These days I have a devil of a time laying hold of that six-inch long piece of equipment that constitutes my manhood. I suspect I’m not the only husband and father with this trouble. I bet lots of men roam their houses, in desperate frustration, searching for the TV remote.

Just as he needs a comfortable chair, set squarely before the TV, a man need his scepter of entertainment power, preferably programmed to skip anything educational and the various Lifetime channels.

With three boys and a grown-up woman in the house, I don’t get charge of the remote very much. This is a hard knock, but I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve learned to be satisfied with a few minutes of executing my will over the TV after everyone has gone to bed, on the nights when they go to bed before my time is up.

“The remote? Why would you need that? The TV’s already tuned to cartoons.”

What drives me up the wall is when I finally get the TV to myself and there’s no remote to be found. Since it’s technically the cable remote, I can’t even change the channel manually. I’m stuck watching Ninja Turtles as my reward for outlasting them all.

They all have their different methods of losing the remote. One routinely takes it to a different room, where it no doubt also controls the toaster. One loses it underneath couch cushions. One throws it into a toy box.

I caught on to all these tricks and was renewing my acquaintance with televised sports when Big Man began his own love affair with the device. Big Man doesn’t care what channel the TV is on, but that remote is just full of fat, juicy buttons to push, and some of them do things to the TV that make his family react in the most hilarious ways.

Guarding your stash is a 24/7 job. Handcuffs for trespassers are optional.

My wife is a self-proclaimed, part-time hoarder. On the other hand, she hates clutter. She reconciles these positions by stuffing her hoard into cupboards and baskets. This issue would not be related to my difficulty locating the remote except Big Man seems to have inherited these contradictory conditions from her.

He has a little cache behind the stereo  where he keeps his prized possessions. His prized possessions are objects that caught his attention for a minute, until he decided it would be fun to drop them into a hole. He has a second cache behind the kids’ chair in the living room. In these caches can be found Leap Frog toys, plastic soldiers, the tail section of a Mega Bloks helicopter, a good portion of my once-pristine CD collection (with or without cases), and something I spent most of a Saturday afternoon looking for so I could watch something besides Peppa Pig for a damned minute.

Oh well, TV is overrated anyway. Maybe we should investigate some more intellectually fulfilling pursuits, like reading to each other or going to family hoarders’ therapy. Maybe we could just relax and listen to some nice music. Oh wait, where are my CDs?