Thank you for your punctuality, which we needed to see, and for which I love you
Old friends stopped off at ours today on their way back home in the last leg of a multi-state trek. I hadn’t seen them in long enough that I can’t remember how long it’s been. Two years, I think, and only for a day or three, and probably another year or more before that. We looked at each others’ kids and said “wow, you’re so big now!” The kids smiled and looked away, a mix of “yes, I am big” and “who the hell are you?”, and two of them wandered over to the toys strewn across the lawn and two of them walked to the back of our yard to peak through the cracks in our backdoor neighbor’s privacy fence to see if anyone was swimming in the pool.
For much of the afternoon I sat on the picnic blanket in the shade and made eyes at my friends’ baby. She likes me. I think we bonded over having the same hairstyle, though hers is a bit more grown out than mine, more grown out on the top of the head than I am capable of any longer. Her mom, my friend Lydia, asked if we were going to have another kid. I said I wasn’t sure, that we had been completely sure before that we weren’t and that now we were not longer completely sure, so who knows. She said that she had thought she wanted a fourth kid until her baby started crawling. I thought about all the chokeable toys we own, and the cabinets waiting to pinch fingers, plus the toilet and cat’s litterbox and the electrical outlets and remembered how my kids slept even worse as babies and I did the math about how old I’ll be when my younger kid’s a teenager, and the baby smiled at me and scrunched up her nose. We’ll probly end up having another kid.
Before company arrived we cleaned the house. Well, we shut the doors to the bedrooms then cleaned the kitchen and living room. Both were a wreck. My wife sometimes talks about how it’s a kind of gift when people have us over when their house is a mess because a clean house says houses should be clean, a belief sort of like ‘I should be athletic and energetic,’ something I believe but mostly for the sake of feeling bad that fail to do as I should. I was feeling too embarrassed to be generous enough not to clean. I don’t like to be controversial but I’m just going to put this out there: cleaning the house kind of sucks. The nice part though was turning up the music loud. Bit of Smiths, some of the sadder Ramones, some Dear Landlord and Copyrights and Falcon. Dad rock. Or maybe despair rock. Same difference, really. Heaven knows every dad has a poison heart, is miserable now.
During the clean up, my older kid decided to put away a couple high value toys that she didn’t want to share, partly because she didn’t want these other kids she barely remembered getting their grody fingers all over her shit (I’m paraphrasing and maybe extrapolating or projecting a little) and partly because she didn’t want to deal with her annoying parents getting up in her face trying to make her be polite and share and not shout and hit. Good call on her part. Very mature, like her mother. My older kid’s toy hiding set off my younger kid, who had to find her newest dolls - “Daddy I can’t find they and I NEED they HELP ME!” - in order to put them away because she was scared these strangers who as far as she remembers she’s never met would play with them.
The stack of toys to put away got bigger and bigger over a few minutes as my kids pulled items out of bins and tossed them on the floor “not THIS one, oh not THAT one, not THIS one, oh THAT one is SPECIAL!” After a bit my wife and I looked at each other, that co-parent look that’s about checking in subtly like “uh, are you seeing this too? like, this is really happening? this is a thing, right?” and is also about a mix of pleading and playing a game of chicken - “someone really should speak up before this gets further out of hand… someone… please… someone? anyone?”
My wife flinched first, said something like “you know, it might be more fun to play with our friends if you leave out some toys to, you know, play with?” My younger kid said “but I don’t want they to take my new dolls!” I said “are you worried they’re going to take your toys home with them? they’re not going to do that,” and she said “I don’t want they to take my doll out of my hand while I’m playing with it!” That’s actually a pretty reasonable fear given how grabby some little kids are, and by ‘some’ I mean ‘my’ (and I can say that for myself I put up my laptop before our friends came over because THAT is MINE and it’s SPECIAL, plus also I wanted to put up my guitar and I would have but I am lazy and instead I just closed the door to that room). Still, our friends were due to arrive in like twenty minutes and I knew if they showed up during the Great Toy Stashing there would be much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, or at least crying and screaming and probably hitting. Luckily we got it sorted out in time because our friends were very courteous and showed up two hours late.
We’re late to basically everything. This is because leaving the house is always something along these lines: “Okay kids let’s get ready to go!” “No!” “Okay, we’ll stay home, we’ll just miss the zoo/library story time/ice cream.” “No I want to go!” “Great, so get ready to go.” “First I need to finish this drawing/computer game/round of draping myself bonelessly on the floor and staring at the ceiling whining that I’m bored.” “Well, if we’re going to get there in time we need to get moving. Can you go put your shoes on?” “Can you put them on?” “I want you to put them on.” “I want you to put them on.” “Are you copying me?” “Are you copying me?” “Stop it.” “Stop it.” “Look, do you want to go to this thing or not?” “Look, do you want to go to this thing or not?” “Forget it, we’re staying home.” “Forget it we’re staying home.” “That’s right. We are not going out anymore.” “That’s right. We - no we have to go! We have to! We have to! We have to go!” “Then stop shouting and get up off the floor and put you shoes on!” “Fine! Meanie!”
Plus there’s the matter of getting them both to try to pee before we leave, and usually the matter of trying to get them to put on one or more pieces of clothing because, being essentially feral, my kids don’t like to wear clothes and will often take off items of clothing necessary for leaving the house. And there’s the matter of discovering that one of them did not eat enough of the last meal or snack and so now, is hungry, something invariably declared angrily, in a tone that says “I will tell the social worker how much you neglect me and I will tell all of my friends forever about how I get headaches from hunger and also I insist that the food be a perfectly symmetrical grilled cheese sandwich, still piping hot, with the crusts cut off!”, this of course declared at the exact moment that we have just managed to get the other kid to pee and then put on clothes and shoes and so the other kid will immediately whine about wanting to LEAVE and to leave NOW because she is BORED from all this WAITING so let’s GO. An additional complication at some point in this ordeal will also be that a shoe or some necessary item of clothing, and mostly likely an item that one of my kids NEEDS to have RIGHT NOW because it’s SPECIAL, will be missing somewhere in the flotsam and jetsam of our house. This usually leads to sniping about how if you would put your things away like I always tell you to then we would know where your things are, which never sinks in because this is not a teachable moment, it’s a fucking clusterfuck moment, but that’s okay because they’re probably not teachable anyway, being feral animals, the best you get is that they are not pissing or shitting on the floor or biting you, at this particular moment.
What I’m say is we’re late a lot and it fucks us up. It’s a basic adult skill, to be somewhere at a time when you said you would or when you need to be there because there just are some things that have set start times, and you just can’t do it anymore and so you fail at this basic expectation, every time, like with the athleticism and energy and clean houses, and the absence eats at you so you feel bad and pissed and hopeless because you feel deep in your heart an intense conviction that your kids will be this little forever so this is the rest of your life from now on (if you want a vision of the future, imagine a child’s feet stamping, one in a boot and the other barefoot - forever), so that by the time you’re in the car, having gotten the kids strapped into their car seats, you don’t even want to go anymore because what’s the point anyway nothing matters there is no exit.
Under the circumstances, our friends were so late that they managed a kind of greater punctuality, in the sense that within the context of our relationship they arrived exactly at the time we needed them to, after the house was clean-ish enough that it wouldn’t cause any urge to recoil in horror too strong enough to be covered over with a polite smile, and after our kids had gotten over or at least learned to live with the fear that we were opening our doors to brutes out to tear their best toys from their hands and stomp on them, and after we hit the point of thinking “we are only rarely THIS late.” By the time they arrived we were finally read for their arrival, just chilling out slightly bored having managed about five minutes prior to get the picnic stuff set up in the backyard and some toys laid out.
So yeah, our friends were two hours late and I loved them so much for it. I wanted to thank them, but I am a midwesterner, we want to but do not thank our loved ones for the qualities for which we love them.