Looky, Daddy!

Easier

It's getting easier. Parenting. Parenting is getting easier.

Kathryn was in the kitchen two nights ago, late, an hour past bedtime, rifling through the silverware drawer for spoons that weren't there. They were in the sink, dirty. Parenting is getting easier, cleaning dishes is still a bag of ass. You probably know why Kathryn was looking for a spoon. Wear your pajamas inside out, put a penny in the freezer, flush an ice cube down the toilet, and place a spoon under your pillow: Ways to make it snow. Ways to cancel school. Ways to win the Grand Prize of Childhood: The Snow Day.

Way back in a drawer, Kathryn found her prize, a tiny forgotten spoon, out of circulation for who knows how long, but as she clasped it in her fist and turned to leave, I stopped her with a question: Did she want snow, or did she want SNOW? I held out to her a handful of big-assed servings spoons and a foot-long stainless steel soup ladle. Kathryn fell flat on her face lunging for the bounty in my hand because footed pajamas are really not meant to be worn inside out.

I offered the spoons to Kathryn for two reasons. Neither one of them were to see her fall, so that was just a bonus. The first was that I knew it would make Kathryn's eyes dance. There would be sparks in them to match the ones in her brain. And second, I really wanted a snow day, too.

And that's how I knew that parenting is getting easier. Because I wanted a snow day.

The Lines, the Face, and the Hanging Basket

Japan is a funny place. I moved to a small town there in 1995, a few months after my future wife sent me a letter saying she'd found me a job there. Of course, what she really meant was "Please move here. I love you and can't live without you," forgetting in our year apart that I was actually much easier to love from afar.

Sharon didn't greet me my first night in Japan. Or my first week, for that matter, even though my hotel was within walking distance of her house. You see, Sharon's parents were in the country that week, visiting from Oklahoma, and she didn't want us running in to each other. In fact, she'd call me in my hotel room late at night and tell me what areas of town to avoid the next day. "Kawanishimachi," she'd whisper into the phone. "Don't visit the kawanishimachi area. You'll know you are there if you see signs with characters that look like lines, a face, and a hanging basket."

She's not the first woman to go to such lengths to keep me from their parents.

Not that it really mattered. My hotel room had an electric bidet toilet, complete with heated seat and two water jets, so while I didn't have any idea where the kawanishimachi area was, unless it sprayed warm water at my taint, I was just fine where I was.

The console said the second jet was for woman parts, but don't you believe that.

The job Sharon had landed me was that of English teacher in the worst high school in the district, and it was easily the best job I have ever had. The school was terrible. The students, horrendous. Nobody expected anything from them, and in turn, nobody expected anything from me. Had my appointment there been arranged by Hollywood, I would have been the misfit teacher coming in to turn the school around with my irresistible mixture of straight-talk and persistence, but happily this was real life, so I spent most of my time there in the nap room.

Yes, the nap room. It was a small room, lined with tatami mats, and it was for napping. I'll give you all a minute to compose yourselves before I continue.

My classroom duties were virtually non-existent. For the first year, I followed Japanese teachers from class to class, responsible for nothing but parroting the English lesson out loud with my authentic American accent. The students in this school did not pay attention. The teachers did not ask them to. Once, out of boredom, I walked the aisles of a class and gently tapped the desk of a student who had put his head down to sleep through the lesson. He rewarded my attention by exploding from his desk and throwing a trash can at me. I had to spend the rest of the day in the nap room just to regain my composure.

It was not what you imagine when you stop to think of a Japanese high school.

The pay, however, was very good and the hours quite tolerable, so at the end of each day, I had nothing but good feelings about living there and doing my job, anemic though it was. Besides, it wasn't for the job that I moved there; it was for Sharon. The love of such a woman could make almost any job bearable. And for the rest, I recommend electric bidet toilets.

Ambulation

The difference is night and day. Last time we did this, Kathryn was admitted into the hospital for three days. Vacation days had to be called in and so did babysitters. Dread and angst filled the air. And then there was the hot dog.

Oh God, the hot dog. It had a plastic bag inside it. Inside the casing. Kathryn took a bite, made a face, then with her forefinger and thumb she reached into the weiner and began pulling out a plastic bag. It could have been billed as the grossest magic trick ever. The bag just kept coming and coming as she tugged. I half expected a string of multicolored handkerchiefs to be tied to its end, red, blue, green, yellow, emerging to ohhs and ahhs from the audience, freeing meat by-product as they came. The nurse on her rounds declared the bag-dog combo the nastiest thing she had ever seen, and you know when a hospital nurse says that, you've got something special.

So this time, when our neurologist told us they had an ambulatory EEG device, something they could hook up to Sparky's noggin then send her home, we said, yes, please, that would be lovely.

And so what, you may wonder, do you do when you are an eight-year-old out of school for three days, hooked up to an ambulatory EEG device? With over two-dozen electrodes glued to your scalp and chest, trailing wires down your back to little black box? Well, you ambulate. And, if you are Kathryn, you mess with people.

"Can I get a cup of coffee?" I asked the waitress.

"Sure," she said, then turned to Kathryn. "And would you like anything, honey?" she asked.

Tap tap clatter clatter tap tap, my fingers flew.

Kathryn cocked her head slightly to the side, opened her mouth, and spoke in a monotone. "bacon-egg-and-cheese-sandwich-please."

Tap clatter tap tap.

"and-a-glass-of-milk."

To be fair, attaching the keyboard to the black box wasn't exactly Kathryn's idea, but she was the one who took the idea and ran with it. And while she ran, she made little whirring sounds under her breath.

Never has a cyborg's father been so proud.

It Got Booted off YouTube... Updated

...so let's see how long it takes to get kicked off Vimeo. Really, though. Instead of filling claim against it, Peter Cetera should thank me for this. Sure, he's not getting any money for the song, but hey, it's not like I am getting paid for this, either. The glories of the Internet.

The First Day of Preschool from Brian Sargent on Vimeo.

And speaking of not getting paid, today and tomorrow are the last days to vote in the Weblog Awards. This little blog has made an incredibly strong showing, and while that's not exactly getting paid, it's pretty close in my book. Thanks. If you can spare the time to vote both today and Tuesday, that would be very gratifying.

Plus, if I win, it will give me a little something to respond to the question, "And what did you do all day?" I'll be able to look up over the piles of dirty laundry, across the unswept floors, and say, "I wrote a post for my Award Winning blog, thank you." I am sure that will make all the difference in the world. Aren't you?

UPDATED: Always a bridesmaid...

I Can't Imagine Where They Would Get It From

Very little of this blog happens in real time, but my wife is mad. She is mad now. Her eyes are narrow and dark and to look in them would be to risk a cut, a pint of blood, a lost limb. Okay, maybe not that, maybe just a finger, but still I'm not looking at them. Not directly. And I'm not even the one she's mad at.

"She called me a bad mother," my wife said when she came home. It was a bit anticlimactic, because the three girls had run in before her, dusted in snow, to tell me first. They were beside themselves with excitement. "Those are the exact words she used," Sharon continued, as I helped the kids off with their snow clothes. "She said, 'You are a bad mother.'"

Being a mother sucks. Any choice they make, somebody is going to tell them it's wrong. Everyone from learned people to crackpots. But mostly crackpots.

"The girls were chasing some pigeons, trying, you know, to get them to poop on them--"

"We were saying 'Poop on me! Poop on me!'" the girls, all three of them, interject. We are a troubled family.

"--and this woman comes over and asks the girls to stop, saying they are abusing the pigeons. So I said, no ma'am, they're exercising the pigeons. And then she tells me that I need to stop them because kids who abuse animals grow up to be serial killers."

"Poop on me! Poop on me!" the girls yell, and for a minute I think serial killers may be an improvement on what we're raising.

"Chasing pigeons is not animal abuse, is it?" Sharon asks, her tone changing, softening, but I still won't look at her eyes, not her eyes.

"No. Of course not," I say.

"Pigeons aren't even animals."

"No. Not even animals." Don't look up.

There is a pause. This could go either way. I hold my breath.

"This is your blog's fault, you know." Don't move, say nothing, avoid eye contact. "Nobody in this family'd be chasing pigeons, yelling 'Poop on me!' if it weren't for your blog."

"They said it is supposed to bring luck," I say.

"There's got to be a limit to how much luck it can bring."

"Probably," I agree, "but you know, serial killers need as much luck as they can get."

Turns out, it wasn't the eyes I needed to be worried about.

Another Benefit Is the Truck Didn't Have a Pissing Calvin in the Back Window

The truck was on fire and we were driving past it at a speed so low, the speedometer needle never saw the numbers above zero. We had been driving past the truck for a long time, as long as I could remember. There had never been a time when we weren’t driving past that truck. Whole civilizations began, thrived, and collapsed back into chaos while we drove past the burning truck.

Time goes slowly in a minivan.

Kathryn, a girl who was born with too many words inside her, spent the time imagining reasons for the burning truck. By the time we had drawn even with it, she had voiced dozens, none of them encumbered by breath or punctuation. In each of these scenarios, the fire was always the result of a crying child.

“Maybe the driver was driving and his baby was crying and crying and crying so he looked in his pocket and all he had was a box of matches so he opened it and dumped all the matches out and then he gave the box to the baby so the baby would stop crying but way down in the bottom of the box where he couldn’t see it there was one little bitty match left and the baby found it that’s why the car is on fire. Or maybe..."

It was a pickup truck, but Kathryn called it a car. A lack of experience recognizing pickup trucks is just one of the benefits of living in New Jersey.

Kathryn's little sisters were less than appreciative of any of her explanations, and had spent the last forever asking why, why daddy, why was the car burning? My children clearly do not watch enough TV. On TV cars burn all the time. American children should look at burning cars with no more interest than they would bikini-clad women surrounding a man drinking light beer. And this truck wasn't just on fire, it was totally engulfed in the flames. The metal itself seemed to be burning. Flames swirled in tornadoes and rose out the shattered windows. It would have looked right at home in any number of TV shows. About crying children.

"...his baby was crying and crying and crying and the only thing that would stop it was one song so the driver kept playing the song over and over and over and the CD player got so hot it exploded and that's why the car is on fire. Or maybe..."

The four of us were on our way back from the airport where we had just dropped off my wife to catch a flight to Boston for business. I don't know why my wife goes to these places. She edits dictionaries. Had a new use for the word "wicked" had been discovered?

"Control, we have an report of a South Shore resident saying, 'wicked nippy'."

"Roger that. Is that in our dictionary?"

"No, ma'am. We have wicked cold, wicked freezing, and wicked frigid."

"Send Sharon."

Seven lanes of traffic had been blocked off for the burning truck. At the rate we were going, we wouldn't make it home for dinner. I wasn't too worried. We could have parked right there and dined happily on our minivan's supply of free-range Cheerios. We could have pulled to the side, snacked on Cheerios, and watched the truck burn.

Would have been just like TV.

Playing Cards

You know, there's a very real part of me that would just be delighted if we were wrong about Barack Obama. Not wrong, like he turns out to be bad for the country, that would be dreadful, but wrong like he turns out to be, like, crazy evil. You know, like all the wingnuts said he'd be? Like, on Inauguration Day he'd stand up, walk to the podium and start out all, "My fellow Americans," but then a few minutes into it, he go all "Rise! Rise, my undead servants! Heed your new master!" and then the sun would turn dark and all these zombies would come out and start eating our brains and my mother-in-law would be all "I told you so!" and locust swarms would devour our crops and toads would rain from the sky and we'd be cursing ourselves that we dismissed all those warnings, all those emails sent mostly from East Texas, but we wouldn't curse for long because we'd be zombies, socialist zombies, and our health care would suck? I think that'd be a hoot.

My wife just read this over my shoulder and asked if it was really the kind of material I wanted to write when I was up for a weblog award. So I replied, yes, this is exactly the kind of stuff I want to write. I mean, I can't keep playing the seizure card, now can I? Sure, it'd probably get me a lot of sympathy votes, to say my daughter is epileptic and keeps having these wacky seizures, in fact I bet I could get a vote every time I wrote the word seizure, but that's not the kind of guy I am. Seizure seizure seizure.

Seizure.

Besides, I was going to play the twin card, but there's a finalist with quads. So seizure.

Speaking of which, what's up with all the comments saying you all are positive I'd rather the seizures were happening to me than to Kathryn? Have you seen those things? I mean, come on! Look, middle school is going to be hard on that girl, too, but you sure as hell won't see me trying to shoulder that burden, either. Remember who you're dealing with here. I'm a finalist for Best Parenting BLOG, people, not Best Parent.

I Still Can't Believe Bill and Hillary Had Their Hands on the Same Ball

It was thirty minutes to midnight when someone suggested we turn on the television, so we did. Because we're American. TV helps us know how to feel and when to feel it.

And there, sandwiched between the improbable eyefulls of the Pussycat Dolls and Fergie, we had Dick Clark. Or what used to be Dick Clark.

"He's had a stroke," someone called out in his defense, as if we didn't already know it, as if putting it in words would somehow lessen its impact. As if it would stop the appalling jokes about to be made. And really, the jokes, when they flew, were almost in self-defense, almost put out there in an attempt to refill the room with the air that Dick Clark's strangely animatronic face had sucked out. It was New Year's Eve, people! There were minutes to go until midnight, and there was our friends' wide-screened TV confronting us with just what the passage of time meant: Old age. Stroke. Death.

Eventually, Dick won and our party was silenced, at least while he was on the screen. The man's face looked like it had been made from two molded plastic masks, hinged together at the jaw. The two pieces didn't fit together correctly, so his words, words that were telling us to celebrate, to rejoice in a new year, were coming out slurred. When he spoke, a few more jokes were floated only to be met with groans and jeers, but mostly we all just sat there in silence, feeling sorry. Sorry for Dick Clark, on whom hardship had fallen, but mostly, if I am to be honest, we felt sorry for ourselves, sorry that at the very apex of our celebration, our TV, which can so often be counted on to bring us only the beautiful, the titillating, the objects of our desires, had brought us something altogether different. Our TV had betrayed us.

It didn't even help when the screen finally cut away to show both Bill and Hillary Clinton pushing their hands down on a big sparkly ball to announce the New Year. Though that did give the comedians in the group significantly better material to work with.

At the stroke of midnight, sloppy toasts and even sloppier kisses rescued us from any lasting damage that may have been made by our uninvited guest, he for whom bells had so visibly rung.

It was when the second round of champagne was being poured that Kathryn came downstairs, her footed pajamas contrasting delightfully with her eight-and-a-half years, and it didn't take more than a glance to see why she had broken away from the kiddie slumber party upstairs. Her mouth was curled down and to the left, stuck and unresponsive, like the top of her face no longer fit correctly with the bottom. She had had a seizure.

"I had a seizure," she told the gathering, her locked jaw making the last word sheeshur.

As if we didn't already know it.

As if putting it in words would somehow lessen its impact.

Such an event was not wholly unexpected. Proper rest, the best deterrent for nighttime seizures, is short in supply over the holidays, and even scarcer on New Year's Eve. We declared it an isolated incident, and slept easily that night, as easily as any of you did. But today is January 4th, and Kathryn has now had more seizures in 2009 than 2009 has had days.

Her brain, which can so often be counted on to bring us only the beautiful, the humorous, the objects of our adoration, is instead bringing us something altogether different. Her brain is betraying us.

Dear Lila and Victoria

Dear Lila and Victoria,

It was on a subway platform in Midtown that you two were given the promise of life, the instant we decided neither of you had much of a chance of one. Or at least I had decided you didn't stand much of a chance. I'm not positive your mom agreed with me; she was too sick to contribute much of anything to the discussion.

"We would be fools to make a decision based on them," I said.

"Bleurgh," your mom said.

Them was you. Were you. Were Lila and Victoria. You didn't have names yet. Hell, you barely even had heartbeats.

If you still had heartbeats.

We had flown from Austin to New York City because your mom had a job interview here. It was our first trip to the city and it was not going well.

"Remember," I said. "The funny thing thing about regret is, it's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done."

"Bleurgh," your mom said, which may have meant, "That's true," or may have meant, "I don't think we should make life decisions based on Butthole Surfer lyrics." Most likely it meant, "Take me back to the hotel. Sightseeing is over," even though the only sights we had seen so far were a subway platform in Midtown.

The decision facing us was whether or not we should uproot our family and move to New York. On the surface, it was a ludicrious idea. We had neither friends nor family in the New York City area and your mom was nine-weeks pregnant with twins. Did I say on the surface it was ludicrious? Because I meant to say it was ludicrious deep down, too.

But.

Your sister Kathryn was four years old. In the time between her birth and our subway platform discussion, three separate heartbeats had each held court in your mother's uterus, three heartbeats that had lasted for months, then disappeared. Nobody knew why. You two were heartbeats four and five. We had no reason to believe you'd last much longer either. The only evidence we had that you were still existing even then was the fact that your mom couldn't go an hour without either a nap or a bucket. Most hours she needed both.

So there, right there on the platform, surrounded by the unfamiliar smell of a New York spring seeping down from above, we agreed to take the job if it were offered, because the only reason to turn it down was you two, and you two didn't appear to have much of a chance.

And thus, just to prove us wrong, your heartbeats strengthened. Stubbornly, resourcefully, for thirty more weeks they grew stronger, as if nothing could please you two more than making us look like idiots.

Happy fourth birthday, Lila and Victoria. May your hearts continue to prove us fools for many more years to come.

Love, Dad