DADWAGON

Did anyone occupy his normal seat aboard the Dadwagon this week? It appears not.

Matt, our househusband, spent the start of his week in Rome, alternating between scarfing down bucatini all’amatriciana and explaining his life to various bemused Italians. (Hey, man, maybe you’re not getting weepy over your kid–maybe it’s the wild swings in blood sugar? Just a thought.) He did follow it up with a happy homecoming, though. He’s also offered a persuasive creation myth for Dadwagon itself; true or not, it allows us to make fun of Southern California life, which is always fun.

Speaking of California, Nathan spent the week there, and it clearly made him dream, just a little, of Golden State life. Consider this reverie about the particulars of daily West Coast existence, and this one, about the charms of growing up far away from subways and street vendors. Nate, you going all gooey there?  Nah: His post about this discovery, from SXSW, made it clear that he’s still jaded enough to be one of us. (But not so jaded that he’d dress his kid up like a dictator without expecting repercussions.)

At least Theodore stayed true to type. Mocking dead little people, contemplating his son’s prospects in the smoking wreckage that is the publishing business, taking a poke at the Times‘s shapeless story about mommyblogging, making fun of the truly tragic. But even he had an uncharacteristically lighthearted moment, offering up this droll set of subway-passenger sketches made by an artist friend of his. We expect him to post about death-metal suicide or something on Monday, just to keep himself in check.

Me, I swapped my usual day-job deadline fever for three days at home coughing and sneezing. But having a horrible cold did give me time to contemplate the historical record: both the prospect of a Texan whitewashing of American history, and the faint possibility that my kid will actually figure in said history. That is, if I didn’t render him totally stupid in this little incident.

We’ll be back to our usual posts (both the positional kind and the blogger kind) on Monday.

You gotta hand it to this Arizona dad. His daughter, 27, got dropped off at home at 1:30 a.m. by her ex-boyfriend. The ex then started choking the girl (always bad form when dropping off a date), and in the process woke up Dad.

Bad idea.

From his second-story window, Dad fired a warning shot. When that didn’t work, he jumped out of the window, landed on the hood of his car, and shot the (alleged) sonofabitch in the groin, sending his daughter’s beau to the hospital, and the dad, a 56-year-old coil of window-jumping, daughter-protecting aggression, into our top Bad Dads We Love spot this week.

I know we don’t feed you much country music here at DadWagon (what with us being mostly Jewish and totally New Yorkish), but this Rodney Atkins classic seems somehow fitting:

Where, you may be asking yourselves, did DadWagon come from? It is a question that has vexed humankind since the dawn of history (which is when we launched, five months ago), but today I am here to answer it.

Answer: Thank Bravo. Back in 2008, when the cable channel first started airing “The Real Housewives of New York City,” I was frustrated. Incensed. Ranting and raving to anyone who would listen (i.e., my wife), and even to those who would not listen (i.e., my wife), that this was a sham. The truer, more daring thing, I foamed, would be to run “The Real Househusbands of New York City.”

Or at least to start it as a blog.

But because other things (work, baby) interfered, it took a year and a half to transmogrify that original idea into the DadWagon we have today.

I bring all this up because I was remembering those halcyon early days of kvetching and complaint, and a quick Google search directed me to something I had somehow missed: “The Househusbands of Hollywood,” which ran on the Fox Reality Channel from last August through October. (Maybe that’s why I missed it—FRC is not among our “favorites.”)

This is gold! Five househusbands—ranging from the guy who played Ron Johnson on “A Different World” to former L.A. Dodger Billy Ashley to a loser dude who dropped out of medical school to become a nonworking actor—struggle to balance their home duties (cleaning, childcare) with their legitimate work aspirations, all the while hoping their wives will, just for once, treat them like the responsible adults they happen not to be.

Friends, it is awful, depressing, addictively unfunny gold. I’m embarrassed to be in the same parental boat as these guys. There’s a scene in the first episode where the almost-doctor has proudly installed a kegerator in his kitchen, and is beaming as his blonde wife, a lawyer, comes home. She is not pleased, to say the least, and after a short discussion we see them wheeling it out to the garage, she worrying that he’ll bump it into the walls. “I’m doing what you want,” he whines, “and you’re still criticizing me!”

Okay, at the same time, I have to say I recognize a certain amount of actual reality in this TV reality. The way that the husbands justify and rationalize their inferior positions and life choices and fatherly incompetence is perhaps uncomfortably familiar. There’s a general “Who knew this would be my life?” feeling to the show, which is pretty much how I feel most of the time. And I’m sure that my lifestyle looks just as loathsome to an L.A. family as theirs appears to me.

Which is really just a way of saying: Hey Fox, give me a call sometime, wouldja?

JP was young enough when my ex moved out that he doesn’t remember his parents ever having lived together. I consider this a good thing, given the amount of arguing he witnessed in the latter stages of our marriage.

As a result, however, his residential life has always included a great deal of shuttling back and forth. There’s some good in this as well–two beds, separate sets of toys, and the like. The downside, perhaps, is a slightly weakened sense of stability and place.

One by-product of this arrangement has been intermittent feelings of  defensiveness on my part about his concept of home. I’m always alert to the possibility that JP doesn’t really feel like he lives with me. So when he refers to his mother’s apartment as “home” and my place as, well, my place, I correct him. We live together, I say. This is your home, too. He doesn’t really get it at this age, but I suspect eventually he will.

One interesting development on this front occurred recently when my ex moved. She decided to tell JP that they were leaving their old apartment for a special new home. Thus JP now talks about “our home”–that is, his home with me–and his “special home,” by which he means his new place with his mother.

No tragedy here, mind you. It’s just interesting to see the three-year-old mind at work, furiously processing. Makes you wonder what else he notices.