Michaela
My brother is currently spending a semester abroad in Vienna, Austria. Before leaving he offered the idea of my visiting him alone. When I proposed this to my parents, their eyes filled with hope and adoration at the thought of a culturally engaging and potential bonding experience for their son and daughter. And much to my surprise, my father did not display symptoms of a cardiac arrest at the thought of his 17-year-old daughter traveling 4,144 miles across the Atlantic Ocean by herself.
Based on this reaction, one would assume that when I asked my parents several weeks later to go to Indiana over winter break they would not think twice before saying yes. However, their response would have made you conclude that I was asking to go to a different country by myself. … Oh, wait. This immense difference in their attitude was due to nine letters: B-O-Y-F-R-I-E-N-D. The boyfriend, mind you, whom I have known for five years now and have been dating for almost two. I was justifiably enraged by their irrational decision-making and thus a ferocious debate began.
One night, my parents told me that the three of us would be going to dinner with a couple that my father knows through work. I was at first reluctant to “fifth wheel” the dinosaur reunion, but I reluctantly blessed them with my presence. Right off the bat, my mom decided to humiliate me by explaining the controversy to these two strangers (to me) using several alternative facts.
“Michaela is upset because we won’t let her stay in a hotel room in Indiana with her boyfriend for a week.”
My dad immediately leapt to my defense, telling them that I merely wanted to visit him, not to shack up in a hotel room for week.
NOT!
In reality, he slithered down into the booth across the table from me and avoided eye contact in the manner of a bird that has just flown into a windshield. However, even after this embarrassing betrayal, I won. See, my mother had unwittingly assumed that all parents are as illogical in their parenting methods as she and my dad. She was (not so happily) surprised when her “ally” sided with me.
“If you trust her and believe that she is responsible then unless there is a serious concern that you are putting her into danger, you need to give her some freedom.”
One would think that my parents, bright as they are, would look at their soon-to-be 18-year-old daughter who (not to toot my own horn) is driven, responsible, and has never broken their trust, and see this on their own. But they are getting old and at some point, as my mom likes to point out, you have to swallow your pride, put on the reading glasses and read what’s in front of you. Needless to say, my flight leaves Friday.
Michael
“As long as I’m living my baby you’ll be.” This was the refrain from a book that I used to read to Michaela every night for the first nine years of her life. During that time when she would run to the door to loop her arms around my knees every night, it seemed impossible that she would ever be anything but my baby. Nine more years have blinked by and my baby girl is just a few months shy of 18. Last year she began dating a senior in high school, who went off to college in Indiana at the end of the summer. She has seen him when he comes home on breaks, but it is always like ripping off a Band-Aid when he has to fly back.
So it was inevitable that the question would come up, and it did, repeatedly, almost as soon as the wheels were up on her boyfriend’s outbound flight after the Christmas break. “Can I go out to Indiana for winter break?” She may as well have been asking me if it were okay to declare her childhood over. The words stung like the purple tentacles of a Portuguese man-of-war.
“No problem as long as mom flies out with you,” I suggested helpfully.
“No, I want to go by myself.”
“Sure. Next February.”
“But you let Caelan go all the way to Virginia to see Logan when he was a year younger than I am.”
Guilty as charged. In fact, we had allowed her older brother to take a train down to Virginia by himself when he was 16 years old to spend a spring break with his girlfriend. But that did not mean I had to double down on bad precedent. I pointed out that Logan’s dad was with his daughter under their roof during the entire visit: I would be 850 miles away.
“You need to trust me, Dad. In six months I am going to be living in a dormitory surrounded by boys.”
The mantra has continued for weeks, as inexorably as waves rolling onto shore.
“So have you guys made up your minds?” she asked the other day, meaning, have you caved in yet? My wife is a licensed clinical social worker who deals with teenage issues all the time. She told me that we needed to trust Michaela to make her own decisions, but ultimately, she was deferring to me. As long as I made the right decision. I ran it past one of my best friends, who told me: “Have a little faith in her. Let her go, as she is in the process of letting you go.”
And so we will let her go to Indiana, and I suspect to farther flung places in the coming years. She needs to find her place in the world. But I hope my sweet girl will always remember, wherever she is, that as long as I’m living my baby she’ll be.
Michaela
In my 17 years I have noted that people tend to believe that spontaneity is a favorable attribute, something to seek in a friend or spouse. In reality, it is an atrocious character flaw. I simply cannot wrap my head around why this trait would be alluring to anyone.
My family is one of the most “spontaneous” groups of people you could find. From deciding on a whim one Thursday afternoon to grab the grandparents and drive 1,200 miles to Florida, to missing the class party on my 100th day of kindergarten because six inches of fresh powder were sitting atop Magic Mountain waiting to be carved by my family’s skis, little room is left for solid plans in the Kerin household. This is laughable considering 50% of the family is comprised of control freaks whose lives revolve around devising and executing meticulous plans.
A prime example of this “spontaneity” can be seen in the literal last-minute cancellation of a trip to one of my top schools. Ironically, my mother and I had planned the trip on Columbus Day weekend, months in advance. I say “ironically” because as already noted we rarely make actual plans in my family; so predictably, the one time we bought plane tickets weeks, rather than hours, before our flight, we ended up deferring the trip.
I was awakened the morning of our departure by my parents’ loud chattering in the hallway. They must have heard my covers ruffle because seconds later my dad whipped my door open, flicked on my light, and started talking to me at a normal volume and speed as if I’d been awake for hours.
Really Dad?
He proceeded to explain that due to “dangerous weather” my mom and I were not going to fly and we were instead going to visit schools in Connecticut.
Somehow our college weekend turned into a quick swing through Storrs (the location of the University of Connecticut) followed by an overnight at a lake house in the middle of nowhere. The A frame is owned by the second craziest man I know, my dad earning the distinction of first place in that category, namely Tom, one of my dad’s best friends.
Although I was not overly excited about the change of plans, that weekend was amazing. We sat on the porch for hours singing along to Taylor Swift songs (yes, the “we” includes my dad and Tom who were jamming out to T-Swizzle, and I have video-proof of it). We ate delicious Polish food that people who live across the lake brought over in their boat. We danced on the porch until we nearly lit our hair on fire in the tiki torches lighting the deck. We even saw a mythical sea creature emerge from the eerie lake waters which, as it turns out, was really just one of Tom and Sarah’s neighbors sneaking up to the dock on his paddle board. We ended the night by diving into the dark freezing water.
Sometimes I guess the best things in life really are those that we could never plan for.
Michael
Plans change fast for the Kerins. When you spend your summers living on a boat and your winters skiing you are always subject to the vagaries of Mother Nature. You have to develop a little fluidity in your plans. Sometimes going with the flow means you have to suddenly unpack a truck full of sweaters and ski gear, and repack it with bathing suits and sunscreen, when there’s a forecast for a week of rain up north. These minor deviations, okay 1,200 mile detours, are occasionally a necessary evil.
So Michaela was not pleased when we were obliged to nix her trip down to New Orleans because Hurricane Nate was barreling through the Caribbean with its sights set on the Big Easy. As a consolation prize, I thought we could look at some schools in New England, even though Michaela had vowed not to go to a school her parents could drive to in one day. My buddy, Tom, had, coincidentally, invited us to stay with him on an island at Lake Williams, about 12 miles from U Conn.
She was unimpressed as we drove through the rolling farmland of Northeastern Connecticut that morphed into a bustling campus of 32,000 students. But incredibly, she ran into two friends who were originally, like Michaela, reluctant applicants, but whose unbridled enthusiasm for their new home was apparently contagious as Michaela was beaming by the time we drove away from the campus.
Tom and his 16-year-old daughter, Sarah, met us at the dock on the mainland in their motorboat so they could ferry us out to the island as the sun slid behind the trees across the lake, lighting up the sky in a raspberry sherbet swirl that seemed to brighten defiantly before surrendering to nightfall. Four neighbors arrived in a pontoon boat, joining our impromptu party on Tom’s porch, as Taylor Swift blared from a speaker and the five girls started to shake, shake, shake to her sick beat. At one point someone ghosted across the lake, his paddle board all but invisible, just another neighbor approaching.
The next morning, the four of us, plus Tom’s Lab, piled into a canoe whose bottom sloshed with an alarming amount of water. We all tried to squeeze our bottoms onto the aluminum braces that clamped the sides of the boat together, but whenever Tom turned the little electric motor one way or the other the canoe tipped precariously. We had to lower our center of gravity and quickly. Michaela must have sensed that I was going to enlist her as a volunteer because she threw a beach towel onto the floorboards, then more or less nudged me off of the aluminum strut onto towel. “Thanks, dad,” she giggled. My jeans stayed dry but only for the few seconds that it took before the towel was fully soaked.
We said goodbye and headed south on 395 toward New London until Mickey announced there was a better likelihood of her going to school on Mars, so we spun around and pointed north toward Boston.
I wish that kid would stick to a plan, just once.
Michaela
If you are like most of my friends, you had your first, second, and third dream colleges, along with safeties, memorized since you were a freshman. However if you’re like me, when someone asked where you were looking, you spontaneously chose names that rolled off of your tongue like “Quinnipiac” or something that matched your outfit like “Brown,” until you actually looked at schools and formulated an idea of what you were looking for.
In April, my parents took me on a five day college road trip. My mom and I had planned the trip months before, scheduling tours at several schools in Delaware, D.C., Virginia, and North Carolina. We made sure to coordinate our agenda in such a way that we would have time for a guided tour of each school with extra time to explore the campuses on our own. Well, we certainly had extra time to explore as we successfully missed every single tour that we had scheduled. My dad likes to blame me for missing the tours, claiming that my inability to get dressed and ready quickly was the ultimate cause of our tardiness at the schools. However, if we didn’t have to circle around the parking lot of our hotels four times every morning while the dinosaur learned how to use his “iPhone GPS” we may have had a better chance of making it to a tour on time.
Surprisingly, making it to the schools was the easy part: maneuvering through the campuses while attempting to pretend that the weird, tall guy in the bright orange shorts and the fur-lined crocs was not my father was the harder part. It only got worse when he opened his mouth. One morning, we arrived at the University of Virginia, late of course, where hundreds of people spilled out of a huge auditorium, but somehow the three of us managed to cram into a nook in the vestibule. After a few moments of looking around and sizing up everyone, my dad turned to me with a mischievous grin and not-so-quietly remarked: “Hey, I’m pretty confident that I am the coolest dad in this room right now. I mean, look at me!” Come on dad, I would like to say that there was a time when the “Hairless Potter glasses” and hiked up-shorts were in, but Mom assures me there was never such a time.
After missing our tour and latching onto someone else’s already over-crowded tour in progress, we wanted to get a quick bite to eat on the patio of a Georgetown café overlooking the Potomac.. After waiting for nearly 45 minutes, my dad asked me what I ordered, insinuating that my order caused the delay.
“A quesadilla and a salad.” I answered.
“Quesadilla. That means ‘house of the day’ in Spanish. Casa día.”
No Urkel, not even close. Really Dad?
Michael
“Dad, can you please not yell: ‘Hey Mick, are you okay?’ when I don’t come out of the bathroom instantly?” my daughter pleaded as we walked into the lobby of the Walt Whitman rest stop of the New Jersey Turnpike. Like I’m some kind of over-protective weirdo. We were on our way home from our college tour through some of the Southern Atlantic colleges on the Thursday before Easter. I hit the men’s room, shuffled around the lobby watching the steady progression of humanity flow through the rest stop, thinking it was not a safe place to linger. I poked my head into the foyer of the ladies’ room, if that’s even the correct name anymore, and shouted: “Hey Mick, you okay?” More than a couple sets of eyeballs glared at me.
Someone from the recesses of the bathroom yelled “Freak!” although I couldn’t tell whether it was Michaela.. Usually, I just enlist the assistance of a good Samaritan to wander in and ask if there is a Michaela in the bathroom, but with the irritated looks I was getting from the potential volunteers, I had no choice but to call again, “Mick?”
“You freak show, dad,” was the hoarse whisper that was unmistakably my daughter. .Now I could relax.
Like all the best laid plans, our meticulously “Mapquested” adventure was doomed from the get-go by a combination of factors that conspired against us. We missed our official Georgetown tour because of DC’s tangled traffic, but managed to merge inconspicuously (or so I thought) with a tour already in progress. The ebullient guide interrupted her canned spiel when she spied our arrival saying: “Welcome. Glad you could join us!” I fought off the urge to introduce ourselves as the Griswold family, but my little Audrey, I mean Michaela, was already looking for a large rock to crawl under, so I settled for a dorky wave.
We missed the American University tour later that afternoon because of a lackadaisical waiter. No great loss because as soon as we rolled onto campus Michaela crossed the school off her list. “How did you spend two years here, Dad?” I wondered the same thing as we sliced southwest across Virginia to Charlottesville where we checked into a hotel three mile from the campus of the next school, confident we would be on time for our 8:30 am tour the following morning.
Wrong again. Despite my repeated entreaties to coax my girl out of the hotel, I couldn’t end the fashion show in front of the mirror quickly enough. My stylish daughter was one of the last prospective students to saunter into the UVA amphitheater, where the Dean of Admissions reminded us that in 16 months we would be saying goodbye to our daughter as she embarked on her academic journey. I could feel Michaela looking up at me, reading my thoughts, as she looped her arm through mine, oblivious to the crowd of her peers surrounding us.
Michael
For the first seven or eight years of Michaela’s life, we did not subscribe to cable, and the only entertainment we played on our 12 inch television screen consisted of Blockbuster videos and the occasional recorded VCR tapes of American Idol that Lisa’s mom would mail up from Alabama because of her growing concern that our kids were being culturally deprived by not knowing who Kelly Clarkson or Adam Lambert were. My idea was that the kids could not miss something they never experienced. I dreamt that the kids would be hunkered down in their rooms transported to exotic places by Jules Verne and Daniel Defoe, their journeys limited only by their imaginations.
What a long slide down the slippery slope since that Super Bowl weekend years ago when I sprang for a whopping 24 inch screen and plugged in cable. “The Bachelor”? Really Michaela? Who watches that contrived nonsense about some two-time loser playing tonsil hockey with 30 women, agonizing over who goes home and who gets a rose? Michaela and my wife, that’s who. So unless I want to sit by myself in the living room reading a book, I have to listen to Nick the nitwit philosophize about whether the third time will be a charm. Thank God, after bedding three of the contestants, one before the show began and two during the climax of the season, he was able to select his soul mate. Now if he can only find his soul.
Ever since my son left for college a couple of years ago, I have been consistently out-numbered whenever there is a vote for a television program. So I am relegated to watching chick flicks like “This is Us” or “Vampire Diaries”. If I try to watch something a little more hard-hitting like NCIS, my wife will boycott the show claiming there is too much violence. And if I turn on “48 Hours” or “20/20” Michaela will storm out of the den horrified that I am so absorbed by these redundant murder mysteries.
On the increasingly rare weekend nights that Michaela graces us with her presence, I crank up the wood stove, and scan the latest movies available “On Demand” while simultaneously checking the “Rotten Tomatoes” rating on my I Phone. Apparently it annoys Michaela that, unlike her, I don’t just pick movies by how cute their title is (how did “Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Squeakquel” work out?) but I have found some real gems that way. It is not my fault you have to read subtitles for most of them.
There is hope for us: last night we watched a Planet Earth Two episode and loved it. It was Mother Nature’s version of “The Bachelor” in which male komodo dragons fight ferociously over their mutual girlfriend until one of the giant lizards is wrestled into submission, the winner earning his rose. Who would have thought that two reptiles slapping each other silly with their tails could restore harmony in the household? And happily, unlike our friend Nick, the Bachelor, these lizards mate for life.
Michaela
Most nights, after we have finished dinner, my family unwinds watching a one hour T.V. show in the living room. This means that we all have to agree upon which On Demand show we will play each evening. You would think that with a social worker and a lawyer as parents, coming to any sort of compromise would be a breeze. You would think wrong. My mother, the tender and loving hand that guides her clients to a middle ground day in and day out, is ruthless. And my dad, a man literally paid to negotiate, is like a toddler fighting over a toy. My mom pulls the “I never get to sit down and watch with you guys; can we please watch something I enjoy this once.” Interesting. After religiously following several seasons of “The Voice” per her request, I would have guessed that we watched it more times than “this once.” Then the whining begins in my other ear, “Mick, I’ve had a very stressful day, I just want to relax.” Well jeez, with this level of exasperation, my advice is to never become a solo-practitioner because if every day is that trying, it can’t be worth it. He just wants to watch “Cool Cool LJ” which, in my father’s language, translates to his favorite cop show, NCIS: Los Angeles, featuring the actor LL Cool J. Really Dad? You could at least make an effort to say the name right.
Now that you have the teams, I’ll give you the play-by-play. Dad’s move first: he waits, silently pouting, until we announce that we will be watching my choice, “The Bachelor” and then he pounces. First complaining, followed by a threat to go to bed, roping mom in for the defensive move. Mom comes in, guns blazing, frustrated that we can’t come to a consensus. First, she yells at dad for not spending time with the family, then it’s my fault, “You knew he was going to do this, let’s just watch his stupid show so he’ll be happy.” Then dad with the assist, “Yeah Mick, come on!” The crowd goes wild: dad wins yet again! This defeat would probably be much more disappointing if my dad wasn’t going to fall asleep any minute.
…4…3…2… “This is The Voice!” Sleep tight daddy.
Michaela
When I walked into school the morning after Donald Trump was announced the President-elect, it was for lack of better words, a crap show. After wading through the hallways of quicksand that seemed to weigh down my peers, I entered the classroom of one of my teachers whom I respect immensely. I sat down in my seat across the room from her, shocked to see that she was crying. She sat like a child, grasping tissues and shaking as the sobs rippled through her body. Then I looked up at the smart board in the front of the classroom. On it, in bold font, was a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I interpreted it to be an ominous message from a despondent Cassius, who was contemplating his own suicide as a means to escape Caesar’s tyranny.
Really, dad? Why all the hysteria? The problem is not Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, or any of the polarized demographic/social classifications that the media has created to separate us: Hispanics, African Americans, educated whites, uneducated whites, pro-life, pro-choice, gay, straight, pro-guns, anti-guns. The problem in America is that all of these categories have been emphasized so much by the media that we forget we are all Americans. The media loves to stick these labels on us that by definition separate us rather than focusing on things that bring us together as Americans.
However you may have arrived in America, you live in the “Land of the Free.” Americans are blessed to live in a nation as promising and successful as this one. So whether or not your candidate won, we have to embrace the results and be grateful to live in a country where this democratic process is alive. Sure, Donald Trump may not be the most attractive presidential candidate, but the fact of the matter is, in a nation of nearly 325 million people, it is impossible to satisfy everyone.
I am 16 years old. But I know when the day comes and I am the role model, standing in front of a room of children looking for any glimmer of hope in my eyes, I will give it to them. I will not cry because the candidate that I believed was “less corrupt” did not win. I will always be grateful to live in a nation that gets to decide its own fate, even when it is unexpected and disappointing. And the lesson that Julius Caesar will help me teach is: “Now bid me run and I will strive with things impossible.” So please, hold your head up, say the Pledge of Allegiance, and believe it.
Michael
How do I explain this election to Michaela? How is it that the same throngs of middle Americans who voted for President Obama twice just elected a candidate whose campaign was built on promises to undo all of his predecessor’s accomplishments? How was it that a real estate mogul who builds penthouses and exotic golf courses was embraced by a basket of unemployed rust-belters who could afford neither his rent nor his greens fees? How could a crotch-grabbing, Muslim hating, tax-evading, race-mongering bully, who picked a fight with the Pope, get elected to the highest office in the land?
Because when they listened carefully, above the din of his vulgar, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic vitriol, they heard what they wanted to hear: a promise for change. Even if they were afraid to articulate it in public, enough people living in the right electoral swathes of the country wanted the American Dream to work for them again, even if the details of his plan were scant. So these people went into the polling booths, held their noses, and voted for change, terrified about what that change might look like.
Where do we go from here? I would suggest that we do not go where many of our institutions of higher learning have gone. Hampshire College has decided not to fly American flags over their campus because, in the words of the college spokesman, for some of the students, “the flag is a powerful symbol of fear they’ve felt all their lives because they grew up as people of color, never feeling safe.”
Following the election, classes in colleges across the country were cancelled so that grieving students and faculty could come to terms with …oh yeah, the results of an election. If only the wounded veterans who sacrificed arms and legs and their sanity to ensure our blessings of liberty could receive the same immediate mental health treatment afforded to the whining students who have the luxury of nurturing their petty grievances.
I would also suggest we do not go where the media has gone and appears to be going.
Until election night, the Republican candidate was never perceived as a direct threat to the ascendancy of the heir apparent, the one who had been anointed by the media, and for whom the election was a mere formality. Only a homogenous group of liberal, self-inflated elitists could have insulated themselves so fully from the foul mood among so many Americans. For a day after the election, there was much hand-wringing and soul searching, but now the media is back to casting aspersions and finger pointing.
Perhaps the media and other malcontents like Whoopi Goldberg and Smiley Virus (both of whom are still residents of these United States last I checked) should adopt the more conciliatory tone modeled by our current commander-in-chief in accepting and honoring the sanctity of our democratic process.
Despite the freaks at the fringes of both sides of the political spectrum, this is still the best country in the world to call your home. I was reminded of this at a Thanksgiving road race when the National Anthem was being piped out of the speaker with almost no accompaniment. Suddenly the canned recording malfunctioned, and there was one awkward beat of silence. Then 500 voices came alive together, spontaneously. “Oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We looked at one another feeling something I am pretty sure none of us had felt in this election cycle. United.
Michael
My wife, Lisa, had to go out of town on short notice a couple of weeks ago. It was just Mick and me for seven days. I felt a niggling doubt that I hadn’t experienced since we left the hospital 16 years ago with our baby girl when I wondered: “Now what do I do?” How hard could this be, I wondered. Single parents do this 24/7/365.
So on Monday morning I get up at 6 a.m., knock on Mickey’s door, hear her muffled plea for “five more minutes” then brush my teeth, knock on Michaela’s door again, hear her mutter “I’m up” in a husky voice. I shave, rap on the door again, flip on the light in her room and yell: “Michaela Elise!”
“I’m getting up, Dad,” she mumbles, but there is still no movement from behind the door.
It was apparent I had to roll out the big guns. If you don’t get up right now, your boyfriend can’t come over.” A nanosecond later I hear her feet padding across her bedroom. And then, just as predictably as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, Michaela asks, “Dad, can you let T-Bone out for me?” I see the fluffy fury circling around the braided rug in the hallway, like a plane looking for a place to land. I scoop him up to bring him down the stairs, not willing to mop up or pick up one of his premature releases.
About the time I get back inside with T-Bone, Mickey yells downstairs to ask if I can make her a chai and some cinnamon toast which she will undoubtedly leave unfinished in the truck after she disembarks for school. I stumble around the kitchen flipping her bread into the toaster, blending my banana, berries and protein in the Ninja, stepping over our golden retriever who is, as always, camped out in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then I select my suit, tie, shoes and towel so that I can shower after my track workout. I pack my soup, sandwich and apple in a paper bag, just as Michaela flitters past me, a supermodel lithely stepping off the runway in Paris. She stuffs her books in her backpack, grabs her coffee and toast, as she makes a beeline for the door.
“Can you put T-Bone in his kennel?” she asks, slamming the storm door before I can respond. I am just latching the door to the kennel when I hear the horn blasting in the driveway. I fill dishes with water and food when the horn blares again.
I lock the front door and stride across the driveway to the driver’s side of the truck, but Michaela is already behind the wheel, anxious to get in as much practice as possible before she takes her driver’s test in January. I walk around the truck to the passenger side.
“You are going to make me late, Dad,” she snarls.
When we arrive at the rear entrance of the school, I ask her to park in the back lot so that I can run on the track before going into the office. It is the only hole in my schedule today. We get out of the truck, and I walk with her the hundred yards to the track, donned in my shorts, fluorescent green shirt and loud running shoes, as a steady procession of cars passes us. Michaela hangs her head as if it is raining, walking at a brisk pace.
“Do you have an exam this morning?” I ask, wondering why she seems so somber. She grimaces as if to say, “Really, Dad?” But instead, she says: “I KNOW all of these kids!” cutting her eyes over to the line of cars slowly rolling toward the school. “And you’re dressed like a freak show.”
“So I guess a kissing hand is out of the question?” I ask, grabbing her hand and pulling it half way up to my lips before she twists away from me and jogs ahead.
“You’re such a goober, dad.”
An hour and a half in the books, and, yep, I am crushing this Mr. Mom thing.
Michaela
A few weeks ago, my mom went to visit her family in L.A., lower Alabama that is, or the “Redneck Riviera” as my dad likes to call it. With mom away and the boys at college, I was on my own. Technically, I was being “supervised” by my father, but as the week unfolded, it became clear that his supervision was neither super nor sighted: in fact, I felt like I was on a ship being steered by a blind captain. Suffice it to say, the week without mom was a little bumpy.
Recently, in a television show that I like to watch, a woman gifted to her significant other a plant as part of a test to see whether her partner would make a good parent. She was going away for a business trip and wanted to see how well he would and/or could take care of the plant. Based on the way our week went, my mom DEFINITELY should have invested in a daisy or two before starting a family with my dad.
The seven days can be summed up in one symbolic scene: Dad feeding the dog. One night I was sitting at the bar table doing some homework when my dad came in and offered to feed the dogs since I was engrossed in my work. Don’t be fooled, he only made this gesture because he was sucking up after not allowing me to have a friend over because I “had too much work to do.” That was a pretext—the real reason being there wouldn’t be enough time for us to have a “cuddle session” while watching TV later if I didn’t get my work done.
A few minutes after my dad had banged around near the dogs’ bowls, I heard T-Bone whining. A frustrated T-Bone was frantically trying to consume the perfectly-oval-shaped chunk of meat that had been carelessly plopped onto a paper plate and tossed onto the floor. He was futilely pushing the plate across the floor because he couldn’t sink his teeth into the pre-formed hunk of meat.
Really Dad?
T-Bone is a smart dog, but he hasn’t quite mastered the use of the fork and knife. I mean, come on. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, by patiently asking: “Dad, did you consider cutting up the food for T-Bone so that he could chew it?” After all, I always mince up the food with a disposable spoon before offering it to my Bobo.
“The dog can’t bite it? Maybe I should have put it in one of my shoes—he rips those apart with no problem.”
I can only imagine what it was like when I was a baby. “What Li, she can’t eat an apple on her own? I see some teeth breaking through her gums. Why doesn’t she use them?”
It’s common sense. If the object of consumption is bigger than the consumer’s head, chances are, they cannot eat it.
Speaking of eating, the meals while mom was away were interesting, to say the least. One night, my dad asked if I wanted “vegetarian Thai curry,” which sounded great. I was puzzled when my dad placed a black plastic container filled with a soupy swirl of chickpeas in front of me. I forced a smile and held my nose so that I could swallow a few bites of the steaming mess.
You’d think that after all of the time my dad spent in postgraduate study, racking up the degrees, he would at least know how to pick out some good microwaveable meals.
Really Dad?
One day during my mom’s absence, my dad bought a cluster of bananas and instead of hanging them on the hook, he skewered one of the bananas through the skin, so that by the next morning all five of the bananas were partially unpeeled, and blackening as a swarm of fruit flies descended upon them.
I realized this was a perfect metaphor for my mom’s place in the family. She is the hook that holds our bunch of bananas together: without her we are unhinged.
I still let my dad think he’s top banana. Sometimes.
Mike Kerin is a lawyer in Milford, and his daughter, Michaela, is a student at Amity High School. In their column, this father and daughter bicker and banter about boys, curfews, homework, stress at school, dress codes, and a host of other issues that represent the jagged edges of adolescence which they must navigate every day, sometimes with humor, sometimes with sarcasm, always with love.
