Life in the Box

Imagine a house. Find an empty shoebox. Grab some scraps of this and that. Throw it together and what have you got?

A box house.

I love the way a ten-year-old thinks when she is bored. This little contraption resulted from a period when she'd finished her homework, practiced basketball, and exhausted every other diversion around here.

She didn't tell me what she was doing. She just rummaged up the materials and set to work.

Ninety percent of parenting is being there. Another ninety percent (yes, I can do the math) is worrying. I worry all the time. My 14-year-old was back in the E.R. yesterday for the third time recently for X-rays.

First, a head injury. Second, a foot injury. This time it is a finger, which got bent back when another kid hit him with a basketball, apparently as a lark.

An expensive lark. We've not been able to completely pay off the previous two E.R. visits yet. We won't know if his finger is broken until later today. Luckily, it isn't basketball season. Unluckily, it is on his writing and throwing hand.

I can tape it for soccer games, but if it's broken and he has to wear a splint, that may end his soccer season.

Kids! If I could do a chant that would allay my worries, I'd try it. Trouble is stuff keeps happening to them. I guess it's that growing up thing. Making mistakes and all that.

What is to become of the parent from all of this?

Speaking of parents, especially single parents, I can see that it makes absolutely no sense for anyone to ever consider dating them until their kids are grown. There is simply too much baggage in the equation.

The only possible exception would be another single parent. Two single parents able to juggle their parenting with their singleness might make for a workable combination. I've seen it work, or appear to work, for a number of couples.

There is the *rare* single woman who can date a single Dad. Circumstances determine when that can work. It depends a lot on the ex-wife, who has a ton of power, whether she exercises it or not.

Making a man look helplessly manipulated by his ex- is not exactly sexy stuff. Most single women will find better options that to witness such drivel.

I take their point. It's hard to be a parent in a "broken" family nowadays. Boundaries get blurry; favors continue to pass back and forth between the ex's. Sometimes they are good terms; sometimes one or the other goes nuclear.

Still, it is not endless psychodrama between the parents that concerns me, but the strain of witnessing it for a person intimate with one of those same two ex-partner parents.

I've noted many times that marriage is an outdated institution, simply from my personal perspective. A more informal set of arrangements could better define relationships between amorous couples. Getting locked down in a marriage, where every stress has to be fully aired and shared, where raising kids in a world that is only partly friendly to them creates huge new worries and pressures, where earning enough money is about as likely as a hamster ever getting anywhere running on his wheel -- the whole damn experience sucks.

The *only* good thing, at the end of the day, is your relationship with your kids. As you lie awake, sleepless yet again, alone in the dark, wondering why the hell your life turned this way, and fully aware that you have no better future left, the warmth of their love embraces you.

Then, at last, you might sleep before returning to the work of worrying about them, as well as how the hell you're gonna pay all those bills stacking up on your Ikea kitchen table.

Just one guy's opinion.

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