Your wife is away at some awful boy band concert with your oldest daughter and her friend. And because you’re the fun parent, you tell the other kids they can pick whatever dinner they want. And the little savages choose Buffalo Wild Wings – a place to which their mother refuses to go. And you haven’t been in a long time. Maybe it’ll be fun.
And your daughter will wear her rollerblades, because of course she will. They’re all she ever wears anymore. Everywhere. And you’ve stopped arguing about it, because she’s probably more agile in skates than the rest of your family is in shoes.
So you go, and you order, and the food comes. Or rather, the “food” comes. And you instantly realize you’ve made a horrible mistake. Because somewhere between your fraternity days (when you subsisted almost exclusively on a diet of sliders and steak burritos) and last Monday (when you cooked an Ikarian “longevity stew” you read about in the Times), you lost the ability to eat like an idiot. And you can’t eat this garbage. And why do you have to be the fun parent all the time?
But your kids are enjoying it, and the wings are in front of you. So you choke some of them down, shaking your head at your limitless capacity to err. And your kids take their sweet ass time, gnawing and smacking and licking. And their cheeks are slathered in various sauces. And my God, their fingers. And you may retch right on the table. And how is this still a place where people come and pay money?
Like some tortured P.O.W., you stare through your surroundings, looking to a place only you can see. A place where you are free from all of this. And you hold on to that place in your mind, even as the waitress brings refills of root beer and Blue Moon. In some bizarro reverse meditation, you are not in the now. There are lots of moments other than this one. Indeed, you embrace everything *but* this.
And then it’s over. And you give your five-year-old a whore’s bath in the sink of the men’s room. Soap! Glorious soap!
And you’re out of there, and you breathe in 103 degrees of Texas freedom. And as oppressive as the heat is, you’ll take it over spicy garlic wings any day.
Then you’re driving when you remember you’re low on a few necessities back at home. This is because your nanny (and mother) normally does most of the shopping. But about a month ago, she pulled a Thelma & Louise on you and went galavanting across the country with one of her girlfriends. And you’re not sure when or even if she’s coming back. And until you figure that out, you are – for reasons that elude you, or that you’re perhaps unwilling to examine – kind of half-assing everything at home.
So you stop at Target for mayo, mustard and Perrier (because yes, you’re *that* guy). And the kids are moaning for a bottle of some cherry limeade flavored sparkling water. And they can only have it if they agree not to ask for anything else. Or speak again. Ever.
Your son’s birthday is coming up and he wants a Wii U. You’ve already bought it, but you pretend that you got him a Wii “Pew”, which doesn’t have games but comes with various stink modules – armpit, wet dog, rhino butt, that sorta thing. Your jokes infuriate him, especially because yesterday you said that you hadn’t gotten him a Playmobil Zoo, but instead purchased a Playmobil Ooze. He insists on stopping to play the Wii U demo game. And your other son is playing a different demo game. And your daughter is skating up and down the toy aisles with glee, cooking up ways to get toys you will not buy her. They’re all content, and you’ve got nowhere to be, so F it. You tap out the start of this post on your phone while your kids do their thing.
Thirty minutes pass, and now you’re feeling not so good. It could be the wings (what have you done?). Or maybe it’s that you stayed up half the night binge watching all of this week’s Daily Shows, plus the Republican debate, plus some John Oliver for good measure. Whatever it is, you’re now tired and cranky. So you pry your boys away from their electronic cocaine, and head to the checkout lanes.
The checkout girl is chatty, and wants to talk about how fast this year has gone by, and how it all relates to the alignment of the planets, and the Mayan calendar. And you wonder why you always get the crazy ones. Do you look crazy yourself? Does something about you say “talk to me about crazy shit?” But as your daughter rollerblades past you, and your son sits in the cart wearing the mustard as a “Pope hat”, you choose not to dwell on these questions.
And no, your kids cannot open their warm cherry limeade. And no, they can’t have that either. Do I ever agree to buy the shit they put next to the register? And why not? Because the bastards know you kids are gonna ask for it, and that I’m going to be weary, and I will want to shut you up (which is how you got the damn cherry limeade in the first place). And it’s precisely because of that evil corporate calculus that I must rage, rage against the crying with my spite. Eh? Dylan Thomas, eh? No? He’s a poet that – oh, never mind.
You load the car and pull out of the lot. And now something is rolling around on the floor of the car. It’s the cherry limeade flavored sparkling water, but you don’t know that yet. And the kids are “dying of thirst”. Seriously? They just had a root beer. And we’ll be home in five minutes. So shut it.
Someone whispers something to someone else. You give a shit what they’re saying, because you just want to get home and lay down and moan. And then you hear the quick hiss of a bottle opening, and then exploding all over your daughter and the car. It’s the cherry limeade flavored sparkling water. Because of course it is.
And part of you is pissed because, well, part of you is always pissed. And you have many sharp words to fire at the soggy daughter behind you. But you choose instead to engage the other part of you – the part that is perpetually amused, especially in the face of adversity. And you take a breath. And you smile. Because it’s just water (not vomit this time, thank the gods). And she was thirsty. And there’s no real harm done.
You go home. And you spend the rest of the night eating Milanos and watching Cartoon Network. Because you’re the fun parent.