All Good Parents are Humiliated

I’m not easily embarrassed; self-deprecation has gotten me through more than a few awkward moments. That being said, no one likes being thought of as a weirdo without having some say in the matter. For example, if I pull my pants down at a party, I can manipulate the experience. First off, it’s at a party, I can wait til folks have had enough emotional lubrication this might be the highlight of the evening. I can control how much I show and how I set it up.  Depending on how I handle the situation, I could find myself with invitations to the grandest events in my area. But let’s say, I’m at Bed, Bath, & Beyond browsing through their glorious selection of floral-print shower curtains, and an associate named Hernando jumps out of the curtains and rips my Levi’s right off my lower parts. The situation is not right, I have little time to react, it may scare my fellow shower-curtain explorers, and God only knows what the hell Hernando is gonna do with my trousers. Time and place. (For the record, I’ve never been pantless in a home goods store voluntarily or involuntarily…)

But as most parents will tell you, sometimes you just have no choice but to let your children sabotage your dignity for the sake of the greater good: silence. And as has been pointed out here on numerous occasions, the obstacle of twins makes most tasks a bit more challenging. About a week ago, Jess, the boys, and I traveled to Maine to visit friends who recently had a baby boy. This represented the longest trip---about 80 minutes---that they’ve taken one-way. The trip there was grand. It represented, as the “Welcome to Maine” sign indicates, “The Way Life Should Be”. Quiet, minus the moose.  They slept most of the way, and didn’t do anything that required one of us unfastening our seat belt and slithering to the midsection of the van at 75MPH. The way back, was “The Way Life Should Be If You’re In No Hurry And Don’t Mind Being Pointed At”.

Your children are scaring the wildlife!

I’ll do my best to recount the exact details of the trip home, but my memory is hazy. A lot happened quickly and I’m probably blocking some of it out. We were just crossing into Massachusetts, when the rumble of one of the kids began. We knew we’d be cutting it close to a feeding when we left, but figured Logan and Jackson would fall asleep and hold off until we got home. No such luck. Logan started to cry, then Jackson chimed in. Sometimes you can wait these storms out, but this had escalated to the point of no turning back until food hit their bellies. We were lucky enough to find a diner and a hotel that shared a parking lot off the highway. It was a pretty good sized parking lot, and we went to the back of the restaurant for a little privacy.

Both of us settled, each with a rugrat on our laps and fed them their bottles. Things were OK for a while, but I’m pretty sure Logan’s foot got caught in a steering wheel or some such thing. Anyways, he was pissed off and didn’t want to eat. Jackson, not to be outdone, also started yelling like he needed medical attention. Well ain’t that great? Clearly these two weren’t going to eat, so the secondary mission was to get them to calm down. Problem was, they were still hungry….but wouldn’t eat.

Let me point out how selfish and illogical babies are. They are hungry and refuse to eat, yet they expect ME to fix their problem? Take the nipple, you screaming freak! I know this isn’t a popular opinion, as they are innocent and cute and helpless. But in moments of weakness, I will apply adult-related expectations that they do not display and hold them fully accountable. I come from a long line of assholes…it’s in my blood. Where was I?

So at this point, Jess and I decide to divide and conquer. Both of us are at our limit…and we have already growled at one another. I put Jackson in the stroller and started walking a 20-foot stretch back and forth. Jess held Logan in her arms, swaying and baby talking. What a scene.  At this point, restaurant workers taking trash to the dumpster started to notice the odd family of four taking up the space normally reserved for their joint-smoking privacy. Sorry to harsh your mellow, Cheech, but we got issues. After a good 45 minutes, we finally had them settled enough to try to move on. Since we were at a diner, we figured we should order something to go…we were absolutely starving. I ran into to order, explained the situation to the woman at the counter and begged for the quickest possible selection. I was informed that fries, pulled pork sandwiches and a chocolate frappe wouldn’t take more than five minutes. Perfect! I ran to the bathroom, then back out to the van to relieve Jess who also had to use the facilities.

Ladies weep, babies sleep!

I saw the van driving around the corner. This meant only one thing. They started screaming again, and Jess got the van in motion to hopefully quell the insurrection. She met me, threw the van in park, opened the door and the cacophony of infant rage wafted out. She practically ran past me and said she’d wait for the food. Great. So we started to drive around. To one end of the parking lot, u-turn, back to the rear of the restaurant, u-turn, repeat. After my third lap, I turned on the Sirius/XM hoping music would sooth the savage beasts. Let me tell you, I am no friend of John Mayer. Not that I don’t think he’s talented. He is. But I don’t find that he uses that talent to make the kind of music he could be making. Then again, he shits in a mansion and sleeps til noon on Tuesdays, so who am I to dictate what kind of music he puts out?  All that aside, the acoustic channel was playing “Daughters” by JM, and wouldn’t you know those boys shut right up? God bless you and your sweet alt-pop sensibilities. Now at this point, I could have pulled over figuring the music was enough to calm them down. But that was a risk I just couldn’t take. Furthermore, Jess would be coming out of the diner any second now with our food. (That’s called foreshadowing, kids!)

The five minute deadline had passed, with no sign of my wife or the pulled pork sandwiches. Five minutes turned into ten, which turned into me chalking up the delay to one of two possibilities:

1.    The young lady I talked to had a less-than-accurate pulled pork-to-reality timer.

2.    Jess decided to start a new life as a waitress in this diner and didn’t have the goddamn decency to tell me.

It turned out that, despite the horrible incident around back, my wife was indeed going to remain a part of our family. After the 15-minute mark, I saw her standing in the window. I mouthed the words “What the fuck?” and she volleyed with her famous simultaneous eye roll-jaw drop-head shake. So now my loop-to-loop of the parking lot officially reached weird status. The people dining next to the window, and folks who were loading and unloading luggage at the hotel had seen the bald guy in the van with tinted windows pass a number of times. Mind you, they can’t see that there are two kids in the back. They just see a lonely man in a mini-van. Not an image you ever want for yourself. I could never move to this town…word travels fast in these parts, no doubt.

I’m not exactly sure how much longer it took for Jess to finally emerge with the food, but I can say that the boys remained silent for the duration. She came out of the restaurant and let me be the passenger. Not out of kindness, but because she feared the effect my eating a barbecued pulled pork sandwich while driving would have on our safety and the van's resale value. I reminded her that the menu selection was based on speed, not accuracy.

I urged her to do a couple more loops around the parking lot, so folks could see that I was actually with someone. But she was in no mood to help restore what was left of my good name in this tiny hamlet…she just wanted to get the hell on the road and get home.

"Tell them kids to kiss your grits!"

After scarfing down the sandwich---which was so good that under normal circumstances would have been worth the wait---I sat back contently. However the good times would only last so long. Yep…about 20 minutes later the inconsolable crying made an encore performance. Again, we found a place to pull over and worked like hell to get them into some semblance of calm. Luckily we didn’t have to run laps in the stroller or wait for food, but we did encounter folks who were wayyyy to interested in our lives and not enough in their own…blogged about this earlier this week. About another 20 minutes had passed and we were back on the pavement.

You know how if you’ve been punched really hard in the throat, that you really only need to be grazed in the throat the next time to drop you to your knees? (I’ve seen “Roadhouse” more times than I’d like to admit, so please don’t think I gathered this info firsthand.) Well, that 20 minute stop was the grazing. It wasn’t the worst experience, but for the love of all things holy, couldn’t these guys hold off? It just added to an already miserable experience.

When we finally got home, three hours had elapsed…or an hour-and-forty minutes longer than it should have taken. And because it took so long, we had to prepare the next feed the minute we were done unpacking and settling in. It was a horrid end to what had been a wonderful day. But I suppose, like all things, this was a learning experience. Another rough road any parent has to travel.  Whether feeding in the van, strolling around the dumpster, or attracting the stares of people just trying to enjoy deep fried food, we sliced and diced our personal pride for these kids. Worth it? Sure. But streaking at Bed, Bath, and Beyond sounds like a lot more fun. 

Even with John Mayer music playing over the intercom.