The joys (and pain) of parenthood.
"Refuse to play with me, will ya'?!"
If you’re a guy, chances are you know what it’s like to get kicked in the warblies. It’s not pleasant. You don’t feel the pain so much in the manjigglies right away, but rather, you feel a nauseating sickness slowly creeping up deep inside your bowels. If feels as if your guts were being squeezed in a vice from the inside. Soreness of the balls comes later.
Sunday afternoons I spend my time hanging out at a local game store. It’s “Daddy’s time” to get away for awhile and work on things that I don’t normally get a chance to work on during the work week. Ironic, isn’t it?
I usually go up to the store by myself but that whole arrangement changed awhile back when my wife signed up for a yoga class which happened to take place on Sundays at 1:00, right about the time I would be up to my eyes in web code and in “the zone.”
As any loving husband should do, I supported her going to the class. After all it promotes good health and gives her something productive and enjoyable to do with her Sunday… Not to mention it helps develop yoga butt. Have you seen yoga butt? I’d be happy if she had a yoga butt. Yoga butt isn’t quite as…abundant as Jennifer Lopez butt, but it’s still very nice. Jennifer Lopez butt is really nice.
But I digress.
So for the past several Sundays I’ve been bringing our son, whom we shall call, The Kicker of the Jewels, to the store with me to hang out and meet some other kids his age who also get stuck with–err ehm, tag along with their dads. This is usually fine as The Kicker of the Jewels regularly packs up a bunch of his toys and figures to keep himself occupied while dad does dad stuff with the guys at the store, but today, he apparantly really needed to get my attention for something that I wasn’t obviously paying attention to, so he kicked me in the balls.
It’s not very often that a 4o-year-old man gets taken down by a five-going-on-six year old, but considering I doubled over and promptly slammed my head into a table after the initial punt, I’d say he he got twice the goods for the price of one.
And there was much cursing (and tears) from the Father.
OK, so they weren’t crocodile tears. And they didn’t actually run down my face so much as loiter around in the corners of my eyes with the threat of dripping. The obscenities, on the other hand, rolled out like a tsunami of phrases too obscure for the boy to understand. This may have been at least partially due to the fact that I was covering my mouth with one hand to keep from throwing up and the other reason is that quite frankly, I don’t think that many of the compound words I spewed made any sense at all. Hey, I was just kicked in the nads, what did you expect, Shakesepeare?
In the end, I paid a little more attention to The Kicker of the Jewels and played with him for awhile. He was happy, I was sore, but happy, and also thinking about how guilty I felt in retrospect not having paid closer attention to him earlier. At one point as he was contructing new worlds out of Lego he looked up at me and said, “Dad, you’re my best friend.” Brought a tear to my eye (that one rolled down my cheek) as I looked at my son and said, “You’re my best friend too, son. But with friends like you, who needs testacles?”
