The Players
I’m going to be writing about my family but I want to preserve their anonymity. I could probably just use real first names in my prose and get away with it for a while, but kids are savvy. Who knows when one of them would craft an exotic compound Google query that would produce a link to this page? So, to be on the safe side, I will resort to pseudonyms: ones that are fitting and are easy for me to remember.
Here is a preliminary cast of characters:
· B1 - my ex-wife of seventeen years
· B2 - my second, common law, and soon to be ex-wife of eight years.
· JayWon – my eldest daughter, currently 21, adopted and bi-racial.
· Adie – my youngest daughter, 20, and my only biological child.
· JayToo – my step-daughter, also 20.
· Tenacious – my youngest step-son, 18.
· Perfecto – my eldest step-son, also 21 years of age.
The kids have been the focal point and the center of my life. They are all healthy, smart, and getting good grades in college (with the exception of Tenacious who is still a senior in high school and will be graduating Friday.) They are also too good looking for words.
No one got pregnant, no one did hard drugs, there have been no major car accidents, or late night calls from the local police. Tenacious did get a couple of suspensions in his freshman year in high school, but it was for typical adolescent stuff. He was very young for his grade and was emotionally, an eighth grader. He and a buddy thought it would be a splendid idea to draw (in the words of the assistant principal) "a large detailed rendition of male genitalia" in the wet cement of a new sidewalk in front of the high school. They were so proud of their creation that they annotated their handy-work with their own initials.
Even Barney Fife could have solved this petty crime in time the time it would take to have an extra helping of apple pie from Aunt Bee.
The second suspension came not more than a week later. Freshman were playing a game of "dare" where you have to repeat some physical gesture originally directed towards you. Someone grabbed Tenacious's right breast, so he had to follow suit. Of course he picked a co-ed.
This is a small town, and in the evening while I was reading him the riot act, I asked him who the girl was. When he told me I was sorely tempted to congratulate him on his taste in women, but I bit my tongue, and gave him the standard boilerplate lecture about respecting physical boundaries. That was the last trouble he or any other of our children brought home.
A long time ago when my second daughter was just born, a pediatrician gave her a clean bill of health and said, "Congratulations. Consider yourself the winner of the Lottery." Those words always stuck with me. With the last kid ready to leave for college, and after eight years of working to successfully blend a family, this should be a time for celebration and profound satisfaction. The fact that it isn’t serves as an unflattering commentary of the dysfunction of their self-absorbed baby-boomer parents.
I sometimes wonder if kids should be offered insurance protecting them from the follies of their parents. Maybe Hillary should include it into her domestic platform.