And if I had the choice,
I’ll take the voice I got,
‘Cause it was hard to find.
You know, I’ve come too far
to wind up right back where I started….
–Concrete Blonde, True

It’s been a while since I posted here on my public, albeit pseudonymous, blog. I’ve been busy. I’ve been retrenching. I’ve been rebuilding.

When I started this blog, with an entry entitled The Beginning of the End is Still a Beginning… Right?, I was struggling to come to terms with the increasingly inevitable end of my marriage. By getting my thoughts out onto these pages, and engaging in such constructive dialog with you, my faithful readers, I was able to navigate the treacherous waters of divorce without upending the entire enterprise. The kids are doing well, and Penny and I have been maintaining a healthy co-parenting arrangement. I’ve begun the long, slow process of getting my financial house back in order, and I’ve done what I can to strengthen my already healthy relationship with my boys.

Somewhere along the way, I seem to have lost my voice. I’m not referring to my speaking voice (although, oddly, that has happened, too; my singing/speaking voice still hasn’t fully recovered from a bout of laryngitis a few months ago), but rather, the part of me that is Inris. The keeper of this blog; the teller of this tale. If the chapter of my life entitled Marriage and Divorce has drawn to a guardedly successful resolution, what’s to be the tone of the chapter to follow? Having addressed the concept of Not This, I’ve been still at a loss to pick up the thread of Then What?

I’ve been maintaining a kind of holding pattern, during which the fog that has enveloped my mind for the last few years of my marriage has begun to clear. It’s not quite yet obvious to me what’s next, but some options are falling away, and I’m starting to feel recovered enough to head off soon on some new adventure.

Certainly, a large part of the next chapter of my life involves being the best father I can be to my boys. I suspect that part of what comes next will also involve having to address the damage that was willfully (though, impersonally) done to me by certain financial institutions. While I have a fine job at the moment that is helping me to pay the bills, there will also have to be some deliberate decision-making regarding my near-term and long-term career goals. So, yes, all of this will help to shape the story of this new chapter in my life.

But there also needs to be romance. Let’s face it: one of the primary reasons my marriage failed was the lack of romance. So, now that the marriage is over, there’s room to let some love back into this story. But how is that going to work out for a mid-40s, single father of three who divides most of his time between work, kids, and recuperation?

Would it surprise you to learn, dear friends, that there can, indeed, be romance after divorce, even for this jaded heart?

Because, the next chapter does, in fact, begin with yours truly starting a conversation with a beautiful young woman who is smart and sexy, and who speaks my language.

She’s got kids of her own, so we have that in common. She’s coming out of a marriage that has had some serious problems, but she is trying her best to make sure her new path is as healthy as possible, with ever an eye toward considering what’s best for her boys.

Her three boys.

Yes.

I know.

She loves me for my body as well as my mind. It’s so weird just to even type that out loud. That after such a very long dry spell, some welcome rain is making its way into this parched  life. Mrowr.

She surrounds herself with good, honest people; she strives for integrity in all that she does. She keeps me intellectually honest. She demands respect, and she gives it, as well. We share overlapping senses of humor, taste in music, and pop culture references.

For all of that, there really is only one complication.

You see, I live in Seattle.

She lives in Arizona.

Teach Your Children Well:

One thing that my ex and I always had in common was a desire to have kids. Lots of kids. And for a variety of reasons — none of them particularly scientific — we always expected that we would end up having girls. Lots of girls.

So, of course, we ended up with boys. Lots of boys.

Only boys.

Not too long ago, on the occasion of our oldest’s birthday, Penny mentioned her observation that our first-born is already “more than halfway out the door.”

The notion caught me off guard. Wait! Wait a cotton-picking minute!

Back in the beginning, back when my ex was my fiance and our lives before us were filled with promise and hope and opportunities and boundless possibilities (ie, you know, before reality and all that), we had all kinds of ideas of things we wanted to teach our daughters. Such as: it’s okay to be smart. It’s okay to pursue your interests, regardless of how society has typically categorized them. It’s okay to have sex if you want to, and to not, if you don’t. It’s okay to be strong. And it’s also okay to be feminine. We wanted our girls to be as fluent in the languages of math and science and literature and pop culture and history and love and philosophy and self-respect and respect for others, as deeply as their talents would allow. Penny and I had both, in our separate experiences, seen how pre-conceived gender roles (and sexual repression and so many other issues, including disrespect and incivility, the growing celebration of ignorance in our country, etc.) can harm both individuals and society as a whole.

And then we had boys, and that was fine, too. Boys, like girls, are awesome.

And I always knew, in the back of my mind, that to honor what we had in mind if we had raised girls, we would need to have a corresponding set of guiding values for raising our boys. In general, I think we’ve been doing okay. We’ve nurtured our boys’ natural love for science and math and stories and history and physical activity and music and movies and so on. We’ve worked on dignity and respect and politeness and kindness and “playing well with others.” They’ve been introduced to religion and philosophy, and we’re starting to get into politics as well. We also expect, one of these days, to deal with more advanced concepts, like closing the @#$%! door and picking up the @#$%! laundry off the bathroom floor. And peeing *into* the toilet instead of all over the floor. I imagine that girls grasp that last concept much earlier than boys, for reasons that have nothing to do with brain development.

As they get older, gender roles are also starting to become a more relevant topic, as well as sexuality, romantic relationships, and picking appropriate nursing homes for their aging and decrepit parents.

I was making dinner for the boys the other day when one of them asked to help. Making dinner is a little different experience from whipping up a box of prepared brownie mix, where all the boys really do is help stir and then fight over the whisk or spoon when it’s done. And it occurred to me… there are a lot of specific things I want my kids to know by the time they leave the house. Beyond the generalities of having “a love of learning” and “playing well with others.”

With Penny’s remark about how we’ve already gone past the half-way point as far as our oldest is concerned, it’s time to get serious.

So, it’s time for me to flesh out a list of “things I want to teach my children (or make sure they learn) by the time they leave the nest.” And I’m asking you, dear reader, to let me know what’s missing from the list.

General Concepts:

Critical Thinking — using logic and assessing evidence to arrive at good decisions

Creative Problem Solving — adapting to change and making the best of it!

The Scientific Method

Character and Relationships:

Respect for yourself

Respect for others

Right and wrong

Being a good partner (business, romantic, creative collaborator) and, on a related note, being a good friend

Understanding different kinds of relationships and roles, and how they can change

Principles (integrity, dignity, kindness, generosity, loyalty, honesty, self-confidence, humility)

Facing tough choices

Acting decisively

Taking stands

Having a sense of humor

Balancing taking risks with playing it safe (or, “Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em”)

Subject matter:

The basic academic subjects (math, science, history, literature, language, social sciences)

Popular culture (a basic familiarity with the classics as well as contemporary movies, music, dance, literature, video games, spectator sports)

Creative arts (play an instrument, compose a song, write a poem, act, orate, paint, photograph, design a page layout, sing, dance, draw, animate, script, cook)

Religion, Philosophy, Spirituality, and Skepticism — in theory and in practice

Government — in theory and in practice

Special topics: racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry — recognizing and avoiding/combating

Technology and tools

Animals — identifying, plus general care and feeding

Plants — identifying, plus general care and cultivating

Specific skills:

How to study / how to learn the answer to an academic question

Survival skills (swimming, first aid, CPR, starting a fire, tying knots, building a shelter, mountaineering, martial arts, jump starting a car)

How to cook at least five different meals

How to perform at least one magic trick

How to drive (stick and automatic)

How to pick locks

How to negotiate

How to compromise… up to a point

How to navigate

How to recognize, handle, and use weapons (also, as appropriate, how to avoid/defend against same)

Hunter safety — even if my kids never hunt, this is a must

How to use the internet safely

How confidence schemes work, and how to avoid them

How to build a book case

How to write a computer program

How to play card games

How to pick what wine goes with dinner

How to make an elevator pitch

How to deliver a speech

How to prepare for a job interview

How to wash dishes. And laundry. And perform all those other chores that make for a more pleasant home.

How to win with grace

How to lose with dignity

————

Wow. That’s a long list. And I know I’m leaving a lot of things off of this list by sheer oversight. It’s also not overly specific. Just as I was beginning to prepare this post, a friend and fellow blogger posted to her site some thoughts about how boys need to be raised to treat girls/women with respect. Her points are dead-on. But if I were to get to that level of detail on every point on my list, I’d be typing for days. Still, I’d like to hear what you think. Be as specific or general as you like. I’m sure I’ve left some things off because I just took them for granted (“don’t eat the yellow snow”). But others I may have left off the list either because I simply forgot to mention them, or perhaps hadn’t even considered them. Maybe you think I should take something off the list?

My ultimate goal is to give my boys the tools they will need to be good men. What are your thoughts?

I think once or twice, as Penny and I were going through our divorce, the idea was gently suggested that perhaps our break-up was the result of a mid-life crisis. Those of you who have read a decent-sized chunk of this blog will know that nothing could be farther from the truth. The question was not, ultimately, why the marriage finally fell apart so much as how had I managed to stay in it for so long.

I even bumped into another old friend this very day and, once more, had to catch him up on the goings-on of this past few years. While we didn’t touch too much upon the foreclosure and all of the financial woes that led up to it, the divorce and how it required me to pull back from my former activities did. And I found myself saying all the same things over again: no, nobody did anybody wrong, nobody cheated, we remain committed co-parents, we have true fifty-fifty custody, but the marriage was broken and could never be fixed, etc., etc.

Naturally, I did not go into what I meant by the marriage being broken. (And if you’re new to the blog, and if you’re curious, I’d suggest you start by just reading the first dozen or so entries of this blog to see how we reached the end of our marriage.)

But that said, even though having a mid-life crisis didn’t contribute to the end of my marriage, the end of my marriage didn’t necessarily prevent the onset of having a mid-life crisis.

What the intercourse do I want to do with my life?

What did I do to get here?

What do I have left in me?

What do I want to be/do now that I’m here?

And a couple of years ago while the divorce was underway, and my financial house of cards had to be rebuilt, and my dear friend Gabe was dying of cancer, and just before I tore my ACL and needed surgery to rebuild it… my mini-van pitched a fit.

I don’t recall if I blogged about that here; I suppose I probably did in one of my “my life is a country song” posts. But what happened in a nutshell was this: the electrical system went haywire one morning while I was driving to work. It was a hot, sunny day. The A/C wouldn’t come on, but suddenly the windshield wipers did. The power locks began locking and unlocking and locking and unlocking. The engine hitched and jerked and began losing horses at an alarming rate. I barely managed to pull off the highway and get to a gas station that was immediately next to the off-ramp.

Taking the key out of the ignition didn’t stop the electrical shenanigans. The wipers kept wiping. The locks kept locking. It was a struggle for me to finally get the front door open. Yes, my friends, I was locked *inside* my car. But I got out, called the nearest shop I trusted, and they arranged towing, etc.

The point is, as with my knee soon thereafter, the minivan gave me reason to stop trusting it. So, I stopped. And once other matters were brought under control, I gently began a slow, methodical search for the vehicle that would eventually replace it.

I looked at other minivans. But, well… I’m not a minivan guy any longer (to the extent that I was), and there’s only one model of minivan made any longer that is available in AWD. I test drove it, and I didn’t really like it.

I looked at the Ford Flex… a practical family car with AWD and a goofy, boxy, retro look. Having four-wheel or all-wheel drive is a must for me. And goofy, boxy, retro looks actually kinda appeal to me. My first car was a goofy, boxy, mid-sixties thang. The Ford Flex evokes that era’s station wagons. I was okay with that.

Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that I would like a convertible. But convertibles, in general, are not terribly practical or kid-friendly. Then there’s the problem of what conventional convertibles tend to say about their owners. You know… like how the Miata (excellent vehicle though it is) screams out, “Hi! I’m gay!”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I don’t want my car telling lies about me to the lady-folk out there, okay?

Or the BMW Z3, which screams out, “Hi! I’m a rectal cavity!”

Or the Porsche 911, which screams out, “Hi! I’m compensating for something!”

(Please accept my apologies if you, gentle reader, drive such a vehicle. I’m not talking about you, whatsoever. Rather, I’m just saying that these are the lies your car is spreading about you.)

I have no recollection of how the idea first entered my brain, but somewhere along the line it occurred to me… wait a minute! Aren’t Jeeps convertibles?

The Jeep Wrangler is.

And aren’t they AWD?

In fact, they are 4WD, which is even better.

And aren’t they awesome in snow?

That’s the rumor.

And don’t they have room for my kids? And groceries, too?

The 4-door version has plenty of room for both.

And… But… would they be fun to drive?

Well, to find out, a test drive would be necessary.

So while I’ve been quietly looking at vehicles for over half a year now (I started my test driving research during a snow storm last winter and discovered that the Ford Flex is well up to the task of handling nasty weather), the pieces started to fall into place when I test drove the Jeep Wrangler. With the top up. With the top down. On the highway. On the back roads. Yeah. Yeahhh. That was the vehicle I was looking for.

A week after the first test drive, I bought one.

I still have the mini-van. It’s trade-in value was roughly minus-$1,000, but it still runs, and it still has a little bit of life left in it. I have plans for it, and I’m hoping that I can prolong its life some while I begin using the Jeep as my primary vehicle. But… yeah. The Jeep.

Ahhh, the Jeep. Driving around with the top down on a sunny day just can’t be beat.

Thus my mid-life crisis kicks into gear.

Next, I suppose, there’s the matter of finding a girlfriend who is ten years younger than I am.

Our youngest just turned four years old.

A couple nights ago, I was reading to him and his next older sibling. This was a new book to us; a story about the Bear family. There was a storm, you see, so Baby Bear woke up Papa Bear because he was scared, and Papa Bear lifted the covers and let Baby Bear get into bed where he could cuddle up all safe and warm between Papa Bear and Mama Bear. (I was curious as to where this was going to go, given that I let my own Baby Bear sleep in my bed whenever he asks, which is only every single night.)

“Daddy?” my little one interrupted. He asks more questions than these short books have words. “Daddy? Why are the Mama Bear and the Papa Bear sleeping in the same bed?”

[please pause a moment.]

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my four-year-old asked me why Mama and Papa would sleep in the same bed.

Penny and I have been living separately for about a year and a half. Our divorce hits the one-year mark right around now. (I haven’t actually memorized the date, and I deliberately didn’t post news of the divorce *on* the date that it happened, so I’d have to actually find the paperwork in order to be sure of when, exactly, the divorce was finalized.)

It’s amazing, though, how quickly our “new” life became normal. The youngest takes our new arrangement for granted. And truth be told, his big sibs continue to seem well-adjusted, too.

And while the kids seem all happy and well-adjusted… I haven’t even gotten around to defining my new life yet!

I guess it’s okay to model being a healthy, single dad who is comfortable flying solo to my kids. At the same time, as some of my faithful readers have surmised, I have not been staying home, alone, with no one to talk to when the kids are with their mother.

But I’m also thinking that at some point, it’ll be time to model being a healthy dad in a healthy, grown-up relationship. I want my kids to know what a healthy relationship looks like. There’s no rush, and I’m not going to push it, nor bring home someone before that someone is likely to play a role in their lives.

Still… that question…

Wow.

“Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around
For my possibilities…”
–Paul Simon

Hello. Remember me? It’s been a while since I posted to this blog.

I’m a father of three young children. I’m 43 years old, albeit not for much longer. A couple of years ago, my wife and I fell on hard financial times; we ended up losing the house, and our family business hasn’t fully recovered. And as all that was playing out, I came out of the denial that our marriage was irretrievably broken. This was nobody’s fault — there was no villain in this drama — but our marriage was dead, and it had started killing me (probably both of us) on the inside. The story of how I agonized about the decision to face facts and move forward is recorded in the previous entries of this blog. Plus the story of how I blew out my knee while all that was happening. And a good friend of mine died of cancer. All-in-all, a pretty rough season in my life.

So, what’s been happening since then?

I know I’ve remarked previously about how my relationship with Penny is very much the same post-divorce as it was during our marriage. We continue to work very well together as co-parents; we continue to handle our remaining entangled financial matters as partners rather than as adversaries; and we continue to talk about politics or science news or other mutual interests. We also continue to never talk about our feelings with regard to each other, or about our former marriage, or about any other aspect of our past.

A mutual friend of ours has been dating another (much younger) fellow grad from our alma mater, and this friend recently posted on Facebook news of their engagement. Penny relayed the news to me — she knows I haven’t been spending much time on Facebook lately — and I wasn’t sure how to respond. As with any relationship that spans multiple decades and thousands of miles, my relationship with this friend (and Penny’s relationship with him, too) has many layers. While I do sincerely wish him and his bride-to-be all the happiness in the world, I’m a little too jaded and cynical at this point to expend a lot of effort thinking about it. And that’s pretty much how I responded to Penny when she mentioned it. It is the most I’ve said to her on the subject of marriage — any marriage — since our divorce.

Likewise, the most she has said on the subject to me was an aside about how some of our mutual friends here in Seattle have been withdrawing from her. She expressed how this had been a difficult year for her, getting divorced and all, and that it felt like her friends didn’t seem to be all that concerned about it. There was much more to that conversation, and about her relationship with these friends, but my point is that one off-the-cuff reference to the divorce. That’s it. For all that we continue to talk, both about the minutiae of child care and the grand sweep of the cosmos, the topic of “us” remains just as unspoken as it did during our marriage.

[I’m not complaining about that, by the way. Quite frankly, right at this moment, I have no desire to pursue such a conversation. It is interesting to me, nonetheless, that this dead zone persists, and likely always will.]

But for all that things remain the same with regard to Penny’s and my relationship, that does not mean that our lives are the same. Far from it. One thing that has changed is time.

As in: I know I never used to have much of it, but now it seems to be gone altogether.

In the last year of our marriage, I would help with the kids in the morning, drop one of them off at school, then go to work myself, come home, help with the kids, do some laundry or some sundry chore, put the kids to bed, then Penny would go to bed, and I would watch maybe some Craig Ferguson and then blog for an hour or two.

In the year since our separation and divorce, I generally have two kinds of days: days with kids, and days without kids. Kid days work like this: I get the kids ready for school and myself ready for work, I get the kids to school, go to work myself, come home, get the kids, shuttle the kids around to and from their various activities, take care of nothing but the kids until its time for them to go to bed, make sure the kids have done their homework, read to the kids, take care of all the chores for that day, collapse from sheer exhaustion, and then start the process all over again the next morning.

On non-kid days, it’s go to work, work late because the work needs to be done (and given the shortage of work I experienced a couple years ago, I’m not inclined to say “no” to my employer on kid-free days), come home late, collapse in front of the TV, do all of the chores that I didn’t get caught up on during the Kid days, collapse from exhaustion in my bed. Repeat.

When you live with your co-parent and you are both active parents, as Penny and I have always been, then you are always on call *but* you are only really *half* on call. When you don’t live with your co-parent and you have evenly split custody, you are only on call sixty-percent of the time, but you’re all the way on call during those times.

Wait, I hear you say. Sixty percent of the time? Not fifty percent? Yes. Because there’s parent-teacher conferences, recitals, and sporting events that you attend regardless of whether it’s *your* day with the kids. Oh, and doctor visits. And so on. And on those occasions, you don’t sit back and watch as the other parent wrangles the kids; of course you help. Because you’re a co-parent. That’s what you do.

Likewise, there’s the chores. When you’re living with your significant other, you split the chores. When you are living alone (half the time with your kids), you have to do all the chores. Oh, and this is true for both households. Penny has to do a week’s worth of dishes and laundry and vacuuming and picking up toys and so on and so on every week, and so do I. Because the kids make the same huge messes in both houses, you  have to cook all week even if you only have the kids half the time, and you have to do all the dishes, too. And the raking (or lawn mowing or driveway shoveling, depending upon time of year). Two houses means twice the chores.

Two parents doing twice the chores they used to and a combined 120% of the parenting rather than 100%… you can see how time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future. I suppose that as my kids get older and more self-sufficient (and even able to contribute to the chores), I may find it easier to decompress after a day’s work and even get more time to myself in the evenings. In the meantime, I need to figure out how to better work my schedule now. I suppose I’ve been in a retrenching mode for a while now. But it’s time to start pulling out of this.

So there it is, my friends. My little treatise (read: whingeing) on why I don’t seem to have any time these days.

In my next post, I’ll tell you the rest of the story as to why I don’t seem to have any time these days…

PS: Yes, my single mommy and single daddy friends, I know you have it worse than I do. I know. And I feel for you. I am truly blessed to have such a good co-parenting relationship. But, then again… just because Christopher Reeve was a quadriplegic, that didn’t make my knee surgery last year any less troublesome.

PPS: when I talk about being cynical about marriage, I don’t mean you, Shannon. Nor you, DelightfulEccentric. You and your paramours give me hope.