Don’t get me wrong, Serge is an amazing dad and his kids are lucky to have him. But he’s just pulling a freakin’ wagon. What’s with him doing next to nothing and getting praised to the high heavens like he just lifted a truck off a toddler? And it happens all the time. It happened all the time even before now. But this single dad thing? Every Band-Aid administered, every incident of baby-wearing, every act of parenting becomes EPIC.This of course gives me an excuse to break out two excerpts from my long-awaited, soon-to-be-self-published-much-to-Marley’s-chagrin debut novel, which of course I will soon be badgering you people to buy (actually reading optional, of course):
You want to know what happens if I post a photo of me taking my kids for a walk? Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
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Watty getting credit for changing a diaper was absurd to me. He’s the father - if he didn’t want to change it, he didn’t really have to. After all, he’s not going to get fired. If a father’s watching his own child (what a great guy!) and the mother comes home to discover the kid had a dirty diaper, she changes the diaper. The father could even say “Oh yeah, I haven’t even checked in a while, I got caught up watching the game.”
But if mom or dad came home to the Manny and discovered a load in the kid’s diaper they’d assume it hadn’t been changed all day, and obviously the Manny had been goofing around on porn sites and making prank phone calls for eight hours instead of watching the kid. Never mind that maybe The Manny had changed the shittiest diaper of its generation at 4:55pm and the kid inexplicably shit again five minutes later as the parent was walking through the door; it was taken for granted that the kid had been basting in his own feces for hours due to The Manny’s negligence.
I always timed the day’s last change as closely as possible to when the first parent came home. Hell, I could’ve just waited until 4:59pm to change the kid for the only time all day and the parents would’ve been happy, no questions asked. Of course, thanks to the hyper-attentiveness of the greatest Manny in the world, I never did such a thing.
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I could sense everyone was starting to get annoyed at Chuck’s barking and wanted to give me dirty looks, but this was one of those times when it actually paid to be a guy. A mother would be expected to nonchalantly juggle four kids on her lap while knitting winter caps and handing out juice boxes, and if one of those kids so much as let out a peep everyone would get bitchy and roll their eyes, thinking “control your damn kids!”
But a man with a baby? Hell, everyone was mildly surprised I’d been able to put pants on the kid before bringing him outside the house, much less take him anywhere on the train. I’d put on my harangued, beleaguered “oh my god I’m so helpless” face, and everyone gave me a pass.
“Poor bastard,” they’d think, “look at him, doing his best. God bless him. And where the hell is the mother? That bitch!”
I perfected my “woe is me” act the same way other guys practiced their air guitar moves: in front of the bathroom mirror. And when it came to putting on this little show I was, simply put, the best.
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