Category Archives: It’s a Guy Thing

Let’s all go for a ride in the clown car

I bought my car 14 years ago — five years before I began dating my wife and 10 years before we had our first child. I was a single guy who lived in a one-bedroom apartment and watched TV on a 19” box.

My little car has two doors, crank windows, and no A/C. Also, it has a manual transmission, which occupies my kid-swatting hand much of the time I am driving. I chose my car because it promised reliable, low-cost transportation for myself, and possibly a date. Those were the only souls I could imagine transporting.

In recent years, it would have been reasonable to trade in my car for something more family friendly.  As sensible as this act would have been, there are a few reasons why I have not done it.

  • Cars cost more now than they did in 1998. I now have a wife and children. By definition, this means that I have less money than I had in 1998. The gap between myself and a new vehicle only seems to be widening.
  • I love my car. It still gets great gas mileage and has been cheap to keep in good running order. Besides, she’s never whispered a peep about where I went, and with whom, during those five years before my wife came along.
  • My wife’s car, though not perfect, has been adequate as a vehicle for transporting the children. It transports them far more often than my car does.

Sleek, inexpensive, and good at keeping secrets. What more could a man want?

Still, there are times when I need to transport the kids in my car. The first time I tried this, it was quite an eye-opener. We were in a hurry, and since my older son’s car seat was already in the middle of the back seat, I put the baby’s car seat in the most easily accessible spot: behind the driver’s seat.

I couldn’t put the driver’s seat back upright without sliding it all the way forward. I’m not short enough to drive comfortably with the seat all the way forward. It made it kind of difficult to let the clutch all the way out without rolling my ankle to the point of a sprain. My elbows extended perpendicularly from my body whenever I put my hands on the wheel. I had to roll down my window to make enough room to get my left hand on the wheel.

It was a short trip, so I decided to bite the bullet and drive all folded up this one time. I didn’t reckon with a difficult parking situation at my destination. Searching out a parking spot in a crowded area is a very active, albeit slow, piece of driving. As I was resting my chin on my knee, contemplating where best to park, this became painfully clear to me.

In 1922, bachelor Rocco thought only of cutting a dashing figure in his zippy sports car.

An indeterminate number of children later, Rocco reluctantly traded in his sports car for this early minivan. This transaction began the period commonly known as the Great Depression. (Image: Russell Lee – U.S. Farm Security Administration)

Fortunately, the throbbing of my clutch ankle was superseded by a cramp, closer to the spine, in the calf of that same leg. The three-year-old asked from the back seat why the ride was so jerky today. I told him to save his questions until he had identified a viable parking spot.

As I was losing feeling in my lower body, I broke down and decided to pay to park in a ramp. It was a bitter decision, taken for the sake of the children. It meant that I would have to carry the baby a bit farther to our destination, but as I limped away from the vehicle, I decided it was a small price to pay to allow the imprint of the steering wheel to start to fade from my chest.

The urinal whisperer

In a three-year-old’s world there are a lot of things that can distract from the need to take action when the urge to potty strikes. At home, my son sometimes gets so involved in his play that he needs to be reminded that nature won’t just leave him alone because he can’t find a spare moment to heed its call.

Way back in his caveman days, he didn’t need to worry about taking time out of his busy wild man schedule for potty breaks. Now that he is civilized, having traded the diaper for underwear, life is more complicated.

Accidents at home are one thing, but accidents that happen when the family is out are doubly inconvenient. We quickly learned the habit of making the little man empty his bladder before we head out of the house. We continue to do this as a precaution, though I’m not sure it’s necessary anymore.

It is not necessary because our little guy has developed a most disturbing hobby. He loves to patronize public restrooms. He did not inherit this trait from me.

The boy is fascinated with urinals. While I agree, urinals are amazing pieces of technology, allowing men to get in and get out of the restroom faster than ever in recorded history, my appreciation for them falls far short of fascination.

Some people like to go around to different cafes, making mental notes of which ones have the best lattes or creamiest cheesecakes. Like these folks, my boy is also an amateur critic. He specializes in comparing our community’s urinals.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp entered this urinal into an art exhibition. If he had been there, my son would have voted it a blue ribbon. Then he would have put it to the test as functional art.

The first criterion that sets a particular urinal apart from the competition is height. He bursts into the restroom scouting out a “little one.”  I’m always relieved when he finds one, because I’m never comfortable with his accuracy when he has to aim high.

Another exciting feature is the self-flushing urinal. I appreciate this advancement also, as I don’t like for him to have to touch anything not absolutely necessary in the public restroom. Whereas flushing occurs to him to be optional at home, he insists on being a good citizen and flushing even the most repulsive receptacles in the public arena.

While I try to be patient with the boy’s desire to chart all the public restrooms in town, it really drives me up the wall in restaurants. He usually waits until our food comes before announcing that he has to go. In the olden days he could go with Mommy sometimes, but now he’s getting big for that, and he’s also noted a disturbing lack of urinals in the bathrooms Mommy frequents.

If you asked my son to read this sign, he would tell you it says, “There are only boring toilets in here. Go to the other bathroom.” Image via Wikipedia

Instead of eating our food before it gets cold, we are off to the men’s room. Hopefully, there is no novelty in this one to catch hold of his imagination and derail him from focusing on the task at hand. Regardless, there are a lot of steps to a successful toddler trip to the bathroom. These steps take time.

Time-consuming procedures are bad enough in a clean, comfortable bathroom, which some restaurant bathrooms are certainly not. I hover around him, making every effort to slap his hands away from anything that is not soap or water. Even so, I usually emerge with a waning appetite. The cold food that is now waiting for me doesn’t do much to help.

It may be that urinals are something that are helping the boy establish his gender identity. I’m no psychologist, so they may just be something that allow the kid to pee at a wall. That’s a good reason to like them too, I suppose. Either way, I can’t wait until he can hold it until after dinner.

I have a limited attention span, partially developed motor skills, and little perception of what you hope to accomplish; you need my help

My son is three, which means he has a biological need to help with all of the fun projects that Daddy does around the house. Little boys need to prove how indispensable they are to the proper functioning of the household.

This is a slow process. It will take him until he is about 12 to convince me that I am utterly dependent upon him. When he is 12, we will enjoy just about 3 months of the perfect father-son, symbiotic relationship. Then, nature will endow him with the blessings of teenager-hood, and it will take a girl to get him to do anything.

Since his little girlfriends aren’t likely to beguile him into mowing my lawn, I should get all the work I can out of him before they show up. Unfortunately, a three-year-old’s zeal is hardly ever matched by his handy-man skills. Still, you can’t help but admire the level of enthusiasm.

If I want my boy to instantly appear, all I need do is get out my toolbox. Screwdrivers are his favorite. He will carry a screwdriver around with him for hours, tightening everything in his path, including screws and anything else that needs to be stabbed and turned.

He likes hammers too. Hammers fit in well with his natural love of hitting. He has an uncommon zest for fixing things by pounding them until they are right. Whatever you’ve got that needs adjustment, a wall, a window, a kneecap, he’ll take care of it with his hammer. And he’ll do it all for the intangible reward of being helpful.

“Here’s an empty spot where we can put some snow.”

A boy who loves screwing things in could hardly avoid falling in love with changing light bulbs. You know the new bulbs? The ones that are all twisty-shaped, save energy by keeping your rooms dim, and are jammed full of poisonous mercury? He really enjoys handling those, because if you want to keep kids from being drawn to something toxic, by all means make it look like a soft-serve ice cream cone. I don’t let him help me so much with these, which really saddens him because he is sure in his heart that he could show me how to install them more efficiently with his hammer.

“We’ve got a lot of lawn to shovel off. Good thing we’ve got a clear space in the driveway where we can pile up the snow.”

In the winter, my son helps me shovel snow.  He follows behind me, shoveling snow from the piles I’ve created and dumping it over his shoulder, down his back, and onto the freshly-cleared sidewalk. Between the two of us, we have cut the job down so that we do only three times the shoveling I did when I had to do it all by myself.

“I’ll get rid of this big, ugly weed for you, Daddy.”

In summer, he helps me weed the flowerbeds. He picks those especially troublesome weeds with all the orange, yellow, and red soft parts at the top. These weeds attract bees, and bees can sting people. I know  he wonders how someone who has been gardening as long as I have could miss the most obvious weeds in the whole garden. Silly Daddy wastes his time on the little green sprouts in between when it is the big, colorful weeds that are using up all the space on top.

It requires extra time to be helped by a three-year-old, but it’s time well spent. I cherish his desire to help, because one day he’ll be 12, and that is practically the cusp of 13. I won’t be as cool then as I am now. Some little girl will come along and steal his attention. What kind of selfish girl would take away the helper of an old man with battered kneecaps?

To Mom, from your boys

This blog is normally written from the father’s point of view, but today it’s all about mothers. Specifically, it is about a mother who has to manage three boys, aged 6 weeks, 3 years, and 40-something, on a daily basis.

In retrospect, we try to make all of our sins seem comical, but they are not always comedy to the one who has to endure them day after day. We don’t mean to kick all of your rugs out of place with our scuffling feet. We don’t mean to roughhouse so disruptively when you’re trying to relax for a minute. We don’t mean any of the hardships we put you through. It’s just that we’re boys; we are doomed to suffer spells of inconsideration and ingratitude. We are not the most emotionally focused breed.

We try to make it up to you in little ways. We try to give you the things you need to be happy (though we sometimes miss noticing what some of those things are). Since you are a girl, we don’t always understand everything you need, but we try to meet the needs we understand.

Our ways are boy ways, so they may not always make sense to you. Still, we try hard, in our own special way, to let you know how we feel about you. And anyone versed in boy ways will hear us very clearly when we do the little things we do to quietly tell the world how much we love and need you.

Happy Mother’s Day. We love you dearly.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers of the world. And to every mother who lives in a house full of boys, a special wish: May God have mercy on you.