Punk Rock Dad

by Jim Lindberg

  THE WORLD’S A MESS, IT’S IN MY KISS

  I’ll be watching the news late at night, observing humanity’s continued slide into a living hell of world war, reality TV, and global warming, and then a commercial will come on featuring some bikini-clad model writhing around on a sports car or walking along a sunny beach, and I’ll think to myself, “It’s been several weeks since we’ve had sex.” With work, school, soccer, and T-ball games, piano lessons, brownie meetings, and dentist appointments, at the end of a long day and the five-hour drama of putting the kids to bed, many nights we end up falling asleep right after the kids. We’ll look at each other and realize we haven’t had sex since the last presidency, and my Johnson is about to detach itself to look for someone who will actually use it.

  Kids take a lot of time, attention, and energy. After corralling them all day and keeping them out of trouble, we are usually exhausted. Sometimes after a long day, all we want to do is stare in a comatose-like state at the television, eat a pint of Häagen-Dazs, and go to sleep. Every time we do find a chance to get our game on, we think, “Hey, this is great! Now I remember why I liked this so much! Sex is awesome!” Then there will be another late night of putting the kids to bed, our schedules will be out of sync, and it will seem like we won’t have a second to ourselves for another decade.

  Like most couples we’re sometimes forced to schedule “date nights” so we can reconnect with each other and remind ourselves why we had kids in the first place. We’ll go to dinner, see a show, watch a movie, or just get an $8 quadruple espresso at some coffee shop trying to take over the free world. We try not to talk about the kids the whole time and instead gossip about people around town and debate world affairs, and dream about moving to the country someday. Then we go home and make sure the kids are asleep and then make our own home movie by reliving our wedding night with the Barry White CD and the motion lotion. We just try to remember not to accidentally switch labels with the Barney tape and send our kids into therapy.

  Many couples fall into the trap where after ten years together everything becomes boring and routine. It sometimes gets hard to remember you’re both parents and a couple, and not just two people raising kids together. When we were younger we could just drop everything and get busy anywhere we wanted, but with kids running around, this becomes a lot more complicated. Unfortunately we have a bedroom door that has trouble locking correctly, and on more than one occasion daughter number two has been able to burst through our defenses at the most inopportune moments. This is when I explain that Mommy was choking on a Bagel Bite while on her hands and knees on the bed and Daddy was using a new form of Heimlich maneuver to try and jolt it loose from behind, and we don’t have any clothes on because we just got out of the shower and I don’t know why Mommy was eating a Bagel Bite in the shower, and “Get out of here, I said.”

  An active sex life helps keep the marriage happy and better prepared to weather the tough spots. That, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s hard to stay mad at someone who’s responsible for getting your rocks off. When you can counter any bad vibes with some mattress aerobics it might make you want to start a few more arguments just so you can enjoy making up.

  WE’RE A HAPPY FAMILY

  Once our kids reached grade-school age we had a whole new set of problems to deal with. Before, I ruled the household with an iron fist like a third-world dictator, or at least pretended to, but now just like any good rebel faction, they’ve figured out a million different ways to subvert my authority. Keeping the peace with my wife and between the siblings in the household is now my main goal in life. This can sometimes seem like a futile endeavor because peace and quiet is totally boring for kids. Conflict, rebellion, and general pandemonium are fun and exciting. By the time they hit high school there will be so many built-in challenges facing the success of our family unit, I plan on building a bomb shelter in the backyard and not coming out until after graduation.

  Up to this point, Jennifer and I have been the main influences in their lives, but now they have their own group of friends telling them what’s cool and what’s not, and chances are, we as parents will soon be firmly placed on the “not cool” side. It’s not that they don’t love us anymore, it’s just that they begin to exist in their own little world a lot of the time, and being several decades older than them, we could never relate, regardless of how hard I’ve been trying to hang on to my youth by dyeing my hair and wearing Clash T-shirts. (See book cover.)

  When I think back to the days of my youth spent cruising the alleys, beaches, and dirt lots of Hermosa with my friends, I remember how every day seemed like an adventure that lasted a lifetime. Between surfing and skating and going back and forth from the beach to Mi-T Mart for candy and Slurpees, there was a seemingly endless amount of fun to be had. There were all kinds of drama and conflict at school with teachers and principals, the rivalries and popularity contests between friends and classmates, and, of course, the first stirrings of attraction to the opposite sex. Most of our time was spent engaged in some type of activity meant to produce cheap thrills. As a parent, though, you’re on a completely different wavelength than you were as a young punk. Now cheap thrills for us are getting a free cable hookup or when you get a hold of the Victoria’s Secret catalog before your wife does.

  It’s not fun to always be the one person constantly grounding your kids and reprimanding them and stifling their good times. Eventually, no matter what I do, I imagine the girls will come to resent me for it unless I just let them do whatever they want and learn their lessons the hard way. We all know how young people get along with figures of authority; even some forty-year-old guitar players still have a big problem with it. The challenge will be how we can help keep them out of too much trouble and keep the peace in our families, so maybe they won’t hate me—at least until they turn sixteen.

  WHEN THE KIDS ARE UNITED

  My sister and I rarely got along growing up. My mom says when they brought me home from the hospital she reached in my crib and yanked out a fistful of hair off my head. Later on, with my surgically repaired crossed eyes still not working correctly, my self-esteem was already low enough, but like any good sister she did all she could to destroy what little bit I had left. The periods of acne and braces during my stomach-churning teen years were met with joyful celebrations, giving her occasion to coin new terms for my appearance, like “Braille face” and “tin grin,” and to spontaneously contribute ego-boosting comments like “Your zits kind of divert the attention away from your ugly face.” To this day, she still calls me “Goober,” lovingly recalling the dorkiest moron to ever grace the television screen on Mayberry RFD.

  I think biology has a lot to do with the way siblings relate to each other. There must be unintelligible chemicals in the air between you that dictate whether or not you’re socially compatible with certain brothers or sisters or whether you’re likely to pummel them. Within a given family you can have two that get along great but another two that would just as soon drown the other in the bath tub than settle down to a nice game of Chutes and Ladders. Some are supportive and friendly with each other and can share toys and play make-believe games and spend hours hanging out peacefully as if they’re co-conspirators in some grand sublime play; others, you can tell that if they could get away with it would nudge their little brother into the shark tank at Sea World just to be the only child again. It seems that it’s the ones who are barely a year apart like my sister and I who have the most problems. She was a year old and had all the doting attention of my parents focused on her, their little angel in her pink nightgown. Then along comes this little cross-eyed doofus who’s always needing his diapers changed and crying to be fed and who’s constantly taking all the attention away from their little perfect princess. I might have yanked some hair out of my head too.

  Daughters number one and two were born exactly two years apart and go through stages where they fight over everything: toys, the computer, TV shows, who dances and sings better, and who Mom an
d Dad loves more. They spend the entire day trying to get on each other’s nerves. There can be rare periods of time when they seem to get along perfectly, although these relatively tranquil episodes seem to always coincide with times when they want something from us, like a trip to Disneyland or to stay up late to watch America’s Funniest Home Videos of dads getting hit in the nuts by errant golf balls. They can usually turn it off and on whenever they want, which sometimes leads me to believe their quibbling is done out of sheer boredom. Either way, there are times when we let them work it out for themselves and others when we have to intervene and referee before it goes so far that someone becomes scarred emotionally, or worse, scarred on the side of their head.

  Advance work once again is always the key. As much as we could, we tried to impress upon our older kids that the new addition wasn’t going to move into their room, take their favorite toys, and replace them, and that we were all part of a family. We tried to make them learn some responsibility for their younger siblings by letting them help take care of them and give them a bath or read them a bedtime story every once in a while. Sometimes this backfired though, like when, as a six-year-old, the barf-phobic daughter pushed her infant sister off her lap and onto the floor when she spit up a little. Offering a lot of praise for older kids when they help out with their younger siblings makes them feel proud and important, and probably less inclined to find ways to want to sell them off into slavery.

  Because most kids crave attention and approval, we try and make sure that each kid gets special one-on-one time with each of us so they don’t always have to battle for the attention of Mom or Dad. My middle daughter is so starved for it she’ll grab a pen and draw a line on a scrap of paper and say, “Daddy, look what I did.” If they constantly have to jostle with a sibling, eventually they start to resent the other person and might start beating on them with a salad spoon. We try to avoid the constant bitterness by scheduling time where we can concentrate on each child individually. I usually do this by putting one in the car and going down to check out the waves and then asking them what they want to do, which is usually followed by them wanting to go get a donut. It’s not what you do that counts, it’s that you do something that gets you to focus on one child at a time, and can possibly get you a maple bar out of the deal.

  Experts say you should try to let them settle disputes on their own so they can learn valuable conflict resolution skills they can use later in life. That would be great except whenever we let our kids work things out for themselves, the skill they usually seem to develop is how to rip a toy out of their sibling’s hands and then the other learns how to tell on her for it. Teaching them to look for ways to share or find a compromise for whatever they are fighting over is supposed to help them learn to get along, but they usually just get resentful that they had to give up something they wanted. I think the only way you can encourage fair play that they both can live with is by having a set solution or mediation for each type of conflict in advance. Sometimes we’ll use a cooking timer to let each person have a set amount of time playing a certain computer game or listening to the CD player, this way at least they only have to fight over who gets to use it first. Eventually the one who ends up having to go second says, “I didn’t want to play that game anyway” and then wanders off to play something else and the problem is solved.

  At times our siblings can be our best friends in life, and at others, our worst enemies. They can either make us feel like a cherished member of the family, or they can be the ones whose insults cut the deepest, always knowing exactly which buttons to press. Good communication, making sure they don’t always have to compete for Mom and Dad’s affection, and then having preset methods to resolve the conflicts that will inevitably occur are probably the only things that will keep the ones who don’t get along that well from constantly wanting to tear each other limb from limb. In the end, nothing may work, and forty years later you’ll still be having screaming matches over Thanksgiving dinner like my sister and me, and continually brushing up on your conflict resolution skills.

  I’M SO BORED WITH THE USA

  Boredom is a plague for six-through ten-year-olds. My middle cretin is constantly telling us how incredibly bored she is. “This is the boring-est day ever,” she’ll say, dribbling a couch pillow like a soccer ball across the wood floor of the living room. You can remind them there are starving kids in China who wish they had the luxury of being bored, but this won’t lift the heavy lead veil of boring boredom that shrouds their extremely boring everyday lives. Daughter number two needs constant stimulation, be it through playing catch in the backyard, swinging dangerously high on the swings, climbing a tree, skating, biking, spelunking, hang-gliding, fire-walking, basically anything that will keep all of her constantly moving limbs occupied. If she is not sleeping she needs to be climbing, kicking, or punching on something, and her only down time is spent snacking to fuel her never-ending energy supply.

  The older one can sit in the corner and quietly read a book for an entire afternoon. At age eight, she read the seven-hundred-and-fifty page fifth installment of Harry Potter in a single rainy weekend. Daughter number one definitely takes after my temperament, so I constantly feel guilty that I’m never doing enough to keep daughter number two happy by running her around the backyard like an underweight border collie. After she has kept a consistent pitched whine of “Dad, will you play soccer with me? Daaaaaad, will you ride skateboards with me? Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad, will you run a triathlon or build a life-size replica of Stonehenge with me?” I finally drag my lazy ass onto the threadbare lawn of the backyard and engage in an embarrassingly competitive series of games with her where I pretend that I’m not really trying, just in case the neighbors look over the wall and see that my six-year-old is thoroughly kicking my ass in soccer-basketball.

  It’s easy to be caught up in the trap of training yourself to think you have to constantly entertain your kid. With the best intentions at heart, I saw one neighborhood dad build a two-story high exact replica of an eighteenth-century pirate ship in his front yard at his kid’s request. Me and the other dads in the neighborhood would walk by, thinking, “Poor guy, his kid must have a whine like a glass cutter or a dog whistle. She really broke him this time.” There was a picture in the paper of him standing next to the hulking mass looking disheveled, with the accompanying article explaining that it took months to build and how much all the materials cost. The headline should have read A BORED KID’S DAD’S CRY FOR HELP.

  The solution I’ve come up with for the “her-being-bored-me-being-lazy” conflict is a trade-off peace treaty agreement, and so far it’s worked okay until she figures a way around it. I tell her that at some point every day I will make time to play with her in some way or another, whether it’s a game of full-contact Candyland or a Greco-Roman Olympic decathlon of sorts in the backyard for a period of thirty minutes, and in return, she’s not allowed to complain that she is bored within earshot of me the rest of the day and drive me crazy.

  The payout in this exchange is that I get some relative peace and quiet or at least a few less moments of sheer pandemonium around the house, and to be honest, once we get playing, I love the quality time playing with the little psycho. There’s nothing like watching the pure unbridled fun of a kid with her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, charging at me with the soccer ball, hoping to score between me, the planter, and the swing set, and then the complete and total exhilaration on her face when she does so easily. There’s going to be a time coming soon where I will be the lamest, most embarrassing fart bag she’s ever known, and she’ll run screaming into her room saying she hates me when I refuse to let her go on a cross-country motorcycle trip with a guy she just met at the mall, so dragging my ass into the backyard to be her hero for a little while shouldn’t really be that hard to do.

  For daughter number two the saving grace is when soccer season comes around. This is the most popular sport on the planet, with thousands of crazed fans going absolutely berserk du
ring the World Cup, but in America, both parents and kids seem to lose interest in it as a national pastime after about the age of nine for some reason. Until your kids reach that age, though, many of your weekends will be spent in a lawn chair on the sidelines next to a cooler on a field of damp grass, watching as small children in brightly colored uniforms, playing for teams with names like the Orange Blossoms and Mighty Green Geckos, chase a ball around for an hour and a half.

  The first year she played was great because this is when the kids had little concept for following the rules of the game or strategy and instead just careened around the field in one giant pack, all kicking legs and tangled limbs, a screaming, laughing scrum of childhood humanity. They flailed and bashed away until one of them finally made contact with something besides the air or an opponent’s shin and then the ball popped out, and they all screamed and chased it around the field some more. On rare occasions the ball accidentally made it into the net for a goal so we can have something to cheer about, but most of the time we just sat there laughing at the spectacle of it.

  That was until daughter number two, the kinetically hyper, athletic, “victory or death” daughter took to the field. The first few games, as soon as the whistle blew, she just joined the traveling pack, kicking away at the ball like everyone else, but during the middle of game three, it was like a light-bulb went off or a switch was flipped inside her head. She ran into the pack, body checked three girls to the ground, arm barred about four of the others out of the way, took the ball, dribbled it the length of the field in a dramatic breakaway, and then booted the ball so hard into the back of the goal it nearly ripped through the netting. She then did this exact same thing six more times during the game.

  The rest of the season pretty much continued on in similar fashion, with her asking me after every game, “How many goals did I make today, Daddy?”