My partner and I were at a bar one day, in the before-times when bars were open. He stood outside a local gay bar repeatedly pulling on a push door. The line behind us lengthened until he realized his mistake. I looked at the people behind me and, as a way of apology, said, “He has a PhD.”
When I met Jim, an English professor at a local university, I worried that I would constantly be assailed with self-esteem hits about how much more intelligent than myself my new man was. I very much needn’t have worried about that.
Don’t get me wrong, the man is brilliant. He can confidently and quickly describe complex philosophical situations. He uses at least one word each day that I don't know. When he taught at universities, his online reviews were full of nothing but, “Professor London is kind and brilliant and this is best class I’ve ever taken,” blah blah blah. But I walked that man through scheduling his first ever doctor’s appointment as an adult last week so let’s just say his brilliance is niche.
After living together for more than a year we were having, yet another, argument about dishes. He had said he would do them. He swore. He promised. When I asked him how it was possible that he hadn’t done them after a week of me asking him to he deadass looks me in the eye and said, “Sometimes, when a person is incredibly intelligent, they develop memory problems.” He sighed, and with the air of a person who has one heavy cross to bear, shook his head saying, “That’s my problem.”
He has a daughter who lives most of the year in another state with her mom. The first time I was present for a visit up here I was surprised by how often he called her mom with questions. His kid has type one diabetes, so I kind of assumed it was a bunch of questions about her insulin pump, which was new this visit. We’d only been dating a few months and it wasn’t my business anyway so I stayed out of it. But then his daughter had an incident with the neighbor girl stealing something from her and he finds out about it an immediately says, “Let me call your mom and figure out what to do.”
Still staying out of it, I sit back with a glass of wine and my brain just automatically makes a plan: Well, you separate the kids for now, address your daughter’s feelings, make up some ground rules that involve her leaving expensive items home when they play together and probably sit the kids down and discuss how theft hurts people’s feelings.
He comes inside, hangs up the phone and says to his daughter, “Ok, for now, you leave your phone and iPad here when you play at her house. Are you ok? How do you feel?”
Her mother is a nicer person than I am and left out the lecture I would have given the neighbor kid but it was otherwise verbatim what I would have done.
Two years later, my step-daughter’s poor mother does actually get a break when she’s up here; she knows I can handle most of the things Jim used to call her for and she knows when her kid comes back her hair will actually be detangled and sometimes even trimmed.
I had been pretty nervous to meet my partner’s ex at first. He and I had gone down to visit his kid for a long weekend and we decided to do a “family dinner,” with her, her parents and myself. I’m word-vomiting, my go-to when I’m anxious. The table had fallen silent for an eighth of a second so I say, “April, your dad so reminds me of my own dad. He’s so kind, he’s very selfless. Avoids conflict like the plague but you’re a lucky girl, he’s always going to be in your corner.”
April says, “Is he super super super smart just like my dad?”
Jim grins and sits back, comfortably waiting for the compliment he assumes is coming his way.
His ex-wife and I silently stare at the table.
Jim assumes we’re trying to be polite about my own father’s intelligence and says, “Your dad is plenty smart.”
April confidently says, as she dips another chip in queso, “Probably almost as smart as my dad.”
Her mom makes a small laugh/snort noise and goes, “April your dad is very very smart…about the subject of his PhD.”
I hid a grin. Jim changed the subject faster than a smoker walking off a five hour flight.
It’s just that by then I knew what all those phone calls were about. Because I now got those questions. He had been asking how to get paint off April’s hands (dishsoap). He was asking if she should skip a shower (sure if she took one yesterday), if it was ok for her to have a snack before bed (nothing carby) and what’s she going to be again for Halloween (Barbie, Jim, she told us last week).
He’s one of those guys that would have done well as a professor with an assistant. He just needs to be allowed to keep his brain focused on the important things like Marxist theories and detailed readings of the major literary works of the last three centuries, nothing pesky like what’s in his bank account or whether he’s double booked himself again for Thursday night plans.
The thing about dating someone with a kid is you are supposed to stay out of it. It is not your job to take care of them. So, that first year, I’m over on Christmas Eve in the morning, and leaving to get stocking stuffers for my family while Jim is prepping some food to take to his grandmother’s house that afternoon.
I give him a kiss on the way out and quietly ask, “You…need me to get you anything? I see there’s nothing under the tree. You are, like, you have Christmas gifts for her right?”
“Oh, I haven’t gotten anything yet,” he says, unconcerned, stirring away at the stove.
“Ok, Christmas is tomorrow though. When are you planning on going shopping?”
“Today.”
“Before or after you cook Christmas Eve dinner for 20 people?”
“After.”
“Who is watching April?”
He stared silently at the floor. I made the decision to give up on “not being involved,” and said, “Give me a spending limit, I’ll be back in two hours with gifts.”
And here’s another thing about dating someone with a kid, when you have none. I was an aunt. I went out twice a year to get one thing at a time for my one nephew. I had never been, nor planned to be, part of the mad rush of folks out shopping on Christmas Eve for their kids. But there I was, in the Barbie aisle at Target, being assaulted by the sheer sensory input of this chore.
Of course the only other people there were women. Exhausted, sleep deprived women, trying to create “Christmas magic,” on a budget. At this point, I don’t know April well but I can make some good guesses. Barbies are definitely a thing for her. So I pick out two dolls that seem to shove expected gender roles down kids' throats the least.
And I knew she liked L.O.L. surprise. Parents, I see you out there. Anyone with a femme-leaning kid born between 2007-2012 knows the horror I write of when I mention this brand. Two years later, she has grown out of them, thank all that is holy, but they are these terribly cheap toys sold as a gamble. You don’t know which fucking doll you’re getting. You just have to keep buying more until your kid has collected all of them. And they will WANT to collect all of them. At the time, I had been naïve enough to never picture myself trying to pick up hundreds of L.O.L. Surprise bullshit plastic pieces from her room every couple of months so I got two or three of those monstrosities. I got a book, I don’t even remember which one. But every kid needs a book on Christmas.
Two intense, rainbow/unicorn/glitter-filled hours later I arrive back at my boyfriend’s house, cursing myself for ever having swiped right on his godddamn profile to begin with (it was the picture of him at the drumkit that had gotten me, I’m a sucker for a musician) and I drop off the bags, half-heartedly asking, “You don’t need help wrapping do you?” before I escape the madness that was my first foray into Christmas shopping as a parental figure.
It’s been more than two years since that day. His daughter now knows better than to thank her dad when “Desi and Dad,” send a gift down to her at her mom’s. We just wrapped up a lovely Christmas with my step-daughter. Her mother tagged me in a post that day of an SNL skit of how exhausting it is to be a mom/mom figure on that day. Kristen Wiig plays a mom who starts day-drinking after watching her kids and husband open gift after thoughtful gift and she keeps saying, “And they got me this robe.” I cry-laughed because Jim had forgotten to fill my stocking and all his gift options had fallen through so one of his gifts to me was a “singing telegram,” that he asked his daughter to create for me….which she performed while wearing a robe I gave her last year.
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