What Marriage Is Really Like

Last night, while we were sitting on the couch after dinner, Jean turned to me and said, “I think I’m going to have a shower.” Actually, she didn’t turn to me. She was looking at something—maybe the TV, maybe a magazine. I’m not really sure, because I was looking at something, too, maybe the TV or a magazine. (Ooh, New York‘s breakdown of celebrity incomes!) A few minutes later, she said it again, with a slight variation: “I’m going to take a shower.”

She did not get up and take a shower.

I mean this not as a portrait of two people in their late 30s who have a boring life. That post will go up next week, and it will be about Theodore. No, my point is this: At that very moment, I realized I’d married a Twitter feed, and that Jean had married one too.

When you’re married, you say pretty much whatever’s on your mind, whenever you feel like it. What you want for breakfast, what you had for breakfast after your partner left for work, what you found stuck in the pocket of that jacket that was at the back of the closet for two years, what the kid did or didn’t do on the way to school—all the inconsequential bullshit that we hide from the people with whom we didn’t enter into a legal (and possibly religious) pact to love and cherish until, inevitably, we die. Except, of course, when we reveal that inane crap to our Twitter followers, the only people other than our spouses who could possibly care about every errant thought that passes through our minds.

This is not a criticism—not at all! (As we say with evil glee in my family, it’s not a criticism—it’s an observation.) In fact, it’s probably good for a marriage, in two ways:

1. We feel comfortable enough around each other that we can express trivialities without fear of embarrassment or mockery, knowing that our honesty, however banal, counts for something.

2. The mere fact of these communications binds us to each other, in the same way that after following someone’s shitty Twitter feed for months and years makes you feel like you know them, even if it’s just because you remember that time they got dried blackberries on their oatmeal or Twitpic’d the back of Jerry Seinfeld’s head. These little things on their own are to be ignored, but in total they form the contours of a life.

There’s also something to be said for the brevity of the observations, both on Twitter and in marriage. These are not grand monologues of triviality, to be attended to with open ears and alert minds, but instead blips, moments of amusement or information that require no investment but which connect us, bit by bit.

Anyway, this is a lot of metaphysics to lay upon the 140-character bane of our existence, supported by one boringly simple observation, but there it is: Your spouse is a crappy Twitter feed, one you have no choice but to follow. And vice-versa. #tilldeathdoyoupart

Linksys Loves You So Much They Want to Give You $100

Note: This post was sponsored by Linksys and the new Linksys E4200v2 router. For more information on sponsored posts, read the bottom of our About Page.

Over the course of the next few weeks we’re going to run a few DadWagon posts related to the idea of “connectivity,” at the behest of Linksys, which has graciously offered to sponsor said posts here at DadWagon.

What’s more, Linksys has generously allowed us to offer a free $100 BestBuy gift certificate to a DadWagon reader. Here’s how it will work: Those of you who read this post can head over to the DadWagon Facebook page (why not “like” us while you’re there–we like you!), and just comment on this post.

Say anything. Say everything. Share your deep, unabridged, uncensored, unmoderated, unhinged, hyper-critical, totally unfair, completely biased, rarely intelligible, opinions. Let us have it! Praise us to the heavens! Just write! Because there’s nothing worse than begging for comments and likes, as we have now just done, and not getting any. Or getting a few polite and neutral ones.

We’re going to be taking comments until next Tuesday, at which point, we will select one commenter at random—using this totally neat site—who will become DadWagon’s inaugural Lucky, Lucky Winner™. Who will win! Because he or she is lucky, and also was diligent enough to go to Facebook and write something about this post!

Another thing: Linksys has also done a bit of research on what they–charmingly, oddly, absurdly–call “Geek Dads.” By virtue of having this blog, we DadWagoners are in fact Geek Dads. Don’t agree? Here’s the short version of what a Geek Dad might be: “tech-savvy, intelligent, engaged, confident fathers who take great pride in sharing their passion for tech with their kids, creating new traditions and making family life fun and memorable in their own unique way.” That is so us! Totally, completely, totally, really us.

Here’s a bit more data from the survey: “Nearly 70 percent of geek dads consider themselves to be cooler than other dads with 75 percent of them attributing it to creating a home where their kids’ friends enjoy hanging out.” We at DadWagon don’t just think we’re cooler than other dads…we know we are, and we have have the low-paying jobs, failed marriages (in Theodore’s case), poor physiques, and receding hairlines to prove it. And we all have iPhones. Geek!

Or how about this: “One in five geek dads admit to using technology in secret to avoid being discovered by their wives.” Yep–we don’t tell our wives anything. Ever. On any subject.

[Ed. note: Portions of this post were amended at the request of our sponsor.]

Who You Calling Daddy (Son), Revised and Improved

I resemble this remark

Shortly after writing my last post about not wanting JP to call me Dad I got an email from my own father. He reminded me that at the very same age as JP–five and a half–I had gone to him one day after school and said that from now on no one would be allowed to refer to me by my name at the time, Teddy.

A couple of kids at school had apparently been teasing me, calling me “Teddy Bear,” a grievous insult in my estimation at that time. I think that my father, as with me and JP, enjoyed calling me by the diminutive, and at first, also as with me and JP, he resisted. Eventually, though, he gave in and he never called me Teddy again, although there are, to this day, members of my family who continue do so.

Now my father was considerate enough not to tell me what I should do with JP. He just reminded me, which, I should point out, is a pure and exquisite form of Jewish guilt. Regardless, I determined to do something to right this cosmic parenting wrong.

Earlier tonight I told JP that before he went to bed he could expect a “special story.” This is the sort of thing that he is still young enough to find inordinately exciting. When he was finally in bed, after the teeth brushing, the discussions about pooping, the final chores, and the reading of a book, I settled in to tell him the tale of how Teddy became Ted.

Once there was a little boy just about your age whose name was Teddy. And he liked his name, because it was his, until he went to school one day and a bunch of kids starting teasing him about it. They called him Teddy Bear, which he thought wasn’t very nice, mostly because stuffed animals were for kids, and he was five and a half and no sort of kid at all. So when he got home that day he told his father that henceforth and in perpetuity (Teddy wanted to be a lawyer at that age) he would be known as Ted instead of Teddy.

Teddy’s daddy, however, didn’t immediately accept this request. He liked the name Teddy, which he called to mind certain things about being a father that he wasn’t sure he was ready to let go of, at least not just yet. But Teddy was serious, and eventually he gave in and Teddy became Ted from then on.

Do you understand what I’m talking about, JP? I asked, and the answer was a rather frank and to the point, no. So I explained and I told him that I was that boy and that I had forgotten this story and that he could call me anything he liked, Daddy, or Dad, or father, or whatever he preferred.

How poignant is THAT? Surely some Daddy prize should be coming my way, right? JP would have to admit, now and in his dotage, that Daddy listened, he cared, he did the right thing…right?

Wrong. JP’s response: “That’s the story?! That’s not funny! Tell me another one.”

He can still call me what he likes.

Who You Calling Dad (son)?

So, as kids tend to do, young JP has been pushing a few boundaries lately, testing, like a velociraptor, the strength of the electrified fence that is my parental authority and dignity. (His sister, on the other hand is so irresistibly cute at 14 months that even JP is having a hard time disliking her–not that he will admit it.)

His newest thing is to start calling me Dad instead of Daddy. A minor point you say? Well, who asked you! I like being called Daddy; I’ve given up most of my life, time, money, hair, and sex appeal (such as it is) in order to reserve the right to choose how my son will refer to me–and I’m not ready to downshift to Dad.

JP sense this, he understands it, he gets it with innate ease, and he’s been exploiting it, mostly by dropping the shortened-d-bomb from time to time, daring me to correct him, which I do, because I’m an idiot. I did, however, come up with a better system at dinner last night. To wit:

JP: Pass the pot roast, DAD.

Me. Don’t call me Dad. I’m Daddy. [passes pot roast, directs child to neglected green vegetable on said child’s plate]

JP: Daddy, when can I call you Dad?

Me: When you turn 17. [ignores eye roll from wife]

JP: 17?

Me: 17.

JP: What can I call you when I’m 18?

Me: King. You can call me King at that age. [JP puzzled, not really sure what a king is, and with little concept of the age of 18.]

Silly but effective.