Around this time of year, it never fails.  We get a Christmas card the weekend after Thanksgiving and this year we’ve gotten the package of wrapped gifts.  I am not a big gift person.  I am thankful for any thought and never care about the cost or the perceived quality of the gift.  This year though, we got the box today.  The last Saturday in November.  It feels a bit strange.  Yes, it’s always felt robotic.  Now, it feels like being so early with the gifts is almost like having been checked off of a list.  I feels so depersonalized.  She’s a cold woman most of the time, even to his brother.  She’s from a germanic nation, often confused by the dumber amongst us with Australia.

Over the years, she’s driven a wedge between us by not “allowing” him to participate when we’ve had “guy nights” or to go to sports events that I know he loves.   She’s treated me like a second class citizen for years and now that her husband is “big time”, she’s just concerned with every superficial thing you can imagine.  At the end of the day, they now live far away and I hardly ever see or hear from them.

As if I needed reason to resent her more.  Maybe next year, we’ll truly celebrate Christmas in July.

Today has been a good day (and no, it has nothing to do with sex).

About a week ago, I started getting back into David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” method of “stress-free productivity” and for the last couple of days, I have been getting lots of tasks done in efficient stead.  I have organized my work-related reading.  I have come closer to getting some projects off the ground that I’ve been putting off and I am generally feeling pretty good about it all!

I’m feeling so good that I decided to spend that gift card that my soccer team gave me after coaching them this season.  I went to a local stationery store (yes, they still exist) and bought a $30 Lamy fountain pen and one of those nice European hard cover notebooks.  I’m intent on writing (real, not digital) and I am feeling pretty excited about that.

I am a techie-geek like many guys. I like gadgets but not for the sake of gadgets.  I like them if they make my life easier in some way.  ‘Cool factor’ is extra.  While I do a lot on my smart phone, I have concluded that all of this technology is robbing us of something.  Basically, it’s robbing us of the use of pen and paper and how much our personality shows through.  Writing (for real) can be so personal if you care to do it correctly.

I remember when I was a freshman in college and the first love of my life would write me a letter a week (no email in those days) and I would be so excited to see her handwriting on this nice teeny-girl stationery.  The envelope even had the smell that I’d come to associate with her (that’s a good thing) and it was SO personal that a whole gift of emotion passed back and forth between us simply in the colors of the ink and the textures of the paper.  I miss that.  Letter writing is becoming a fading art.  Actual paper notes are disappearing.

The Digital Age is great but it’s taking something from us and I’m not sure we even realize it.

I’ve lost whatever little sex appeal I used to have.

I have a friend who is single and when she’s bored, she’s been known to take out her nice camera, set up a tripod and goof around taking portraits. Now, it helps that she’s pretty but the point is that being photogenic is part what you’ve got and part what you’ve learned.

You can learn to pose for a camera. You can learn what smiles look best or what angles flatter you. Of course, what you can’t change is what Mother Nature gave you or (to some degree) what Father Time has taken.

I took out my camera yesterday and while I didn’t really set out to do some drawn out photo shoot, I set up the camera and took a few face shots. I thought, “Gee, I’ve got a nice face. Perhaps I can get at least a facebook profile photo out of this…”. After it was all over, I only kept one photo. I got a little down.

I never expected to come out looking like I belonged in a magazine but I’m not happy with what came out. Of course, I have to go through the usual questions. Have I gained weight? If so, is it because I am eating more food, poorer quality food or exercising less? Am I simply showing signs of aging? Am I losing more hair? Am I gaining hair in places that I didn’t use to?

Well, I don’t know. I haven’t gained any weight although I still feel like I need to lose about 15 pounds (I’d kill for 20 but that might be too much). I have lost some more hair on top and even though I am not a hair-obsessed person it’s been commented on recently by a guy at work.

I guess when I look back to my early to mid-30′s, I learned how to dress and in a professional line of work, looking my best…feeling my best and doing my best was great. I found that dressing for success is a lot about how you feel about yourself but also a lot more about how others perceive you too. The former co-worker who I was involved with during my separation/near-divorce admitted that she used to stop in department stores and smell the cologne that I used to wear. She admitted to stopping at men’s shirts and feeling the texture of the dress shirts that she knew I wore.

I guess that I still dress okay but I work in a large work environment and, at some point, us guys in our forties must lose something that we used to have and perhaps that’s because there’s always a fresh supply of young men and women to remind us of how we used to be.

For someone as decidedly unconcerned with personal appearance as I was in my teens and 20′s, it seems like a big setback to be upset over it now. I have to commit to a solution. With the holidays coming up, I feel a big weight struggle coming on as well as the annual psychiatric stress test (with families at holidays) which has already begun.

There is a glaring omission above, however, and that is the issue of the “non-physical” sex appeal. Have I lost the ability to be sexy? I don’t know if all women tie their sexuality into their physical appearance. I know a lot of women who do. If they’re pudgy or have some trait that they feel is physically unattractive, they think all hope is lost and they aren’t sexy enough. Ladies, that simply isn’t true. Being “sexy” is an attitude. Some of the sexiest women I’ve ever known were not perfectly attractive and I will tell you that my first long sexual relationship was with a woman who was short and cute but overweight. There was an attitude about her though that reeled you in big-time. Now, it turns out that she was just (a little bit) mental and I felt like she was going to go “Glenn Close” on me at any time…but she was almost too much to handle. In the interest of full disclosure, she probably had an adolescence/early adulthood that equated intimate acts with “acceptance” but there’s no denying that she had some degree of “it”.

Have I lost that too? I don’t know. I don’t seem to have too many women flirting with me these days. I am not saying that my life isn’t quieter that way but even as recently as two years ago, I could at least look at myself in the mirror and feel good about the fact that I caught some woman “checking me out”. I don’t know anymore. I will be honest and say that I miss the attention. I don’t believe that “ego” is necessarily bad; it’s how you show it. Maybe it’s the grey hairs on the sides or my “salt and pepper” beard but I am still a man inside and it I know it will still feel good when it happens.

I have noticed though that my energy can be directed other places.  I cleared off my desk this morning, paying bills and filing away things that got piled up (for some reason, my desk is the default dumping ground).  I don’t feel stressed out but I must be because in the last two days, I’ve done things that I normally do when I am stressed:

1. I organize.  I am big on straightening out my desk and office area.  I’m a bit of an OCD neatnik that way.  I’m trying to get back to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” method but I find that keeping organized on a smart phone isn’t as easy as paper for some reason.
2. I bought office supplies.  Pens, pencils.  Notepads…like I have tremendous amounts of writing and notetaking to do.
3. Art books.  For some reason, I find reading about art technique to be relaxing.  It’s not the actual art or that I may take to drawing or painting but the reading about “how” to do it seems to relax me.  Taken one step further, I also have some unused art supplies for “when I get around to it”.  Living in a science profession, I find that I don’t have much opportunity to express myself artistically.

So, here I am…clean desk…wondering what to do with the kids while my wife is at work today.  I still have some housework to get to including finally getting my winter clothes out of the attic.  Good days!

Our waitress was the blonde.  She was nice.  It’s just that she had on a very low cut t-shirt with a camisole.  I see women wearing this sort of thing daily but she was a bit different in that her bust was twice the size of her waist.  It did jiggle a bit. “Oh man.  I’m  a shit.” I thought.

I am friendly with female coworkers and I’ve always had good friends that are women.  I am usually pretty good about things like not staring at women’s chests or other features of note.  I guess it’s just me trying to be respectful.  I don’t know what it was about today…I just couldn’t stop looking.   I left there feeling pretty poorly about myself like I’d failed to save the world from nuclear annihilation.  I know that a good friend of mine doesn’t like having her breasts spoken to.   I felt like I’d let her and whole of womanhood down.

I thought about it a lot today and I guess there was no harm done.  She didn’t (to my knowledge) notice.  Then I began to wonder, “Do women gawk at attractive men?” Do they?  Does a woman see a man who suits her tastes and ever stare or lose focus?  I imagine that must happen to some degree.  We’re human, right?

“Did you see the kids?”

“Yes Dad.”

“Were you feeling shy?  I know when I was a kid, I would get really embarassed seeing my classmates in public with my parents (Usually, it’s because immigrant parents always know how to say the wrong thing at just the right time.  If they managed to say the right thing…they didn’t say it right.).  It’s okay if you felt that way.   I would understand.”

He shrugged his shoulders in indifference to the kids.  I guess part of it may have to do with the idea that he’s a late birthday as it is and is one of the youngest seventh graders.  On the other hand, these kids are obviously hanging out with girls and texting girls, etc.    He’s just not there yet.  I’m not saying I’m in a hurry for him to get there but I just want him to be social.

We did have a good day though.  We went out for breakfast.  We played some video games.  We played 1-on-1 hoops in the driveway.

It’s been a good day.  He’s still my little boy in some ways even though he’s now 12.  Do your kids ignore you in public?  Do you embarass them without even trying?

The coaches of the team were the varsity coach along with the JV coach.  The former was quite the yeller while the other coach was more reserved.

At the end of the game that eliminated our team we had been down by 30 points since halftime.  All of the kids on the bench got to play but my son had yet to be subbed.  I was convincing myself that I didn’t care if he got in.  He was lucky to just be a member of the team.  I was not going to be one of those parents.  As the clock kept ticking down in the fourth quarter, it began.  Our friends, whose son is a year older, turned to me and said “He hasn’t put your son in yet!”.  I promised them that there must have been a good reason and that it wasn’t important.  Slowly, however, the buzz began to circulate amongst our parents and the mom of one of other players started heckling for them to put in my son.  At this point, it DID start to bother me.  I don’t know if it was out of embarassment or that they’d just hit the right button with me but I was pretty upset at this point.  The coach did not hear them or at least pretended that he did not.  He’s a guy in his late 20′s who is an alum of the school.   At times, he was more embarassment than anything on the court.

The game ended with my son still on the bench; the only kid not to have gotten into a game that we lost by 35 points.  I walked down from the stands.  The coach had gathered the team in a hallway next to the gym and was giving them some sort of criticism.  I couldn’t hear what he was saying.  Some parents came up and shook my hand apologizing.  I just nodded politely.  I really had a mind to tell this guy off or at least demand some explanation as to why on earth my son didn’t get into the game even for a single minute to say he got on the floor.

I chose not to.  After all, what good would become of it?  I figured my son would be trying out for varsity this year and he was going to be marginal.  I didn’t want to give any ammunition to the coach to take it out on my son.   It’s not like he could fix what he had done.   I took my son in my arms and told him how proud I was of his fighting spirit and how he’d hustled all year long.

That was the right move.

That varsity coach accepted an assistant position in high school.  Some say he left.  Others say he was not invited back.  If so, it certainly was not based on anything that I did or said.  Now, the JV coach was elevated to the varsity and even though he and the other coach were cronies…he took twelve kids out of 25 and my son was the 12th.  He might have been the last one to make it.  He might get marginal minutes this year but he has a coach that respects him, a dad who adores him and a spot on the team that’s all his own.

My Dad had a temper and a loud, booming voice. When he was mad it was quite scary. I remember being 6 or 7 years old and hiding under my bed. I remember hiding in the closet in my room under a blanket. When I got older, I remember counting down the time until I was able to “get out” by going off to college. There was no way I was going to stay home and commute to school.

I can honestly say that I do try my best as a parent. I am far more conscious of the kids being around when there’s an argument (even a little one). My wife generally doesn’t. Last night was not my best moment as a parent. I’ve been a little frustrated with my wife lately. The ongoing libido problem hasn’t improved and lately, it’s been worse. There’s no real difference lately. She isn’t under pressure at work. She’s not stressed out. We had a quiet Friday evening where she rejected my amorous advances. Saturday night, I was refused as well. By Sunday, I was feeling a bit rejected and miffed. Sunday night, she crawled into bed at 8 pm and proceeded to go to sleep.

It was wrong of me to be upset. Clearly, she must be tired (She’s had all of the medical tests for that sort of thing too). I asked if she was going to sleep. She turned away and said “yes”. We proceeded to argue about the lack of romantic “equilibrium”. I’m the one making all of the effort and she just keeps refusing to find time or energy for romance. She started yelling at me about how she did (insert household duties here) and I yelled back about how I did (insert household duties here) and that we shouldn’t keep score. She kept trying to change the subject which aggravated me and that probably escalated things. I decided she could have the bedroom and I’d go watch TV.

From the upstairs, I heard sniffles coming from my daughter’s room. I went up and she was crying. I put my arms around her and she hugged me about as tight as I think she ever has. She was trembling. I kissed her and told her that everything was “ok” and not to worry. Adults argue about things too. Sometimes we yell just like she and her brother do…only we don’t have our parents to tell us to stop. I re-assured her that her needs are still going to be met and that we all love each other and she was (to some degree) okay. My son, on the other hand was crying in his room. Oddly enough, even though he’s older…it took a lot more comforting and explaining and more pep-talk to get him to calm down.

I think that the old rule of not arguing in front of the children is a good one and I reminded my wife of that. In this case, however, our argument became loud and heated. We have to put the stop to that too.

I feel terribly that the kids had to hear that. I suppose it’s part of life that people argue but kids deserve better than to witness that kind of anger.

I think that people can grow apart but more often than not, I think they choose to grow apart.  When I first met my wife, we had many of the same interests and some that we did not share.  I think that the areas in our relationship where there is distance evolved to be that.  Is the other person really different?   Are we different?   The answer is that I do not know.  I used to think that this was just a line but now I’m in my forties with one woman for 15 years and I wonder about how much I do or do not resemble the person she fell in love with.  I wonder how much she has changed.

I’ve stayed in this relationship because I vowed that I would.  In a world full of women, I chose this one.  I chose someone who still can’t pick up after herself.  I chose someone who insists on loving me in her way and not mine.  Yes, there’s times when I still feel like a roommate and I find things incredibly irritating.   Is this different than the woman I met all those years ago?  On some level, yes.  She had far fewer responsibilities in life back then.  She had no job or work responsibility.  She had no children to challenge her time organization skills.  Basically, she could devote her energies to our relationship.   She doesn’t really do that now.  I’ve suggested “date night” and other types of non-child activities to get her to invest in us and if it wasn’t for my doing so…there would be no ongoing attempt to nurture a relationship.

I can’t help but think of friends (both male and female) who are out in the single world yearning for a soft human touch to make them feel complete.  A warm embrace to make them feel loved and safe.  A connection to bring balance to their lives.   My wife doesn’t get that.  Perhaps she’s back to taking things for granted.  I don’t know.

I’m always admonished by friends to develop the conversation about these things that bother me and I do.  It’s only that I meet with the same sort of dismissive “we’re okay, we really are” sort of response.  It isn’t that I come home to verbal or physical abuse.  It isn’t that we throw things at each other and don’t get along.  Yes, there’s irritation.  Yes, she drives me nuts with her level of disorganization but we aren’t doing poorly.  It just doesn’t feel at all romantic.   I feel like I have been reduced to a checklist.  Remember his birthday? Check.  Let him have an afternoon to watch football?  Check. I know that I can wake up every day for the next five years and one thing that won’t be happening that day is a spontaneous sexual attack by my lover.  I know that her emotional needs are a muted mess of whatever little modeled love she saw as a kid.  I really resent my mother-in-law for this.  Sure, she was a busy woman after her husband walked out on her and the kids but she had two options.  She could have found another meaningful relationship or she could have gone the “I don’t need a man in my life” route.  She chose the latter.

I will say it.  My wife is a romantic and emotional idiot.  There are “I love yous” but there are never any “because” statements.  She can’t dig deep.  She can’t express herself.  It’s to the point where I wonder both how she managed to do so when we were dating and I wonder if she’s even capable of deep emotion otherwise.   I am embarassed to say that I’ve gotten more positive emotion from strangers I have never met than this woman who knows everything about me….yet has to be inebriated to really get into me emotionally.

How did I wind up here?  I have no idea.  I tend to be a very busy guy and perhaps being busy makes it so I don’t have time to reflect on how my emotional needs are not being met.  That isn’t entirely true.  My emotional needs are not being met until I have some mini-meltdown and then she tries to make up for the fact that getting me some coffee in the morning (while a nice and appreciated gesture) doesn’t really make us more than roommates.

About a year ago, my son asked us for a cell phone.  He was 11 at the time and in sixth grade.  We said “no”.  I asked him for a reason.  He really couldn’t give me one.  I offered him the land line,

“Here’s the phone.  Call whoever you want.”

He really didn’t want to at that point and stormed off.  We told him that it was simple.  He takes the bus home.  Phones aren’t allowed to be on in school.  He gets rides to and from his activities.  There was really no reason to pay for a sophisticated toy.  These discussions went on for about a week.   I knew why he really wanted one.  Why does any kid want anything?  Because the other kids have one.   This certainly wasn’t lost on me but I wasn’t about to hand over a cell phone to a sixth grader “just because”.

A year has gone by and this sequence of current events began a few weeks back.  My son heard me and my wife arguing.  It wasn’t a major argument but rather one of those heated debates that married people have.   He heard us and became upset.   I went upstairs to comfort the kids and to reassure them that Mom and Dad were getting along and that we were sorry to have upset them.  I must have startled my son because he crumpled up a piece of paper that he was writing on.  I fished it out of the trash and he was in tears.

“Dear Mom,

I’m sorry to run away.  I would never want to hurt you.  I just don’t know if I can keep living like this.  Sometimes, life just doesn’t feel like it’s worth it.”

I can’t say that this wasn’t devastating.  Besides the obvious fact that my son had addressed this letter only to his mother and not to me…this was really an emotion out of the blue.  We’d never even suspected he might be harboring this type of feeling inside.  We sat him down and he insisted that this was “fiction”.  He didn’t mean it.  I wasn’t buying that.  Who writes that sort of thing?  We called a friend of ours who happens to be child psychologist.  She gave us a few names but reassured us that if he’s doing well in school, eating well, sleeping well and generally is a happy kid, it’s hard to expect that this is real and lasting given that he’s thriving in so many spheres of life.  It started my observational mode rolling however.

One of the things that she mentioned is that perhaps sadness is a new emotion for him or at least one that he doesn’t have much experience trying to express.  He’s been very busy the last two months with sports and music and the start of school.  He has only really been in touch with one friend.  Several weeks ago, he was at soccer at an away game in another town and I was stuck in traffic due to construction.  It was starting to get dark.  I had no way to get a hold of him to tell him not to worry.  Now, luckily, my hopes were realized when one of the moms stayed until each kid was gone…but she didn’t have to.  We’ve had those types of concerns before but now it felt a little more urgent.

Last night, we went to a school “game night” and during the breaks I noticed how many kids were on cell phones.  They were calling and texting away.  I don’t like the idea of texting as a means of communicating.  That said, it is how kids communicate now.  They don’t hog up the land line anymore.  I remember my Dad yelling at us to get off the phone because he needed to make a call or was expecting one.  Kids don’t call anymore.   Perhaps this is a method for him to communicate.  His three closest buddies at school all have cell phones.  Maybe this is a little freedom.  Perhaps the responsibility would be good for him.

There are many evils to cell phones.  Nowadays they have so many capabilities that the kid has a lot of “connectivity” if we allow it.  A friend of mine has three daughters with the eldest being in high school.  He did give me some good advice once.   He told me there’s plenty of evils but he chooses to welcome them with his kids with his eyes open rather than hide his eyes trying to shelter the kids and deny that they’ll ever be exposed to it.

This isn’t to say that every kid needs a cell phone nor that they should have one.  I think that the younger the child is, the better the reasoning needs to be.  Only you know your child well enough to know.  A year ago we made a pact with the parents of one of his friends that we wouldn’t get cell phones for them until high school.   I guess things change.  I called up that mom because I didn’t want her to see the phone or hear about it and think we were blowing it off.  We discussed the above issues.   Oddly enough, she agreed (she can usually stick to her guns pretty well!) that it might be right for my son.  Hers on the other hand is not as responsible or mature.  He can’t handle one.

So, friends, I think this is an opportunity to help my son.  To not shelter him but rather to let him grow a little and make it a “win-win”.  He gets some “big kid” responsibility.   I get to be the Dad who “gets it” and I can tell you that he’s still on cloud nine tonight.  Happy Early Birthday, Son!  I love you more than anything!