issue, the kids stayed up and watched cartoons. During all of that, they managed to make and eat a big bowl of microwave popcorn. At one point, one of my kids tried to put the bowl, empty except for a  bunch of unpopped kernels into the dishwasher. I stopped that, and I didn’t get upset.

I thought they’d have been disappointed about not being able to swim, but they seemed pretty happy. They asked me if I wanted to play “Lego Rock Band” with them on Wii. I did. We played for a while and then I got serious about bed and tucked them in.

Since my ex left, getting them to sleep has often been an ordeal. I’ve come to realize that one reason it is an ordeal is that I am distracted by things that seem more urgent, when I really ought to focus and prioritize getting them to go to sleep.

Today, there was no ordeal. They were very sweet. “Good night, Dad, I love you.”

I feel like there is an important moral lesson here. I can’t figure out precisely what it is.