Their Children, And Mine

My son crammed the cupcake full-on into his gob so hard I was worried he was going to suffocate himself.  That's how Jewish fathers think.  I guess maybe we shouldn't have gotten him a cupcake that was approximately the same diameter as his head.  My daughter wouldn't touch the thing, at least, not with her hands.  She held them up high at a dainty angle and licked her cupcake to a long, slow, moist death-- her tiny, flicking tongue the snake-like weapon in this dirty masquerade.

I told the story of my children eating their first cupcakes to approximately six different coworkers, at different times of the day, on Monday.  By the third retelling, the third "That's so CUTE!", I silently prayed the floor would open me up and I'd be sucking on Hades's dick with my hair and skin on fire by lunchtime.  

On Friday, twenty children fell to the ground-- their clocks stopped forever-- in a mindless, senseless, brutal and hateful act.  The next day, my two children turned one.  My wife said she was sad that their birthday will be forever linked to the calamity at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and it wasn't something I had thought about until she mentioned it.  Maybe it will be, maybe not.  I don't know.  I'm like you in that, after Friday, I don't know anything anymore.

And I don't much want to.

I don't want to talk about it anymore than I want to talk about my children's birthday.  It happened.  Everything that can be said's been said.  It's been said on Facebook and on Twitter, from behind lecterns and on pulpits, on television and on the radio.  It's been said by the copy machine and at tables and on chairs, some that swivel, some that used to.  I've said everything that can be said about my twins' birthday.  I don't want to talk about it anymore.

You understand.

I don't want to go on Facebook-- ever again.  Some people are trite, some are sincere, but I hate them either way.  Some won't leave it alone, some post pictures of candles and say dumb things.  One idiot my wife went to school with said her cat "sensed something was wrong in Connecticut".  If you want to open up a discussion about mental health in this country-- start with her.  I want to delete my account entirely, but what about all the pictures?  Of my children and my wife and my life, and how will I ever secretly ogle the inaccessible girls I went to high school with?

Well, it used to be a secret.  Actually, probably not.

I guess I'm not very good at expectations.  I'm expected to talk about the shooting as much as I'm expected to talk about my children, but I resist.  I squirm.  I'm petulant and vague, always holding back.  Talking about the shooting makes me ill and talking about my children makes me uncomfortable.  I feel idiotic and small, silly and vain.  When I am badgered at work into showing pictures of them on my cellphone I get sweaty and hot-- it's not an enjoyable experience and, the louder the cooing, the more fervently I pray for that hole to open up below my shoes.

"You know," I said to the only real friend at work I'll ever have, "I really miss the time here when I was new and no one talked to me, and I just came in with my head down, did my job, and left unnoticed."

Now I'm expected to talk-- about... I don't know what.  People places and things.  About whatever.  And I can banter and make jokes and hold a conversation.  I can do that.  I'm just dying inside, or wishing I was.

I like to think I'm the kind of man who says what he thinks, who tells it like it is, who owns up to how he really feels, but I'm not.  I'm not that at all.  My father is, because he doesn't give a shit about what anybody has to say in return.  I'm obsessed with it.  I don't know how you get what you get from your father or your mother that way, but I don't think I got much from him except his body hair and his brown eyes.

I have things to say-- about their children, and mine-- but I don't know where to begin, or why I would.  I don't know who would care, and I don't know if I'd respect them very much if I found they did.  I have some things to say about the 2nd Amendment and mental health and masculinity and security and this country and our mentality and our tragic flaws and statistics and prejudices and I have some things to say about the new thing my son did today, or how my daughter looked in her gray hoodie, or the lump in my throat at this moment or that, about thus and so.  I have a song to sing, O.

But I don't remember the words.

Don't Wanna

Someone once told me, as I was complaining endlessly about an unpleasant task I had set up for myself to do one day, "Don't do it-- we spend so much of our lives doing things that we don't want to do-- paying bills, visiting our inlaws, wiping our asses, getting the car inspected-- why should you have to endure one more annoying thing that you don't want to do-- just because you think you should? Fuck that."

Just. Don't. Do it.

Hmpf. Pretty revolutionary, don't you think? As advice goes, anyway.

Trouble is, nobody actually said that to me. It's just sage-like advice that I pulled out of my ass (after wiping, of course). I do this sometimes-- give myself advice, like an old friend might, if I ever asked an old friend for advice. Which I don't, which is a shame, because that's essentially what old friends are for, and I do have a couple left. But I'm far too busy with my spinning little life to pay them much heed. You know, there are bills to pay and cars to get inspected.

Anyway, I give myself advice every now and then, and, invariably, I heed it not. At least I don't pay some clipboard-toting shyster to give me advice that I will then ignore. Of course, good therapists don't give advice. I learned that in college, and not much else, I'm embarrassed to say.

Yesterday, after a thoroughly annoying day of working with some of society's less fortunate, less desirable, and less assimilated beings, I got to fight through forty minutes of just-out-of-school traffic only to arrive at the doorstep of my middle sister's shabby apartment on the outskirts of the city. Broken red moulding disgraced the threshold and, as I leaned back against the wooden railing propping up her doorstep, it bent unceremoniously and threatened to cave beneath my not-very-impressive weight. I texted her, as she requests, probably because her doorbell is broken.

"I'm here."

My sister, who has had her iPhone surgically implanted up her ass, usually texts back in under two seconds flat. After four minutes of freezing my tibbles off in the cold rain, I called.

"Hi. I'm here."

"You're where?" she asked.

"I'm at your doorstep. Can you let me in, please?"

"What are you doing here?" she asked, obviously put out.

"Well, I was supposed to see you last Monday, and you postponed until this Monday. And now, it's this Monday."

There was a brief pause.

"Oh," she replied with customary eloquence, "well, I thought you were going to, like, confirm."

Like, confirm, huh? What is this, like, a doctor's office?

Instead of that biting little remark, I said nothing, determined to be a good boy.

"Well," she said, "it's too cold to go take the baby to Starbucks."

"Um, I know-- I don't care about going anywhere, I can just come up and say 'hi.'"

"Oh, yeah, sure, we'll come let you in."

And so began what was one of the more traditionally awkward twenty-six minutes of my life: meeting with my sister, on her turf. Where my mother and eldest sister are not around to conduct air puff residue tests on all of the baby's toys and sanitize his every corner. This apartment is not the happy medium I hope for my nephew. He toddles and doddles around the living room happily, putting discarded Starbucks coffee cups into his mouth that have been lying around on the floor, he gleefully chases a yellow, plastic ball that goes careening towards the vast tangle of wires and cords connected to her modem. There is shit. Everywhere. And she puts on some sort of digitized bastardization of Mickey Mouse that he pays attention to for sixteen seconds, and then wanders off in search of other stimulation-- I don't know, like, where it's supposed to come from.

And neither does he.

And neither does she.

Maybe he'll pick up some wisdom from the pithy quote on the side of the Starbucks cup, if they're still doing that-- but I doubt it. He is, after all, fourteen months old.

I'm tired of doing things I don't want to do. I just want to take my nephew away, to a diner somewhere, for bacon, eggs, and well-done hashbrowns-- like my father did with me-- once the kid's old enough.