Come Here Often?

Practiced by many, perfected by few, cussing is one of my favorite things, as Maria von Trapp said in The Sound of Music. The second my kids are gone for the weekend, it’s like Custivus around my house, at least for me. I know that “Dang!” may get my point across when my husband short pours me, but “What the fuck?” ensures that he doesn’t do it again.

I don’t cuss in front of my kids, for the most part, and I really don’t know why. Cussing isn’t exactly any worse than a few other things I expose my kids to, like the proper way to deliver a beer poolside (gently, like a butler would), as opposed to the wrong way (rolling it on its side, across a hot patio).

Actually, I do know why. I have probably kept this charade up this long because my husband isn’t a cusser, and I totally respect that. He’s a teacher, and works with teenagers. For him, there’s just something about a 14-year old kid telling another 14-year old kid to “Eat shit!” at 7:45 in the a.m. on a sunny May morning while crossing the quad that can be a bit disconcerting. Birds are chirping, lessons are planned, copies are made and BAM! It’s just a little sickening to see the disrespect – kids know adults are close by and can hear them, and they just don’t care. What I’d like to know is who is raising these little fuckers?

At this point, I’m afraid I’ve missed my window to begin cussing in front of my kids. I still get ragged on when I let even the slightest little thing slip. I can’t even get “ass” out of my mouth and I’m screwed. Wait, that didn’t sound right. Here’s what I meant:

“That a-hole needs to stop tailgating me!”

“Mom!”

“Sorry!”

In my opinion, cussing isn’t bad, but poor timing is. It’s just plain disrespectful. That’s the part I haven’t yet shared with my kids, but I will. I’m going to let them ride the non-cussing train for as long as it works for them. If they take it up in the jr. high school courtyard tomorrow, my advice to them is, “You better not let a grown-up hear you.” However, I’ll never tell my kids this lie: “You’ll never find a nice boy/girl with a mouth like that.” It’s simply not true. I was raised by cussers, and I found a nice boy. Maybe it’s because I wore my cusstity belt for the first six months we dated in order to keep getting more dates. Pretending to like football probably helped, too.

To be clear, I’m no professional when it comes to cussing, but I know someone who is. She takes cussing to the next level – raising it to a verbal art form.

Her delivery is poetic. Uttered with as much emotion as one typically lends to words and phrases like “porch” or “grilled onions,” her F-bombs slide in, hit their mark, and exit stage right, leaving the listener both shocked and impressed. Best of all, she pulls it off while at work, and she works with the public. 

More than once I’ve caught myself wondering, “Did she just drop an F-bomb while pleasantly greeting me?”

The answer is, yes. The question is, how?

She’s a bartender, that’s how. Another lost art with which I am ever-so-slightly familiar.

Her working environment is a place where people go to enjoy some booze. To be clear, they aren’t thirsty. If they were, they’d drink a glass of water at home. I know this because I, too, have earned a living as a bartender. Not only that, I once enjoyed a drink at a bar.

I have tended the full range of bars, from three-story college bars with flooded bathrooms, sticky floors and stickier doormen, to four-star dinner houses where people like to pretend they’ve never been to a sticky bar.

Of course, I did the bartending thing a little differently than my local friend does. For starters, I wore more clothing, covering fewer tattoos. I’m not judging; a girl’s just got to know her limitations. And mine were tits and tattoos, two pivotal requirements if one is to cuss and make money at the same time.

If a gaggle of nuns toddled into the bar at 2 p.m. on a Sunday, her song would remain the same. Cheery voice, breasts pointing toward heaven, huge smile, and this:

“What the fuck, sisters, what’ll you have?”

“Five iced teas, thank you.”

“You got it,” she’d declare, strolling off to the far side of the bar.

As it turns out, this bar happens to be annexed to a restaurant, so nuns as customers are not out of the question. Of course, the regular afternoon group of electricians, landscapers and shift workers have yet to see the food side of the menu. They still believe in the power of their dreams – that they’ve died and gone to rehab heaven.

Nuns and menus aside, it seems to me that if you walk into a bar, you’re stating indirectly that putting some alcohol into your body is the priority, to be replaced later by either sex or vomiting or both. Nobody is pulling any punches when they walk into a bar.  

Who am I to pretend any differently?

Considering our world is vastly different than our local bartending friend’s is, our conversations with her are bittersweet – and personal. Take, for example, a recent one we had after not seeing her for awhile. We shuffled in for happy hour, late on a Friday afternoon. She was right there to greet us, staring at us with her big eyes, and big smile, ready to make our obvious state of dehydration her top priority.  

Hey, there! Where the fuck have you guys been? Haven’t seen you in forever!”

“Oh, well, we’ve just been working, and tending to our four kids….”

“Holy shit, you guys have four kids?”

“Uh, yeah,” we say as we smile and nod, wondering what kind of parents we are for hanging out at a bar instead of sitting home and looking through family photo albums all weekend long while our kids are gone.

“So, what’ll you have?”

“A pitcher of vodka.”

“Hahaha. I bet!” she shoots back with a grin.

“We’re not kidding.”

“Oh.”

“Just kidding!”

“You fuckers got me!” she announces, tilting back her head as she strolls away laughing.

We smile, looking at one another fondly. I speak first.

“Did she just call us….”

“Yeah.”

“We need to come here more often.”

“Yeah.”

 

Parental Guidance Suggested

Just cleaned off my desk in my home office/loft/shit mitt and lo and behold, there actually is a flat surface underneath it all. After two days on the couch with my laptop on my lap, to give my back a break from my chair, I’m back to work at an official work space. All ready to conquer a mountain of writing about tiny computery parts and the companies who make them, I run into a problem: the next door neighbor is jackhammering his walkway into rubble. Until now, working from home has been a great test for my capacity to ignore. I can ignore a dripping faucet, a dog obsessed with licking himself, a woodpecker determined to break into the attic from outside my window and even the buzz of the dryer alerting me to fact that there are clothes to be folded, but I can’t ignore a jackhammer.

So, I do what any legal adult would do when they need to check out of the present moment and it’s prior to noon; I reach for my iPod. I always go with my initial, gut feeling as I scroll through the menu. Today, of all the 43,972 selections to choose from, it was Pink Floyd that caught my eye. Now, I’m listening to the sound of jackhammering and getting angry for the orphans of London.  Why can’t they just leave the kids alone? Crap. This really isn’t working for me…

Maybe I’ll just do a little daydreaming. That ought to kick start the creative juices I need to begin writing about solder pastes and tin whiskers with the sort of flair our clients expect. In other words, I’ll try not to drive anyone to pull a Foxconn. (In case you haven’t heard, Foxconn, the China company who contracts with Apple to put iPads and other gadgetry together, installed nets around the massive, dormitory-laden factory because employees keep jumping to their deaths. Turns out, 35-hour shifts at 31 cents an hour is pushing people to the brink – literally. Check out the report by Jon Stewart here.

Ok, back to surreality. Let’s see… what is there to daydream about on this fair, almost-February morning? Aha! I’m eligible for my phone upgrade tomorrow and I’m throwing it all in for an iPhone – albeit last year’s model at the sweet price of $50. 3G is good enough for me. I just want to be able to find out where I’m going when I’m lost, how I can get my hands on some sushi when I’m out of town, and of course, play Words with Friends. I don’t really know how it works yet, but I plan to modify it into Dirty Words with Husband.

As technology goes, I’m not one to camp out in front of the Apple store. I had my Classic iPod for three years before one of my students informed me that I could download movies. That was three years ago and I still haven’t done it. Then, my brother told me about podcasts. Right now, I’m just thrilled that I finally have something to replace my Sony Walkman, which replaced the beige Realistic transistor radio that I used to toss into the white plastic basket on the front of my purple Schwinn bicycle — the one with one gear.

My kids and their relationship with technology is another story. It’s all they know. They will never walk across a room to turn a channel. Heck, they’ll never experience the satisfaction of successfully talking a sibling into getting up and turning the channel for them. They’ll never know what it’s like to not be able to see the TV while having an important phone conversation while holding a toaster-sized, two-headed “receiver” to their ear, while standing two feet from the phone base that is attached to the wall with a little curly cord that can be endlessly stretched and twisted, or wrapped around your leg until your foot turns a cool shade of blue. They’ll never know the supreme joy of FINALLY getting a princess trimline phone in any color they want, with its sleek, ultra-modern design that can actually  travel all the way across the room with them because someone has finally made a 20-foot phone cord! Oh, the joy!

Modern technology at their fingertips robs them of precious critical thinking opportunities.  For example, gone is the opportunity to feel the terror of making the decision to wait until the moment they are supposed to be home to call and ask for more time at the park with their friends. I could have left the swings, or climbed down from the tree in plenty of time to walk home, ask for more time, and then walk back. Instead, it was the same dilemma, weekend after weekend:

“Let’s see, do I run home right now and get there ten minutes late, or spend five minutes begging a dime off a stranger and then five minutes searching for a pay phone that works? Then, if she says no, will I still be in hot water for not being home on time?”

By the way, the answer to that last question was yes.

 Yep, cell phones sure do take a lot of stress off kids. On the flip side, they sure do have the potential to bring more stress into their lives if they aren’t handled with maturity. It’s one more way to get into trouble in class, one more distraction that discourages homework, or walking across the street without tripping, or walking at all because they are content sitting on the couch texting their friends. Like Tosh.O, or Cialis commercials, or anything else kids have access to these days, with a little parental guidance it can all be put into perspective.

I sure did enjoy those days of having no ties to anything. My parents couldn’t call me and ask me what I was doing, or tell me to come home early because I didn’t clean my room before I left. Once I left the house, at the tender age of 10, or 11 or whatever, I was gone, baby, gone, until the designated be-home time. I loved the feeling of being off everyone’s radar.

Kids didn’t need cell phones to stay safe back then. My friends and I had a plan in case some pervert started chasing us down the street. Again, critical thinking in action: The plan was that we’d run up to the nearest house and ring the doorbell. No, wait; we’d just blaze right into the house and explain what we were doing in the middle of some stranger’s living room. Then, they could call 9-1-1, just as soon as they were done dismembering the last fool who walked in their front door.

Luckily, we never ran into too much trouble, except for the time a guy pulled up in his car next to us as we crossed the street in front of the neighborhood ice cream parlor and asked for directions to the local high school. As I politely gave him the left-right-left deal, my friend noticed that his johnson was hanging out of this shorts. As I said, “So, then you pull into the first parking lot and —“ she yanked me by the arm and we ran, laughed and screamed all at the same time.  A block away, we stopped running and I asked her what was up. 

Then, she told me.

A cell phone probably wouldn’t have done much good at that moment. Sometimes there’s only time to run. Not a bad life lesson. Sometimes, your feet are the best tool at your disposal. Just ask Fred Flinstone. 

Borderline Inappropriate

Remember how our kids, when they were little, got the pint-sized, rose-colored explanations and answers? However “age appropriate” they might have been, they were a yawn. They were cute and gentle and nurturing, and most of all, they were fulfilling.

But that was then; this is now. Responses now, while fulfilling for totally different reasons, are borderline slightly inappropriate. Now, it's finally getting interesting.

As much as I miss the little, squishy versions of my children, the clinging hugs to my torso, face burrowed into my neck, feet wrapped around my waist as if we were two pieces of an ancient human Pangaea that occasionally snaps back together for loves, tear-drying or carries up to bed, I don’t miss having to filter, edit and otherwise push the “safe answer” button when it is time to communicate.

With two teens and two “almost-theres” under one roof, communication is becoming something that not only moves information from Point A to Point B, it’s a source of entertainment—for everyone. I love that I can use the sense of humor I was born with, (yet not the same one I use when they’re not around) and I am thoroughly enjoying seeing a sense of humor develop in my kids. It’s a great day when one of them makes me laugh out loud. It’s a better day when I make them laugh out loud. Not that it’s easy – they have pretty high standards when it comes to what’s funny. Luckily, mine aren’t so high.

The transition between kid-friendly responses to their questions and factually correct, non-watered down responses began a few years ago. I recall the night I sat the three little princesses down on  my bed and began The Talk. Before I could even begin, one asked why I had a piece of paper and a pencil. Then, without saying a word, I drew a picture. Of a woman. Down there.

“What’s THAT hole for?”

“That’s exactly what we’re here to talk about!”

The picture made it fun for me. Turns out, it was fun for them also. I refrained from drawing funny weenie pictures, but it wasn’t easy.

I’m also glad that I can stop lying to them, saying stuff like, “Oh, everything will work out,” or “Those striped tights and that polka dot skirt look so cute with that soccer jersey.” Now, I can do a little more tactful truth-telling. The truth is, things don’t always work out. The secret to navigating the tough times is knowing you can handle whatever comes along – good or bad – you’ve got the power.

Just the other day, looking for shoes with my 11-year old daughter, she picked up a shoe off a rack at the shoe store that in my opinion, had clearly been run over by the ugly train.

 “Mom, look at these!” she said with the enthusiasm of a diabetic kid in a candy store who just found out they discovered a cure for diabetes. I could not, would not, let her wear those shoes in public. I had to intervene. My daughter knows, even gets irritated with me when she asks me what she should wear, what color she should color the clown’s pants, etc., because my answer is always the same: I can’t make that choice for you – choose whatever makes you happy. This was different. There exists a code among women – women who truly love each other – to tell the truth when it comes to wardrobe choices.

“Okay, when we look at things, there is a difference between my opinion, if I like something, and if something is right for you, okay? Um, these shoes are for women over the age of 70.”

“Thanks, Mom. I’m glad you told me.”

Then, we promptly went over to the section for ladies without canes and she found a pair she loved and I didn’t have to say a word.

Perhaps the most striking difference between parenting pre-schoolers and pre-teens lies in the delivery of not just important truths and honest life lessons, but funny stuff. And by funny, I mean rude. I mean, how does a parent actually get mad at an 11 year old girl with a smiling comeback like the following:

Dad: Hey, sweetie, don’t forget to grab your lunch on your way out the door.

Daughter: Stop telling me how to live my life!

Then, there’s everyone’s favorite, the somewhat hostile, “Your Face” one-liner.

Me: Honey, please push your chair in when you get up from the table, kay?

14 yr. old boy: Why don’t you push YOUR FACE in!

I can’t help it: It cracks me up every time. It’s a little like diffusing a bomb: he doesn’t want to be nagged, and can’t honestly say, “Stop nagging me” or he knows I’ll hurt him (emotionally of course, never physically, in case we’re counting me pinning him to the ground and sticking my finger so far into his armpit I can’t see my hand). With this routine, we make each other laugh, while at the same time communicating our extreme distaste for what has just been said.

“Hi Mama, what’s for dinner?”

“Your FACE!”

“Really Mom? Really?”

“Hahahahahaahahaha. Meatloaf.”

“Gross.”

“I’ll tell you what’s gross….YOUR FACE!”

“Mom!” my daughter yells, unable to keep from laughing. I got her!

Other times, it gets slightly more heated when I select “sarcastic reply” from my menu of options. Especially with my 14 year old son. He doesn’t get sarcasm.

“I can’t get the liner in the trash can right.”

“Keep trying. You’ll get it.”

“No, really, I can’t get it because it is SO STUPID! One side pops up when I pull the other side over the edge!”

“Stupid is a strong word. Apologize to the trash can now.”

“Mom, STOP! I….can’t…..get…..itaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!! Stupid trash can!”

“Your Grandpa always said you have to be smarter than what you’re working with.”

“Seriously, Mom! It’s difficult!”

That’s when I keep the sarcasm, but lose the funny-ha-ha tone. Now I’m getting annoyed. He’s missed the window of opportunity to make light of a frustrating situation and he’s going to pay for it.

“No, Jackson, Climbing Mt. Everest is difficult. Calculus is difficult. A trash can liner is not difficult.”

“Dad says calculus is easy.”

“Dad’s easy.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Nevermind.”

Later that night, we’re assembled at the dinner table. This is where I get the slightly inappropriate stare-down most of the time. I can’t help it though. Making dinner is hard and by the time it’s over, I need a little comic relief. My husband does the nightly "check in."

“How was everyone’s day?” The three girls answer first.

“Good.”

“Horrible.”

“I don’t know.”

“Dad, mom told me you’re easy. What’s that mean?”

All at once, three little girls’ faces spring to life, staring right at Dad, like little birdies in a nest, waiting for the worm. Since they know me, they know this has the potential for being borderline inappropriate, like the other night when one daughter asked me why we moved our desk out of our bedroom and into the loft area. I told her that a bedroom isn’t a place for a home office. “This is where the magic happens,” I said, raising my eyebrows up and down. She clammed up tighter than a nun’s knees and tried to look like she didn’t know what I was talking about. I think she actually left her body for a moment. My husband, complete with hands on hips and disapproving tilted head, said, “Really, Lisa?”

“Well, Jackson. What mom means, when she says I’m easy, is that I’m just a very agreeable person. I’m easy to get along with.”

“Nuh-uh, that’s not what it means. She would have told me that.”

“Man, you are good,” my husband replied to my son, shaking his head.

“That’s what he said….”  

“Really, Lisa?”

Alternative Methods of Communication

In an effort to better serve my audience, because verbal instructions, advice, and threats don’t always work the way I’d like them to, I’ve been toying with the idea of using something I know a little bit about – the written word – to communicate with my kids, and what the heck, my husband. After all, I’ve written letters to the editor of the local paper when I’ve had a problem with the schools, or the city council or the local liquor store (shortening store hours on Sunday? Really? Don’t they understand that Sunday afternoons are immediately followed my Monday mornings?) I’ve always received positive responses from people around town after my letters appear. With this in mind, maybe all these years I’ve been overlooking the most effective way to get my point across to my own people: in writing.

To be honest, I’ve already ventured into this area and it went well. I recently wrote each of our four kids a letter, personalized for their particular stamp on this world, and delivered the letters the night before school started. I just wanted to tell all the children that I’m rooting for them, what with all four in various stages of junior high school this year, and hoping the transition from a busy summer to the agony of sitting in a classroom all day goes smoothly. The result was even better than I had anticipated: two sweet hugs, one bear hug, and one hug accompanied by a handwritten thank you note! 

I’ve decided to really go for it: my first full-length project for my family will be a book. Just in case you’re wondering, you don’t have to be Mitch Albom to write a poignant memoir about a special person, or a special day of the week. With this in mind, I plan to get busy writing Tuesdays with My Foot Up Your Ass as a way of communicating to my kids the importance of, well, just about everything I say. This, in an effort to avoid the kids sitting at my bedside someday, just like Mitch sat at Morrie’s, week in and week out, only I’ll be strapped to mine in a padded cell.

The book will cover a lot of territory. Here’s a sampling of just a few chapters I’ve already begun working on for my kids:

• If You Don’t Feed Clothes to the Monster in Your Closet, He’ll Eat You!
• Your Mess, Your Problem
• Vocal Chords: I Will Remove Yours

Of course, the most important chapter will be, “You Don’t Know How Good You’ve Got It”.

In it, I’ll explain the finer points of living in a house where the most technologically advanced electronic device was a light switch. The house had one TV that received exactly three channels, and it would have been tuned to a kids show exactly never if an adult was home. And there always seemed to be an adult home. Making us play outside for hours and hours at a time. Telling us to get off the phone….the one phone that hung on the wall of the kitchen, which was not in view of the TV in the living room. Not that it would have mattered…

In this chapter, I’d also spend a little time on the topic of alternatives. For example, the alternative to playing outside on a hot day was playing outside on a hot day. The alternative to the food on your plate was no food, period. Let’s not forget talking back. Back in the day, before the authors of parenting books invented “1….2….3…..(insert consequence),” talking back resulted in anything from a glare to a swift smack upside the head, depending on the task at hand, or the distance between the smart mouth and said hand.

My book will have chapters dedicated to my husband, but these will be briefer, because he’s awesome, and because if I ramble on too long, he tends to glaze over, and then we have to start all over tomorrow. His chapters include:

• How Wiping Kitchen Counters Improves Your Sex Life
• Putting Things Back for Dummies
• Football – Whatever
• This is Me Rolling My Eyes at You (a kitchen-sink chapter for anything not covered elsewhere.)

 Just to give my kids a treat, and feed their addiction to screens, I’ll create a website when I’m finished with the book. This will give me a “real time” venue to keep them updated with important announcements (“The next person to ask me a question will regret it”), and late-breaking news (“Grandparents en route! Remove all visible DNA from the bathroom counter, floor and toilets STAT!”)

To make sure it grabs my kids’ attention, and in the interest of full disclosure should an innocent viewer stumble upon www.everyonegetoutofthekitchennow.com, the first thing they will see on the home page is a meowing kitten and a blinking puppy, with this text underneath:

“Welcome to the Lucke-Eagye Family Website.”

Then, the puppy and kitten will fade out, and a skull and crossbones will fade in, along with a quote by the original parenting expert, Dante:

 “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

In addition to news alerts, the website will be full of lighthearted anecdotes, like the one my stepdaughter hurled over the wall the other day, out of nowhere, during a commercial break from Say Yes to the Dress. You know the show….all about women, with commercials aimed at women….

“Lisa, what’s feminine odor?”

I snuck a peripheral peek at my other daughter, who was in the room reading. Her face froze as she ever-so-slightly pulled her book even closer to her face, as if she was reading Braille with the tip of her nose. So, I knew she was listening.

I gave the little inquisitor the five second answer, which I shall not share here, but that must have been satisfactory, since she turned her attention back to the TV and away from me. Then, I split.

Note to self: never watch chick shows with the daughters again. Or, better yet, tell husband the girls are dying to watch an episode of Say Yes to the Dress with him, just cuz. Film the interaction during the commercials. Upload to Facebook. Mwahahahahahaha.

With a website, I can have a Q & A forum, where my kids can pose those awkward questions and I can give them the straight story without them getting embarrassed, or knowing the number of beers it took me to get through it.

The family website will be chock-full of little gems like this, not to mention a few choice images, and maybe some video. I’ve always wanted to secretly film them at their worst and play it back to them. My plan is to catch them arguing as a way of illustrating how stupid they sound. That’s right, I used the S word. If there is any other way to describe the sight of two kids arguing loudly over which one will hold the poop bucket and which will shovel, I would like to know what it is. I think filming them is a perfect way to get them to see how ridiculous their arguments are. Then again, it could backfire, which would be a bad thing. Like an evil déjà vu, I’d have to experience the idiotic moments again and again:

“See, I told you that you were looking at me during breakfast last Tuesday. Look, the angle of your head is directly pointing right at me!”

“No it isn’t! I was looking OVER your SHOULDER, out the window at the BACKYARD!! Rewind – wait – pause it right there! See, I’m looking toward the dog out on the back lawn!”

“That’s not the dog, that’s a deer!”

“No it isn’t! Rewind!”

The video may require some heavy editing. Especially if the camera is rolling when I sneak into the kitchen during dinner and long-neck the last of the Zinfandel while the kids are trying to decide who should put the milk away, the first person to touch it or the last person to use it.

Overall, I think wading into a new method of communication can improve almost any household’s ability to understand one another. With the written word, a person has time to think! There’s no pressure of an immediate, verbal response, or the kids witnessing my skull splitting in two. After all, we leave notes for each other all the time for silly little things, like “I fed the dog,” or “Your mother called, again,” or “I am not upstairs working in my room with the door closed so don’t bother checking.”

Isn’t it about time we started writing down the important things?

Home vs. Away Games: Don't (or do) Try This at Home

Many people who know me also know that my husband and I have no kids every other weekend. We call these “away games,” (thanks to a clever friend whom I secretly refer to as Metaphor Man because of his ability to create unusual and interesting metaphors for pretty much any situation. One day, this person said, “Home or away game this weekend?” I said, “Huh?” Then, he said, “Do you have children with you this weekend, or not?”)

Anyway, everyone with kids knows what home games are like. However, if you have fewer than four children, otherwise known as “in your right mind,” you probably can’t relate to what our home games are like, which means it will be difficult for you to appreciate what our away games are like. So, in the interest of full disclosure, here’s a little background.

Home games are a mixed bag. During “family movie night”, they are a dream: six people sharing a large couch, a few blankets, and a wholesome flick, like Dodgeball. (We love that our kids are getting to the age when we can expand the family video library to movies that do not include voiceovers, talking toys, or communities of backbiting lions.) The take away value of a movie like Dodgeball should not be underrated. Since viewing that movie, I need only whisper the word, “wrenches” and my kids are clamoring for more chores to complete.

Family dinners are also a bright spot to home games. We don’t ruin them with lectures, or ever give the kids bad news during dinner. Dinner is a time when we hear about who did what to whom, and why, on the playground, and allow them to complain about the food without being interrupted with silly admonishments to keep their room clean.

However, there is another side to home games. They can also be a little like Ultimate Cage Fighting, but with a ring full of stoned, idiot-savant badgers. Vicious, chaotic and brilliant one second, blissfully unaware of having any purpose in life whatsoever, aside from eating and sleeping, the next.

Now, for the away games. The kids leave us for the entire weekend. We don’t hear the word “mom” or “dad” for 48 long hours, save for through a cell phone, which is different. There is also much cussing on my part, just because I can. For me, saying “Now where the heck did I set my mother-fucking coffee cup?” just feels right.

The house is empty and silent. There is no sound of “ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?” or “OH MY GOD THIS GAME SUCKS!” coming from my son’s room, where he often can be found amusing himself playing video games online with unknown opponents. Nor do I hear the voices of two ten-year old girls arguing loudly for twelve minutes about who should shut the bathroom drawer – the one who just got something out of it, or the one who needs something in the drawer underneath it. I’m also not treated to the sound of TWO people trying to ask me a question through the bathroom door while I’m concentrating on a crossword puzzle.

One of the few things you can hear on away game weekends is the occasional, and by occasional, I mean every 15 minutes, sound of a cork popping. If you listen very carefully, you might hear muffled sniffles – not as I peer into empty little bedrooms, but while watching a poignant movie without interruption, including the tragic ending that I don’t have to pause in the middle of to gently suggest to the children that they go play on the freeway. I’m just kidding. Everyone knows we don’t have a freeway in our town. Drop in on us during an away game and you may be surprised (but probably not, by now) to learn that underwear drawers are about the only place where you won't find any underwear.

Sure, it gets a little bit sad at times, mainly around 5 p.m. on Saturdays, when we’re floating in the pool, by ourselves, and that garage fridge is so close, yet so very far away…

Let’s get one thing straight: we are not advocating divorce. It wasn’t easy getting to where we are in life. There were plenty of tears, frustration, even anger—until we finally found an affordable mini fridge for the patio.

Seriously, most of our friends have asked us how they can get in on our gig. Others sneer at us, as if we waved our magic divorce wand, and then sat down and wrote our bestselling pamphlet, “How to Get Out of Parenting Every Other Weekend.”

Because we are actually on speaking terms with our exes, friendly even, everyone thinks it’s been a piece of cake. The truth is, we’ve earned every minute of our away games, and if you don’t believe me, have a few more children. Then try step-parenting on for size while you’re at it, which eclipses garden-variety parenting tenfold in terms of difficulty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’m right where I want to be, and someday, I plan to look back on these days from my padded cell and thank the universe for everything it ever blessed me with. My grown children’s therapists will all point out that my team of therapists had it all wrong, and gave me a bunch of bum advice back in the day, which will probably lead to some kind of hideous intervention-style sit down with a future version of Dr. Phil.

Or, perhaps not.

Perhaps our kids will grow up understanding they don’t just have two people who love them unconditionally, but many others who are ready and willing to shed blood, sweat and tears to make them happy. Four sets of grandparents who have hundreds of years worth of combined experience in life, and can’t wait to feed them lollypops for breakfast when we’re not looking and take them to the movies whenever they can.

Therefore, whether you sneer, or are looking for an Away Game Action Plan, here it is:

1. Marry the wrong person. And by wrong, I don’t mean ever-so-slightly-not-suited-for-you-wrong. Really do it up right, and by right, I mean wrong.
2. Get divorced.
3. Work out, whether through mediation, court or via duct tape and a butcher knife, a thoughtful co-parenting schedule that everyone can live with.
4. Now for the tricky part: Meet someone who has completed Steps 1 – 3, fall madly in love, and convince your exes never to deviate from the schedule.
5. Love your kids like crazy when they’re home, have lots of sex and booze when they’re not.

It’s that simple! Be sure not to let me know how it works out.