The Reluctant Daddy

Today, despite not taking any of my usual mood stabilizers, I bounded out of bed with a smile on my lips and a spring in my step for Saturday is the ‘BIG’ day. No, I’m not getting married, (been there, done that) nor am I having another bundle of horrors delivered to me by a flying monkey, er uh…I mean having a bundle of joy delivered to me by the stork. The blessed event I speak of is the apex of my social calendar for it is nothing less than my literal and emotional emancipation from parenting; the delivery of my son Ethan to summer camp. This morning, Ethan and I will board a plane bound for New York City, where he and I will meet the charter bus destined for the bucolic White Mountains of New Hampshire, where for seven blissful weeks, professional, highly-paid, total strangers will selflessly assume the parenting responsibilities that should be mine.  Ethan will play tennis, soccer (oh shit – I guess it’s FOOTBALL now as everyone who’s anyone suddenly gives a fuck about the World Cup) do arts & crafts, and develop lifelong friendships with other rich, entitled, east coast brats.

To our native California friends, the notion of sending one’s children to camp during the summer is a completely alien concept.  I’ve had more soccer mommies, I mean FOOTBALL mommies, castigate me for this one act of unmitigated selfishness than for my out-of-control drinking, carousing or criminal sense of fashion, for in their opinion sending Ethan to summer camp is tantamount to white slaving him to South America.

“How can you send him to summer camp, don’t you love him?” Neighborhood Botox mommy asks. As I stare at her, I think to myself, that’s one loaded fucking question!

“Define love,” I respond.

“I don’t know….like won’t you miss him?”

“Define miss him.”

By now, Botox mommy is shrugging her shoulders and giving me a pained look. ”Well, I could NEVER send my Preston to summer camp, I mean unlike you, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”

“Is that a question or an accusation,” I ask frankly.

Botox mommy is now flustered and realizes that she’s stepped her Fred Segal-attired foot in it.  ”It’s neither…I mean..uh…uh.. I just love my son so much and he’s so much FUN to take care of.”

Fun. Fun?!  Would I consider taking care of my son Ethan FUN?  The chauffeuring, the brown bag lunches, the interminable questions, the lonely nights locked in my house guarding a sleeping eight year old, fun? I knew that I had tons of time to mull the childcare ‘fun’ concept over in my mind for on our flight to New York, I had the foresight to fly business class and wisely placed Ethan in the FAR, FAR, FAR reaches of coach.

(To be continued)

(Continued from THE JOY OF SEX PT. 2)

Last night while playing SORRY with my son Ethan, I realized that he was much smarter than me.  While I tend to move my blue plastic pieces willy-nilly and take absolutely no time to strategize, my son has already plotted six moves ahead. This is pretty amazing considering SORRY is a game of chance and virtually impossible to lay any type of real strategy.  My son’s angelic blond hair and jovial green eyes mask his sadistic, killer nature.  To my son’s way of thinking, there are no other ‘players’ in SORRY, only enemy combatants that need to be annihilated.  Whenever we play SORRY, my son begins to resemble those freaky blond kindergartners from VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED – I’m certain that one day soon I’ll anger him and his pale green eyes are going to begin glowing red.  Naturally enough, I’ll end up a putrid pile of soot and all that will remain will be my singed UNICLO skinny jeans and my TOTALLY expensive, super uncomfortable PRADA loafers.  Not much of a legacy if you ask me.

As I sat on the floor of Ethan’s bedroom and had my SORRY ass handed to me by my disturbingly competitive son, I thought about Madame Zelna, my childcare expert from THE PSYCHIC FRIEND’S NETWORK and her analysis of my son’s dream about goat sex. Was it possible, as Zelna had suggested, that not only did Ethan consider me his intellectual inferior, but to my complete horror found my Lady GaGa ‘Telephone‘ video impersonation to be completely uninspired?   It was bad enough that Ethan subconsciously considered me a complete moron, but now, to make matters FAR worse, he consciously considered me a shitty female impersonator as well!  It was almost more than I could bare. The true horror of this calamity began to dawn on me when I thought about the grueling hours I spent in his room neither reading to him nor running through our Chinese language flash cards, but instead cannily performed the choreography of Madonna’s ‘Vogue,’ Beyonce’s ‘All The Single Ladies‘ and Britney Spears’ ‘Oops, I Did it Again‘ as toddler Ethan sat perched on his bed judging me! Had all my time and efforts been wasted?  Had my pathetic attempt to expose Ethan to the world’s greatest choreography this side of SHOWGIRLS inadvertantly lead him to the conclusion that his father was a not only a mental defective but the also the worst kind of gay man – a gay man who can neither lip-synch nor back-up dance?

My reverie was suddenly interrupted by my son Ethan who was gleefully shrieking ‘SORRY’ at the top of his lungs and dancing manically around the room for his angry, blood-red plastic piece had landed on my tranquil blue plastic piece sending me hurtling back to my START zone.  All was not lost for in Ethan’s gloating, swaggering victory dance, I caught the slightest whiff of Kylie Minogue choreography and realized that contrary to what Zelna thought, goat sex dreams or no goat sex dreams, Ethan just can’t get me out of his head, La La La, La La La La La!’

(Continued from THE JOY OF SEX)

“…and I hate to admit this, but sometimes when I get bored at night, my son and I watch Lady GaGa’s ‘Telephone’ video and I try to imitate the choreography while my son observes.”

“Hm….I see.” Madam Zelna, my Psychic Friends telephone psychic clucks pitifully.

“Fuck you, Madame Zelna!” I shriek. ”I know what you’re thinking! How disturbing, yet monotonously typical that this old queen desperately tries to bond with his son and simultaneously hold on to his fleeting youth by shaking his fat ass like a 23 year old, Manhattan celebutante!  OK, maybe you’re right.  It is a little weird that I’m trying to entertain my 8-year-old son by doing choreography to a song that causes every faggot in America to practically shit glitter.  I have NEVER been, nor never will be able to dance those steps properly, but like climbing Kilimanjaro, those overdressed  inmates, those Diet Coke can curlers, those strategically torn fishnet stockings speak to me and practically demand I dance around my son’s room like a 72 year-old, day-shift stripper!  There’s something so seductively reasonable about those moves so, I don’t know…attainable.”

“Yes, Lady GaGa is very talented.” Madam Zelna responds matter-of-factly.

“She’s the new Madonna, you know.” I confide smugly.

I’ve already spent $175 dollars ‘consulting’ with Madam Zelna of The Psychic Friends network and hadn’t even addressed my 8-year-old son’s goat sex dream. Instead, I sit in my kitchen, my brain tumor inducing iPhone plastered to my head, yammering to a $3.99 per minute ‘psychic’ about my faggy parent/child bonding activities.

Madam Zelna continues to listen patiently as I explain that that my son Ethan, the darkly sardonic, yet drearily predictable straight-boy should be repulsed, or at the very least frightened by his 46 year old father prancing around his room covered in police tape, but to my surprise, Ethan seems to get caught up in the excitement, dare I say, glamour of it all.  My mind is now racing as I breathlessly confide to Madame Zelna that at the conclusion of my Lady GaGa routine, I’m left gasping for breath, while my son Ethan stares at me with an unreadable look on his face. I explain that I must wait patiently for I know Ethan is invariably going to give me his ‘notes.’   As I stand before him, I am reminded of that movie ALL THAT JAZZ, where in my imagination, Ethan is Bob Fosse the famous choreographer, and I’m that crazy dancer girl who cries all the time because she’s so desperate for Bob’s unattainable approval.

I can hear Madame Zelna breathing on her headset but she says nothing.

Perceiving her silence to be interest, I babble,”Madam Zelna, do you know what he says?  He says ‘better’ but you still kind of suck. That’s what my kid says.  Can you believe that shit?!”

“Well he is a Leo…” Madam Zulna trails off.

God this woman is good!  It’s like she sees into my very soul.

“Yes,” I respond, “he is a Leo – that explains alot – but what about his dream that his best buddy was having sex with a goat?”

“When a child sees a goat in his dreams,” Madam Zelna mystically explains, “it usually represents a lack of parental judgment as well as a sense of gullibility. Consider the associations with the goat as in “scapegoat” or “getting someone’s goat.”  In other words, in addition to your son thinking you’re a terrible dancer, he probably believes you are a complete idiot as well.”

(To be continued)

Memorial Day 2010 Check List

Low-fat, low-carb, vegan style barbecue…check.

Adult-centric, kids-should-be-seen-and-not-heard pool party…check.

Kick-ass, mask the excruciating, married-with-children pain margaritas…check.

My 8-year-old son merrily exclaiming to his best buddy while dangerously splashing about in our child-unfriendly pool, “Hey Luca, I had a dream that you were having sex with a goat!”…check.

Wait.  Stop. Back up and run that one by me again.  ”Hey Luca, I dreamed you were having sex with a goat?”  Where the fuck did that come from?  I mean, as frank as I would like to think George and I are with our son, we only recently covered the basics of the ‘Birds and The Bees,’ and reasoned that we could cover bestiality somewhere between his Bar Mitzvah and SATs.  When I asked Ethan to repeat himself, he began to vividly recount a dream that had his best friend enjoying a ‘special cuddle’ with a farm animal.  I stopped him before he could elaborate, as my Master Cleanse wooziness had reached a crescendo, and my brain which had been for so long been deprived of calories just refused to compute this type of information.

I just didn’t get it. Why just that very morning, my son and I had been having a rather heated debate about Luke Skywalker’s ability to kick BEN 10′s ass in an ally fight, and now we’re discussing semi-consensual sex with livestock? While the children continued to frolic in the pool, I leaped up from my lounge chair, and darted into our seldom used library, that in addition to housing our for-decoration-only collection of antique books, also contains the few, pathetic child development books that I have never bothered reading. The first book I cracked was that dog shit WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOUR EXPECTING which covers boring, insignificant shit like diaper rash, colic and empathy. Nowhere, do those jerks talk about really important parenting stuff like breaking it to your child that you are terminating the cleaning lady so that your BIG BOY 8-year-old can finally assume his rightful position as in-house scullery maid/bartender.  Who cares about childhood development or self-esteem when there are hardwood floors that need waxing and wet bars that needs stocking?  After all, those VERY dry Martinis aren’t going to mix themselves, now are they?!

I became frustrated as I speed read through the WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOUR EXPECTING ‘D’ glossary, trying to find ANYTHING that addressed dream interpretation, but instead found more useless dribble about Developmental Appropriate Practice, Developmental Milestones, and Dyslexia. Clearly I was getting nowhere. As dramatic times call for dramatic measures, I decided to consult my go-to source for all childhood-related matters, The Psychic Friends Network.

(To Be Continued)