Stay-at-Home Dad Survival Guide My Little Drunk Buddy
My Little Drunk Buddy
Sunday, 31 January 2010 01:50
Some call it "parenting."
It feels like shepherding a friend in the middle of a bad bender.
He’s ecstatic, laughing, happy to see you. But he’s moody. One thing goes wrong and he throws a bottle at you. He keeps ‘em stashed all over the house; grabs ‘em, sucks ‘em dry and flings ‘em to the ground in disgust. He’s a two-year-old in “The Lost Weekend.” He bumps into walls. Falls on the floor. Stairs are terrifying. You watch him like a hawk for fear he’ll damage himself.
Yet, a guy's gotta pee. Just be gone a moment, right? You’re alone. He’s alone. It’s quiet. Too quiet. Panic strikes. You rush out of the bathroom unbuttoned, stumbling, only to find him happily rolling on the floor making goo-goo eyes at the cat.
It’s like he’s perpetually stoned. He’ll dig random bits of food out of the trash. When he’s hungry, and he’s always hungry, or at least always putting crap in his mouth, he’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants. He's relentlessly self-destructive.
At times he shows amazing promise. He opens the door, walks outside, takes a look at the sunshine, and smiles like it’s the first day of the rest of his life. He’ll turn things around and amount to something great some day. Then, in an instant, he's shrieking, “Bottle! Bottle!!” and is inconsolable until he gets one. He thrusts it into his mouth and drinks greedily as if he’ll never drink again.
So here I am: nanny, mentor, food-feeder, diaper-changer, putter-to-sleeper. The sober friend of a pathetically intoxicated 30-pound staggering ball of terror. His favorite game is Sit-on-the-Cat. He eats soup with his hands, then runs his fingers through his hair. If you leave the seat up, the toilet becomes a self-service baptismal font. All dogs belong to him. In short, he’s like every other toddler on the planet.
Yesterday, I took two minutes to check email, during which time he found a bag of peanuts. Slobbery shells, crushed nut particles, paper-thin brown peanut coverings littered the room and him. I stood trying to recall how many times - in books, classes, and in conversations with more diligent parents - the word “peanut” was used in conjunction with the words “choking hazard."
Over and over, I think to myself, “I can do this better.” Then I think, “If I spend another month pulling his hands out of his own feces, I’m gonna go bonkers.” The months go by fast, though. It’s the individual minutes and hours that seem to take forever. Ah, yes, good times. Hanging with my little drunk buddy. Er, I mean “parenting.”