Big Daddy Paul

One thing I absolutely do not miss about the working world is dressing like a grown up. My fashion has regressed to something close to a 16 year-old, usually involving sneakers, a baseball hat, shorts, and my all time favorite article of clothing: the hoodie. The hoodie is my friend, it covers all manner of ills. It is my security blanket and I love it dearly.

I used to be a regular sweatshirt guy. Then, my I started an ambitious expansion program which necessitated finding things to mask my expanding girth. After an unfortunate incident involving a girdle and a brief period of asphyxiation, I decided the best approach was going to be to just cover up my midsection. See, with a hoodie, I can put my hands in the front pocket. That way, the people who look at me will think that the bulge in my midsection is just the result of my hands resting in the pocket, and not the result of an infatuation with cheeseburgers and popcorn. Pretty smart eh? Now, getting ready consists of the following: take off pajama bottoms and replace with shorts. Throw on hoodie. (If day begins with letter T, brush teeth and apply deodorant.) Leave the house. The hoodie, as you can see, is the most versatile piece of fashion since mom jeans were invented.

It is precisely these reasons why the hoodie is the official fashion item for the stay at home dad. I don’t know if I should reveal this, but once you are initiated into the inner sanctum of the stay at home dad world, you are ushered into a small room for initiation. After some “rites of passage” involving two or three dozen hot dogs and a 12-pack of beer, you are presented with your very own hoodie to wear as a badge of honor. You then go forth and save the world, one child at a time. You can tell how experienced a stay at home dad is by the number of stains he has on the front of his hoodie. They are similar to the rings on the inside of an old redwood tree. It doesn’t matter how new the hoodie is, they follow you like the stink of a rental car even after you have returned it. I got a brand new  hoodie a month ago, and it already has four stains on it, one for each year I have been at home with Malcolm.

It’s not all fun and games though. I recently lost one of my favorite hoodies of all time. I was pretty bummed when I lost the skull hoodie, I loved it and the kids that I hang with loved it too. The loss was about as emotional for me as losing our cats or Amy having jinxed the Giants into losing the World Series. I don’t know where you are out there skull hoodie, but know this: you will be missed. And tell the girdle that I am still mad at him.

I spent a good deal of the morning asking questions. Mind you, not the questions I should have been asking: What am I doing with my life, what’s our plan for the future, or who is this Vietnamese man in our bed. No, I spent the morning asking Malcolm questions. Why? Yesterday was shit. Malcolm stayed up way too late on friday night, and has been a cranky butthead ever since. When he is tired, he is mean, vulgar and way too physical, sorta like Amy when she’s drunk. Yesterday had a lot of yelling and a lot tears.
Today, I decided to mix it up. Instead of yelling at him and ordering him around, I began to ask him questions. I heard about this approach somewhere before, although I am not sure where. The theory goes, if you ask your kid open-ended questions, they will spend their precious brain activity formulating responses and that is good for their brain. It can also be good for your relationship if it means that you don’t want to throttle them anymore.

So this morning was a lot of questions. Instead of telling him what do and what not to do, I tried to limit my communication to him to questions. I asked about our plans for the day. I asked whether he thought knocking the chair over at breakfast was a good idea. I asked if we were going to get along better and why. It was an extremely difficult exercise because, A) you have to really engage with your kids to make it work, and B) you end up asking absurd questions just to keep things moving along. At one point, I asked Malcolm whether it would hurt his meatballs to ride a camel. It is extremely difficult to engage your kids this way, but a good way to get out of rut. I wasn’t able to just ask him open-ended questions, but maybe I’ll get better at it. This is definitely a skill building exercise.

Eventually he got tired of talking to me. (The smart ones always do.) He took off and is now playing in his room by himself. Of course, this means I am going to do this all the time. If short bursts of intense engagement will lead to long periods of alone time, I am going to try this little trick as much as I can. I guess this makes sense, as I get annoyed whenever Malcolm peppers me with questions. Try it sometime. Maybe your kids will lose interest in talking to you, too!

I hate to have to admit this to you, but Malcolm still has tantrums. I honestly thought that we would be done with those by now, given he is four years old, but they remain a constant and irritating part of our lives. His meltdowns are fierce and have extravagant production values. He cries, screams, kicks, scratches, bites, and yells every insult imaginable at you, (the most common being, “You are NOT coming to my birthday party!!!”) He is like a three and a half foot tall version of Amy Winehouse. I began to take the tantrums personally, like they were some sort of reverse merit badge for bad parenting. Each subsequent meltdown would cause me to fall farther into the chasm of parental self doubt. What was I doing wrong? What could I possibly be doing to make Malcolm have so many tantrums?

In an effort to get to the bottom of the mystery, I began to take mental notes whenever he had a tantrum. I realized something immediately. Malcolm only had tantrums when I told him something to do! He falls apart when I tell him he needs to turn his clothes right side in. He blows up every time I tell him we need to run errands after I pick him up from preschool. He has a conniption fit every time we make him leave somewhere that he is enjoying. These tantrums are occurring because we are making him do things that he doesn’t want to do.

Obviously, the solution to the tantrum problem is to stop telling Malcolm what to do. This falls into line nicely with his Montessori education, where he has the freedom to select whatever activity he desires during the day. If he wakes up and doesn’t feel like going to school or swim class then he won’t have to go. If he wants to watch movies for twelve hours a day, so be it. Who am I to tell him that he can’t  eat chocolate all day? On second thought, why aren’t I living my life this way? He may be on to something!

The beauty of this approach to parenting is that it essentially eliminates most of my work. I would just drive him to things he wants to do, buy stuff at the store that I think he wants, and play some games around the house. No friction, no mess. No tears, no injuries. My job would get real easy, real quick.

Of course, there may be a downside to his having absolute control over himself. Robbed of the ability to command the inclusion of fruits and vegetables in his daily meals, his diet will deteriorate. He will remain his current size for the rest of his life. Sporadic school attendance will eventually lead to Malcolm, the village idiot. It won’t really matter, though, because he won’t leave the house due to the constant stream of movies that will play at our house. Poor hygiene choices will actually make me glad that no one is around to visit with our stinky, toothless son. Yes, we’ll have a real winner on our hands.

On second thought, maybe tantrums aren’t the worst thing ever.

I am lucky. I officially have the greatest job on earth. I hadn’t really realized it, but having lately thought about what I am going to do with my life, I realized that it is not ever going to get better than this. So, I am going to revel in it while it lasts.

Being a stay at home dad wasn’t always the bomb, though. When I was 25, if you would have offered me a job whose chief qualities were getting thrown up on and corralling handfuls of human feces, I would have politely declined the assignment. (Unless, of course, the job was at the world’s most bizarre burlesque club.) Somehow, I survived the newborn stage and made it to to toddlerhood, where the job involved corralling an angry mutant, hell bent on biting and hitting anything that moved. Any hint that the mutant wasn’t going to get what he wanted was met with loud tears and even more aggression. Not so fun either. Little preschoolers are nice, but you spend so much time and energy trying to figure out what the fuck they are trying to say that you feel drained at the end of each and every day.

The older preschooler is amazing.

What other job involves naked abacus sessions?

Fully potty trained and able to eat exotic foods like salami, they, for the most part, talk and function like real people! Plus, they no longer just want to sit around the house and play pretend with their horsie. In the past six months, Malcolm and I have: bowled, gone to the horse track (and won!), learned at the museum, gone to a baseball game, golfed, went to the movies and watched a boat load of football on TV. What’s cool about all that stuff? I like to do it, even if my kid isn’t there! That’s right, I get paid to do things that I enjoy doing anyways. How cool it that? OK, so I don’t get paid, but it sure feels like I do!

Sure, the job sometimes gets to me. Then again, all jobs do. As an attorney, I had to leave a Superbowl party early to go look through 20,000 documents to find examples of delivery drivers who peed into gatorade bottles in their trucks. I’ll take an occasional meltdown and a few Mr. Mom wisecracks over that any day. The thing that separates this gig now is that with a little imagination and some patience, you can do whatever you want. And when you can actually enjoy your kid and not have to worry about throw up, diaper changes, mutant attacks or the inability to communicate, then life is sweet. And right now, it is.