Sunday, December 01, 2002

Too Cool for Two Jim Haefele I’m not ambivalent about my children. But choosing to have kids means more than becoming a caretaker for a baby--it's a fundamental identity shift, and it's not easy to come to grips with that. My wife Melissa and I are expecting a second daughter in January, and we’re looking forward to the next step with bottomless fear and uncertainty. I’m just a few months away from making a massive jump: I’m about to become a FAMILY MAN. With only one child, it’s possible to continue to think you’re still cool. I may be thirty-one, balding, going to the gym too frequently for too little payoff, and carrying around more than a little disdain for ‘N Sync and Britney while yearning for Duran Duran and other musical wonders of the early 1980s. I may be able to name all four Teletubbies, and I might hum the theme song to Elmo’s World on Sesame Street on occasion. But I’m cool, damn it! I can still go out with some of my hip, childless friends on nights when Melissa is willing to stay home. We can take advantage of people who actually want to baby-sit while we go out. I see myself as an independent, modern, youthful man, married to an independent, strong, cool woman. We’ve chosen to have a child to enrich our lives, but I swear we haven’t changed. We still h intend to see the world, drink good beer, watch R-rated movies, and stay up late. I am a liberated man, staying home full-time with my daughter, flouting conventions and having fun all the while. You can still do many things with one child that you could do with none; it just requires a bit more planning. You can take the kid along for a lot of excursions. But two kids? It’s over, man. Want to go out to the bar with some buddies? Nope--can’t leave your wife with BOTH kids on a Friday night. Want to take some friends up on a casual offer to baby-sit while you go out for a nice dinner? Watch those offers dry up when diaper changing doubles and crying multiplies. Want to go out to a restaurant with two children under five in tow? Forget it. Rent a movie instead, and try to watch half of it before falling asleep at 7:45. Of course, this entire neurosis is based on falsehoods--I know that in the real world I am not particularly hip. I do not spend much time at cool bars, I don’t have a cool wardrobe, and attractive young women are not checking me out. I would rather drink a good stout than multiple shots of anything, and the last thing I want to do is is go to a rave. Melissa and I have a ritual that we go through any time we look for a new place to live--we always consider the closeness to great bars or restaurants or other places to hang out, and then we diligently avoid any of those places. Like everyone must, I have reached the point where I have to accept that I am a grownup. The second child is likely to be the catalyst that forces that acceptance, regretfully. Is being a grownup such a bad thing, though? There’s more money in being a grownup, that’s for sure. And being in control of my own life is nice--at least insofar as any parent of a toddler is in control of anything. And, despite my irrational fears of what it means for my social status, being a parent is truly awesome. It’s fun, and it’s incredibly rewarding, if overwhelming. Hearing my daughter say "Daddy" is far superior to drinking shots any day of the week. Nevertheless, there are going to be times when I’m walking by the corner bar, and a bunch of super-cool twenty-somethings will be sitting outside on a nice weekend night, having a beer and laughing. And I’ll be envious. But then my daughter will probably grab my hand and smile, and she might even grow up thinking that I’m an awfully cool guy. At least until she’s thirteen. 7:31:11 PM

The Ex-Factor by Jim Haefele They say that divorce rates are sky-high in our country--over fifty percent of marriages end before death does them part. That seems low to me; my extended family alone constitutes roughly 32% of divorces nationwide. Frightening but true: between the six children of maternal grandparents, there have been eight divorces. Using logical extrapolation, that puts the national rate at 133%. And my family isn’t psychotic or anything, honestly. My aunts and uncles (and parents, for that matter) are kind, friendly people. They just don’t seem to do marriage particularly well. I wish I could understand the reasons; if someone would explain, it might help to ensure that my own marriage remains on track. I have no clue what the lesson is, but so far so good, so I’ll just roll with it. The thing about divorce is that the aftermath is far too complicated for the children. My own parental situation is increasingly preposterous. My parents divorced amicably eighteen years ago, but remain close friends. They see each other regularly, and when I’m back in Kansas we often all get together. I’m pretty comfortable with this, though it is unusual and at times discombobulating. I am thankful that they get along so well, actually. I can remember going to a “Divorce Workshop” not long after they split up. Most of the kids there had insane stories about one parent stabbing the other or somebody pulling a gun on somebody else or Dad burning down the house in a drunken frenzy after Mom hired an assassin to kill the priest Dad was having an affair with. At least I’m not aware of any weapons charges have been brought against any members of my family. This weirdness is about to manifest in a new way--in January my parents are coming to visit us in Tunisia after their second granddaughter is born. They’re flying here, together, and then staying here for a couple of weeks. What in the world? How do I decide who gets the better bedroom? Do they share a bathroom? What is the code of behavior for this? I think they’re actually relying heavily upon each other in order to get through the frightening experience of international travel; my father has traveled only a little in the military and then to Cancun, which is less scary than Oklahoma. My mother has never crossed the U.S. border. So I can appreciate that they want some support on their trip, but it’s like I'm taking my own trip to Bizarro World. And then there’s the stepparents issue. My mother and father each remarried in the late 1980s. In the last three years, they’ve each gotten divorced again. I was pretty close to each of my stepparents--something else upon which to count my blessings. But they’re no longer stepparents; they’re ex-stepparents. How is this supposed to work? This summer I found myself sitting on the porch talking to my father while he sat on the couch between my mother and my ex-stepmother. Dad and Colleen (my ex-stepmother) are both recovering alcoholics, each sober for just a few years, and they openly admit that much of their marriage was based on drinking together. And recovering alcoholics seem to rely heavily upon something my dad calls “drunk humor.” This leads to otherworldly awkward moments in which they laugh uproariously about how they got drunk repeatedly on this very porch and spilled liquor all over the place. While this would be awkward for any non-alcoholic to cope with, the fact that the conversation was occurring between my father and my now ex-stepmother adds a whole new level of unreality. And this doesn’t even address the fact that my father’s other ex-wife, who happens to be my mother, was sitting there too. I need to get a flow chart to keep this straight. And then there’s the other time when my parents, my ex-stepmother, my sister and I were all having dinner together. The conversation took a Twilight Zone-turn when Colleen and my mother started laughing about dividing up the dishes in the midst of their divorces. Things like this are too weird to be shared with the children. My now ex-stepfather is a whole different sort of deal. Less than two years ago, in the throes of a standard-issue midlife crisis disguised as “clogged chakras" and "spiritual journeys", he decided he no longer wanted to be married to my mother. Our relationship had really moved beyond parental and into the “friend” category, but few things can more quickly devastate a relationship than mistreatment of one party’s mother. I think he wants to continue our ties, but I don't know want I want, and in any case little has come of it so far. The whole situation certainly highlights how complicated these things get when real relationships are formed based on divorce and remarriage, and how painful it can be when those relationships have to end. "What happens to the kids after my second divorce?" is a largely unanswered question in these divorce-ridden times. Think about it--someone comes into your life as a new family member, an authority figure on at least some level, and the most important person in your biological parent's life. And then, after a period of time, once you've established an independent relationship with them, once you forget that they're not a blood member of the family, it ends. What then? I don't know how to answer that question. Ultimately the children of divorce have to make a choice about their stepparents and the level of involvement and depth of relationship that they will allow. I have a lot of friends whose parents are divorced, and some of those parents have been remarried multiple times. None of them go to dinner with their ex-stepparents. For the most part, in fact, they have no real relationship with those stepparents. I genuinely cared about my stepparents, however, and I still do. I'm glad that I made the choice to create real ties with them. But what do I do when Mom and Dad get involved with another potential spouse? Do I protect myself by guarding my feelings, or do I risk another relationship? It's the classic poker dilemma--play tightly with few risks but smaller potential gains, or play fast and loose with more at stake, and thus more to win...and lose. Most importantly, what does that choice mean for my relationship with my parents? None of the friends that have no relationship with their stepparents have particularly enviable relationships with their biological parents, either. The decision about how close to get to stepparents is fundamentally a decision about how close I remain with my mother and father. I love my parents, and have close and deepening relationships with each of them. Stepparents or no, I want it to stay that way. Who the hell needs these complexities? Isn’t life weird enough as is? Perhaps at some point in the future my parents will, in fact, each get married again. Then I’ll come home to see them together while my new stepparents go out for a nice dinner. Meanwhile, I’ll try and recruit my ex-stepmother to run interference with my ex-stepfather. With a family this hyphen-friendly, I just hope I don’t end up with an ex-wife. Though who could blame her for wanting to avoid a situation in which she has to make nice with ex-stepparents-in-law? Not her stepparents-in-law-to-be, that’s for sure. 2:36:21 PM