On the Ex

I’m speeding back to New York after a day spent mediating a case in the hellhole that is Wilmington Delaware. I would have thought that with so many credit card companies and banks having their headquarters in Wilmington that the train station would at the very least sport the latest in air conditioning technology. After all, there are a lot of people wearing ties over collars that people can get hot under down here when the economy rolls up the red carpet and decides to head south for the summer. Yet, in the true spirit of Republican miserliness, the lightly taxed multinational banks contribute nothing to the City they call home, resulting in a crumbling infrastructure and a temperature of 95 degrees in the station and 98 on the platform. I was sent here to mediate a case involving an airplane and a pole and the parsing of responsibility for said airplane striking said pole, but was unavailing in coming to a mutually acceptable resolution. The only thing good to come out of the day was the delightfully greasy french fries that I had for lunch. Presently I’m relaxing in the relative luxury of the Acela “high-speed” train to New York, paid for by my employers, of course. After a day spent blustering and being blustered, a fastish train with a bar car and working bathroom are small but necessary comforts. It is here in the Northeast Corridor where one truly gets a sense of the impact of the current run-up in gas prices. Businessmen, “suits” in the internet vernacular, are deserting their automobiles in droves and flocking to the train to make the run from Washington DC to Boston and points in between. The result has been, regrettably, a longer wait in the bar car, but the overall effect on the environment has likely been positive.

Since E. and I moved in together I have been deftly avoiding the issue of how to integrate her ex-husband into our little domestic party. Clearly he has a right to associate with his son and be a part of his life, but his rights vis a vis D. do not, by implication, translate into the right to sit on my couch and raid my refrigerator. I was neither married to the guy nor did I have any of his children, so aside from the necessary contact involved in visitations and such my interest in getting to know him or have him as a member of my circle of acquaintances is less than zero. This is especially so because the first six months of my relationship with E, I listened to a litany of comments about what a manipulative, drunken, abusive, self-absorbed so and so he was, so I can hardly be blamed for harboring a less than rosy picture of him now. I certainly do not want Jack regularly exposed to a person with such a self-absorbed world view.

That said, I have neither the desire nor the inclination to get in between A. and D. D, for whatever reasons make sense to the three year old mind, is rather fond of his father and A., in his own way, seems to be genuinely fond of D. I’m a born cynic and I chalk up this recent interest in son’s well-being to his more innate tendency toward extreme narcissism rather than any desire to genuinely connect with D. A. was more interested in the bottom of the bottle than in D. for the last three years and even in the first months after he stopped drinking he was much more interested in making E’s life miserable than he was in becoming a part of his son’s life. Regular threatening phone calls, incessant focus on himself, etc. E. for her part, is one of the nicer people I have ever met and she is willing to give A the chance to repair his relationship with D. This is a kind and wonderful thing to do, but I know even as nice as she is, she’s doing it for D. not for A.

I wonder if the fact that I could never envision abandoning my own son for ANY period of time colors the way I look at A. Frankly, although he styles himself some sort of macho dude, (on his brief visitations he dispenses an awful lot of fathering tips to random people in the mall who have no idea that he sees his son for about ten hours a month) I see him so much less of a man because he couldn’t handle the responsibility of raising a child.

II suppose my ego is tied up in all this too. While I get to deal with the day to day heavy lifting he gets to show up every other week with a bag of toys and by virtue of his mere presence thinks of himself as father of the freaking year. Of course he is just playing daddy, while I am, in fact, an actual daddy. He chose to be absent from his son’s life and that is something I'm having a difficult time understanding. In my opinion If you haven’t wiped your kid’s ass or changed their diaper, you are merely an uncle, no matter what your genes say.