Fathered Five

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Boy 13 caught and killed it, but if we were relying on it to keep us alive, we’d have died. You know that scene in the movies where somebody catches a fish and then the camera cuts to the perfectly browned fish rotating on a spit over the fire? Yeah, it doesn’t quite work that way.

First, it’s hard to skewer fish unless they’re really big, even when your skewer is not a sharpened stick but a hot dog roaster. The flesh is soft and tears easily. Second, if you do manage to get the thing onto a spit, it’s hard to cook it. The fire is too hot or not hot enough and the fish wobbles and turns on the spit in a very uncooperative way. You can’t simply rotate it evenly and slowly like they do on screen. You have to be careful with the angles and compensate for the fish spinning as you turn the spit, or else the same side will always be facing the fire.

As a result, boy 13 blackened one side of each fish while the other sides were raw before they finally tore off completely and fell into the fire. We gave up and went back to the hot dogs, which are much more forgiving. I survived the weekend in the wilderness relatively unscathed.

We learned something about Girl 2, who at home has a tendency to go out the front door and walk wherever it suits her: she has no separation anxiety. Which means she will simply up and walk away without so much as a “so long,” much less permission. She was 100 yards away before we spotted her pink and purple-striped backside nearly topping the hill where we would have lost her from view completely.

Later that day, her 2-year old cousin came to Her Hotness, breathless: “She’s in the water!” Wife went with the fraught toddler to the edge of the stream, but no Girl 2. Her Hotness panicked and bolted down to the next camp which was just beyond the river bend, hoping, I guess, to catch Girl 2 as she floated by. En route, she met Jamie carrying Girl 2 after having pulled her out of the water. (She was only in ankle deep, but still.)

Yeah, it’s scary. Welcome to my world. I’m trying to nurture Boy 13 in something as abstract as becoming a man while Girl 2 is in mortal danger. What are Girl 16, Boy 4, and Boy 8 up to?? I can’t know because I can only attend to one of them at a time! Her Hotness can do three at once, but watching five stretches even her ability.

You’ll say that Girl 16 and Boy 13 need less watching, but you’re only partially right. Boy 13 still tests the flammability of alcohol and hairspray in his room despite our threats and warnings and confiscation of matches. Who knows what he’d do with a wide open space, sharp objects, and an open flame?? Girl 16 doesn’t require a lot of watching, it’s true, but a percentage of my limited brain is still wired to vigilance over her whether she needs it or not. That’s true of all of them with the result that each kid gets 20% or less of my attention when everything I read leads me to believe that each kid needs and deserves 100% of my fathering attention.

It’s enough to make a guy feel inadequate to the task.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Stuff I've learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.