What made me think to look up an old post on this blog is that just recently I’ve had to revisit driving training again.  No, I didn’t have another child.  If I had, there would be a doctor who I saw several years ago that I would be punching in the mouth.  The training involves my youngest daughter, again.  She didn’t forget how to drive, she does pretty well for the limited two years that she has had her California license. 

It’s that in the infinite wisdom that is my ex-wife and her husband, they bought her a gorgeous late 60’s VW square back station wagon.  The car has been a project of theirs for the last couple of years.  They have spent many weekends rebuilding the car almost from scratch.  The finished car is really a very pretty car to look at.  It will be a great car for a teenager to drive back and forth to school and work.  A cool car for Southern California.

The drawback.  It’s a four speed manual transmission.  Have you ever tried to teach a child how to drive a stick shift?  It’s like trying to herd cats or push spaghetti uphill.  It can be done, but with much difficulty. 

Now, my personal car is a BMW 5 series with a 5 speed manual transmission.  A stick shift (not the pedal shifters) but one that is easily driven.  This VW is a pain in the ass to drive.  The clutch has to be pushed down hard, the stick has to be moved hard to change gears, and the car drives like a slug.  Add to all this a teenager who knows nothing about why there is three pedals and not just two on the floorboard. 

So I begin the teaching process of how to feather the clutch and accelerator while still working the brake and getting the car into gear.  I am revisiting what it took to have patience with a teenage driver again.  I realize that you truly never get to escape these responsibilities.  However, there are days that I think I’m just getting too old for these “E Ticket” rides anymore.

I’ve had the opportunity to have several mother’s in my life.  Obviously my own mother, who raised a couple of sons without much training considering she was an only child.  I maybe biased, but she did a pretty good job of getting my brother and I into adulthood. 

I have also married a couple of women (not at the same time, that’d be wrong…) who have been great mothers.  My first wife, with whom I had the great pleasure of raising two beautiful daughters.  And my current wife who with her own daughter has made for an interesting “female heavy” household.   

So, let me join the chorus that all men need to be shouting.  Thank you ladies for being the mother’s that many of us dad’s would be lost without.

Happy Mother’s Day….

So, she calls and we start off with the small talk that we usually do. Then somewhere in the middle of it, she blurts out, “Daddy, I need to talk with you and mom face to face tomorrow for lunch.” Any of you out there who are parents, you know this is the time when your butt cheeks start to clench and your mind goes “Oh shit.” Of course, I asked her to give me a preview, something to ease the heart attack that was starting to build in my chest. I love my daughter for many things; one is that she seems to be intuitive to what is happening to her father.

“Dad, I’m not pregnant,” came from the other side of the phone. Oh, thank God, was in my head and I probably said it aloud as well. “The thing is that I need to move because our lease is expiring and I’ve lined up a couple of new roommates.” Here is where the bombshell is dropped, “and Mark (not his real name) and I are going to live together.” You see Mark (not his real name) has been my daughter’s boyfriend for the past three years. They met in her first year of college and have been together every since.

So, you would have thought this would have NOT been a revelation to me. She is after all almost twenty-two and has been living on her own since she was eighteen. Of my three daughters, my oldest is the most headstrong and determined to plow her way in the world.

Nevertheless, all I get is visions of my little girl in pigtails, running around the neighborhood playing with the other kids. NOT living with some guy she met in college.

So my oldest came in to town so that her mother and I could go to lunch and she could tell her mother the news. Her mother and I have been divorced for over ten years now and since then has become a fundamentalist Christian. There was no sure way to know how she was going to react to her news. Our daughter moving in and living with a boy.

Surprisingly, she took it well. She heard the news and calmly sat there absorbing it. She smiled and said that she wasn’t fond of the idea but she understood it. You see, her mother and I had lived together for a couple of years before getting married ourselves. And as she said, you can’t call the kettle black.

The song “Time’s of Your Life” by Paul Anka, was used in an old Kodak commercial back in the mid 70’s, keeps running through my mind. You watch your kids go through life’s stages, infants discovering the world, toddlers walking, grade school aged and innocence, teenage years and discovering themselves, and then on to young adulthood and being grownups.

I think I’ll just sit here and let Paul Anka sing in my head and rerun those memories in my head of my little girl and watching her grow up…

I swear I’m going to sit down and write a book...

This book will have some kind of pop up in it.  One that “literally” slaps the face of the reader.  A kind of a wake up call,  a physical reminder to that reader that they need to pay attention because life is about to get really hard and really nasty.

This book that I’m contemplating on authoring would be directed to those idiots who have decided that they are going to neglect their partners.  Specifically men who have seemed to have forgotten why they got married in the first place.

If you’ve spent any time reading my blog I’ve sent you over to read KT at When Did I Become a Grownup?   She’s a courageous woman who has just recently been through her own hell.  Unfortunately, it’s not over for her yet, but she’s on her way.

What makes me an expert on this?  I’ve been through this little slice of hell myself.  Through more than 16 years of marriage, I, like a lot of my fellow neadrathals out there, didn’t put our best foot forward.  We didn’t appreciate what we had and made excuses not to be the best husbands we should all be. 

I’ve been asked several times what broke up my first marriage and the easy explanation (read excuse) has been that my ex cheated on me.  But, that’s not really the reason.  Just a symptom.  You see, it takes two people to destroy a marriage.  In my case it was a matter of letting my partner down.  I didn’t tell her that I appreciated her enough, that I loved her enough.  When those things are missing in your relationship, it’s not hard to see the other partner either giving up or finding it somewhere else. 

Divorce is messy.  It needs to be messy and hard.  That way you’ll think twice before doing it.  The problem is that you don’t know it’s going to be that way until you start to go through it. 

We all think the grass is greener on the other side and that we’ll find it easier after getting out of this mess. 

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG…  A thousand times, wrong. 

Through my divorce, I suffered, my kids suffered, my ex suffered.  There were emotional wounds, financial upheavals, and physical exhaustion.  If you don’t think this is a little slice of hell, go ahead, give it a try.

And yet, the lessons are too easy to learn.  My wife and I practice them daily.  A kiss in the morning to start our day.  A kiss in the evening to say hi after our long day apart.  We constantly remind each other why were in this relationship together.  I made mistakes in my first marriage that don’t intend to repeat. 

You’ve been warned.

Next time, be careful, the next book you read could slap you in the face.

Once again the ugly head of my past divorce has come to haunt me.  An email (what no phone call?) from my ex has got me really pissed off. 

I’m going to have to go sit in a corner and mutter my mantra: “It could be worse, we could still be married” until I calm down.

We divorce about nine years ago and in our divorce decree we agreed that as tax deductions we would swap our daughters (two of them) back and forth.  She would have my oldest on odd years and I would have the youngest.  On even years she would have the youngest and I would take the oldest. 

Fair enough.  For 2008 I have the oldest. 

A recent email from my ex came to me “asking” if she could use my oldest as a tax deduction this year.  Her reasoning was that she felt she contributed more to her in financial support.  This would give her both kids to write off.

I replied that I need to decline her request (yes, I was very cordial).  I said that you may be contributing more to her financial support now; but I have contributed much more in the past and have not made the same request to you.

I also explained that my accountant and I discuss the upcoming year and make our decisions based on who and what can be deducted.  If she wanted this to happen, she should have talked to me months ago, not just before she’s seeing her accountant.

Her reply was that she was going to do whatever she damn well pleased. 

Now she’s really pissed me off. 

I told her good luck on getting an accountant to change our divorce agreement.  I also told her that if she wasn’t careful we might both be audited for trying to deduct the same child.  I have an agreement on my side. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go sit in the corner for awhile…

“It could be worse, we could still be married”