Escape - 055
Trying to find the small moments in between all the chaos.
“I wanna watch car explosions!” Leo states.
“Leo, I know you want to watch the car show but we have to eat lunch.” I point at the bowl of half-eaten rice and bits of beef. Just two ingredients because if there were any more colors in the bowl, well all hell would break loose.
“I WANT CAR EXPLOSIONS!”
I close my eyes and search within myself, deep inside for an ounce of patience. After a morning full of complaints, crying and shouting, the well is running empty and there’s nothing left.
“Leo…” I grit my teeth. “You’ve asked for the car show like ten times already. Dad knows you want to watch but remember we have to finish lunch first.”
“I WANT CAR EXPLOSIONS!”
“LEO!” my voice gets louder. “What did I just SAY?”
Leo’s upper lip quivers. “You’re not saying the right words. You’re being loud and screamy.”
The vein on my forehead pulses quickly as if trying to break free, trying to escape.
“Leo, I’m sorry for being loud but you need to eat. It’s important to eat our lunch so we can grow up big and strong.”
Leo sits there, eyeing his bowl, then eyeing me. We both sit there, looking at each other in a sort of stalemated silence. He’s already made up his mind and so have I. I’m not leaving the table until he’s finished and he’s not finishing his meal until he gets to leave and watch his show.
I pull up my phone and scroll through Facebook.
A friend of ours is vacationing in Europe with her boyfriend. There’s a picture of her in Greece by the sea, another of her eating an enormous slice of pizza in some quaint European town.
Must be nice to travel and live that childless, burden-free life…
The thought manifests unconsciously. We travel every now and then as a family – this year we drove down to San Diego for Thanksgiving and earlier in the summer we made the trip to Disneyland.
I love it when we get the chance to vacation together, the wife, kid, and dog all in the same hotel room. But it’s the kid, wife and dog all in the same room. Woken up by a kick to the face from a tiny foot and then having a Pomeranian “wash” your face with fish-scented breath while the wife snores away on a much too small queen bed is not a relaxing time.
When Leo was still housing in the wife’s big belly, she had this trip all planned out to Hawaii. I rejected the plan, probably made some excuse about money, and we never went. Word of advice to all you childless folks out there, travel now when you have the chance and don’t be a freaking idiot like me.
I look around the house and I can just feel my heartrate accelerate. Dirty dishes piled up high in the sink. Bits of debris seeping out from under the much too full trashcan. A weird odor permeating through the apartment, probably from some awful thing in the bathroom. Maybe Leo’s half-washed poo-stained undies in the sink.
Our home doesn’t look like a place by the sea, or some quaint European town. It’s an active warzone and I’m stuck in it.
But there is one escape, an old vice that I depend on nowadays.
I got a Super Nintendo when I was six. We had this big house with a game room upstairs that was at the end of the hall, opposite end from my parents’ bedroom and I would sneak out of my room in the mornings before anyone was awake and hide in there and play Super Mario. I’d eventually get caught and be forced to go to school, but every chance I got, I’d be in there playing video games.
Fast forward a number of years and I’m still sneaking out early in the morning to play video games, before I have to drive to work and before the girlfriend (now wife) wakes up. She always catches me in the act, sitting there in the living room but as if I was doing something criminal and it got to the point where she gave me an ultimatum – her or the game. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like had I chosen the game…
The other day I was playing a new game on the Switch. Leo is playing close by with his toy cars, racing them along the couch and he gives me a look. It’s not quite a judgmental look because I don’t think a three-year-old is capable of that look yet (at least that’s what I believe) but it’s close and he looks sad. As if he knows I’ll be gone for the next couple of hours, absorbed in my videogame world.
You know things are so much different now than when I was a kid or even when I was a young working adult. Real responsibilities have taken hold and I can no longer escape whenever I want. It’s the price that you inevitably must pay when you sign up to be a parent.
You get these thoughts that sometimes nag at you, those little naggy ones that harken back to the old days of hedonistic freedom. But then you look at your kid, you know when he’s quietly asleep during naptime, and you can hear those precious little snores and then you realize all over again that you wouldn’t change the current life for anything in the world.
But maybe when I’m fifty and the kid is all grown up, maybe then I’ll take that trip to Europe and just lie somewhere by the sea with a drink in one hand and a video game in the other.