“The Next Best Thing”

Madonna and Rupert Everett star in a gay-themed family comedy that goes seriously awry.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Topics:Fatherhood, Motherhood, Movies

There’s nothing as frustrating as a
promising idea undone by a failure of
nerve. In John Schlesinger’s “The Next
Best Thing,” a single woman in her late
30s, played by Madonna, bears the child
of her best friend Robert (Rupert
Everett), who’s gay, after a single
drunken assignation. The two decide to
raise the kid together, and the
arrangement seems perfect: Robert is a
remarkable father, Abbie a patient and
sensible mother. Their son, Sam (Malcolm
Stumpf), is bright, well-adjusted and
free of the brattiness that filmmakers so
often try to foist off as cuteness.

But alternative-family arrangements come
with their own set of problems: When
6-year-old Sam asks his dad why he
doesn’t sleep in the same bed with his
mom, as his friends’ parents do, Robert
tells him it’s because she snores. It’s
a funny, clever dodge, but we know as
well as Robert does that it’s only
temporary.

The problem with “The Next
Best Thing” is that instead of wrestling
with some of the thorny, delicate
problems that might come up in such a
family, it struggles to manufacture and
hand over big, clumsy ones — as if the
inherent drama (and comedy) in such a
socially unorthodox family could never
be enough to fuel a movie. “The Next
Best Thing” is two or more confused
films shoehorned into one, a picture
that spends its first half straining
against conventionality and its second
half bowing and scraping to it.

Madonna’s charisma as a personality –
and even though it’s dwindling rapidly,
I’m willing to believe she might still
have some left — has never translated
particularly well to the big screen, and
“The Next Best Thing” doesn’t do much to
help. Her role is conceived so that she
can pretty much play herself — her
character is a yoga instructor with a
fondness for bindis and other eastern
trappings — but perhaps she’s changed
personas so many times that she can’t
even pull that off. She seems wooden and
unnatural, and it’s tough to watch,
because she’s clearly trying her
damnedest.

Everett, conversely, in an effortless
and enjoyable performance, scoops up the
whole movie with one hand. He has a
charming rapport with his co-star,
spinning out offhandedly funny lines
like the one that begins, “If I were you
– and I practically am …” He plays a
landscaper, so we get the occasional
glimpse of him in rugged workwear, for
those inquiring minds who want to know;
he’s beautiful to watch, and there’s
both dignity and unabashed sexiness in
his presence. He plays a character, not
an orientation.

In many ways, his role
is carefully written: In the picture’s
first half, when we see the easy, warm
relationship he has with his son,
there’s no doubt that he’s a nearly
perfect father. And there are lovely
touches that Everett plays beautifully:
Reading to Sam at one point, he turns
the book upside-down and makes up his
own ridiculous story involving a giant
purple booger that’s enough to feed a
large family. It’s just the sort of
silly gross-out that kids love, and it’s
an especially appealing bit of goofiness
given Everett’s unflappable smoothness.

But the story — the screenplay was
written by Tom Ropelewski — takes a
jarring spin at the movie’s midpoint and
never recovers. It makes the movie feel
suddenly baffling, almost as if
Schlesinger, a veteran director with a
spotty record, simply didn’t think to
guide us through the weird, inexplicable
tone shift. (And of his recent pictures,
at least, it would seem from the
charmingly eccentric “Cold Comfort Farm”
that he has some feel for delicacy of
tone.) When Abbie finally finds herself
a straight love interest — an
investment banker who also happens to be
a pretty decent guy (Benjamin Bratt) –
Robert feels threatened in his role as
Sam’s father. That’s the point at which
the movie seems to be taken away from
Everett — a serious mistake — and
veers into “Kramer vs. Kramer”
territory. Abbie’s character changes
overnight in a way that just doesn’t
make sense; she behaves in a way that’s
almost incomprehensibly cruel.

In its last half-hour, “The Next Best
Thing” hurtles toward high drama like a
runaway train, as if Schlesinger and
Ropelewski had decided that there wasn’t
much to be said about alternative
families after all — a weird choice and
a cowardly one, given that we live in a
country where gay marriages aren’t
officially recognized and conventional
family units are still held up as a
prized ideal.

And “The Next Best Thing” deprives us of
some fairly essential pleasures: One
minute Abbie is about to give birth to
Sam; the next minute the action has
jumped bumblingly ahead to his sixth
year. We see her flipping through a
photo album, only briefly lingering on a
snapshot of Robert holding Sam as an
infant. Wouldn’t it have been a good
idea to include at least a few scenes of
the couple adapting to life with their
new charge? I want to see Everett
reduced to a complete blathering idiot
in the presence of a tiny baby. As it
is, “The Next Best Thing” takes so many
wrong turns it’s barely an also-ran. It
isn’t the next best thing at all. Not
even close.

: Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment. More Stephanie Zacharek

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How football saved my relationship with Dad

After the second divorce, he grew angrier and harder to reach. But one subject provided common ground

By Annalisa Grier

(Credit: David Lee via Shutterstock)

Topics:Real Families, Football, Life stories, Fatherhood

As a kid I watched football with my dad, an inveterate Texan and incorrigible Oilers fan. I collected football cards and put them in a wicker knitting basket that said on the front in needlepoint, “Enough is better than too much.” Ignoring this, I crammed it with cards for players I hardly knew, teams I had no particular interest in; I collected to collect. I would sit with my father in our basement, the ironing board behind us, our feet up on a coffee table, and organize my football cards by team or position or color while this game I hardly understood unspooled on the screen, yelling when my father yelled, cheering when he cheered.

I’m not a sports fan, as a rule. My progressive high school required that girls learn to play football, and my main memory from those gym classes is that I could throw a football with no more accuracy than I could throw anything else. I haven’t learned much in the intervening years. I remain unclear on what “intentional grounding” is. I am unsure what a neutral zone infraction consists of, and how that differs from encroachment. I don’t know who’s in what division, including my own home team, the Rams, although I do know enough to lament them, generally.

But every Sunday and Monday night during football season I am on the couch, drawn by the responsive logic of the game: players moving like pieces in a scheme, which is satisfying in the same way spy or heist movies are satisfying. If this, then this. If that, then the other. The shouting, chest-beating masculinity. The muscles wrapped up in spandex, the end-zone celebrations clearly practiced before a mirror, the physical intelligence masquerading as athletic talent, the intensity of focus on one, purely pointless endeavor. The players within their helmets remind me of a theatrical production I saw a few years ago, “Antigone” with masks, the actors learning how to speak through their motions. This is how I felt as a child, as if I’d been denied a face: wrapped up in a body that didn’t work the way I wanted it to and unable to communicate across the space between me and the world.

My father and I have had a difficult relationship. As a child I usually felt that he and I were equally strange and silent, and equally unable to reach across the gap between us. He took me fishing, and I would cast a few times, then lie in the bottom of the boat reading or reorganizing my tackle box. I would catch catfish by accident and he would have to unhook them as they (and I) squirmed, and toss them back. We went hunting, and I would shoot targets in the yard but refused to shoot a quail. He read Hemingway to me at night but, lying across his elbow, I would scan to the bottom of the page and wait impatiently for his voice to catch up.

Like him I am shy and halting in conversation, and usually prefer quiet. At least watching football, I knew when to cheer, and when to groan theatrically with disappointment, and I knew that my father and I were reacting in the same way at the same time. Our relationship has been marked by blowups and tentative rapprochement for nearly as long as I can recall, and it is not one that has changed much over the years. With adulthood, awkwardness has settled between us instead of comfort: a fear of the wrong move, a sense that a false step will shatter the peace.

When my father and his second wife were divorcing, I was determined to keep myself neutral. This was the third divorce for me as a daughter — my parents, my mother’s second husband, my father’s second wife — and I could not, I decided, keep my own sanity while engaging with the divorce in any way. The equanimity that came from this neutrality lasted precisely until the moment my father, his voice on the phone quiet with anger, said to me, “Do you know that your stepmother has put you down as a witness to testify at trial?”

I saw this as a sign that keeping out of it would be harder than I’d thought.

My father sent me emails and text messages about the divorce. They got angrier: at my stepmother, at the courts, at the world he lived in where his youngest daughter, my sister, could be in someone else’s home, out of his reach. He, like me, masks sadness in rage.

Then I got caught in it. If I wasn’t with him, I was against him. His notes started saying things like, “I have tried.” They said “why don’t you” and “you should” and “please.” They were signed, “your father.” I cried until blood vessels burst under my skin.

I didn’t let my father hear me cry. I didn’t answer his notes, either. Instead I shredded my fingernails and broke out in cystic acne that made moving my face painful. Finally I said to him on the phone, “We aren’t having this conversation.” I started screaming: “I’ve told you I won’t have this conversation with you.”

“I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong,” he said. I went into hysterics and hung up. For the next few weeks I ignored his calls, picked at my skin, and watched a lot of football.

Then my grandmother called me from Houston, where my family lives. I had decided not to visit until my father was over the divorce, or at least over talking about it with me. “We’re having a Christmas party,” she said. She sounded hopeful, which is not a tone my grandmother customarily uses. “I was thinking you might want to come. I’ll buy you a ticket. Also,” she added, “my mother is in the hospital.”

My great-grandmother is 99, although in her mind she’s been 90 for several years. She is fragile. The equation had changed. If this, then that.

I bought the ticket. “I’m staying with Grandma,” I said to my father in an email. He wrote back: “Stay with her Sunday night. Monday with me.” I didn’t respond. I was strung out with nerves; I packed my suitcase in a more obsessive fashion than usual, dividing my toiletries by type into Ziplocs, putting my shoes into plastic bags, rolling each item of clothing individually, down to underwear. I watched the Broncos beat Chicago and yelled at the screen: “You little prick,” I spat at Tebow. “You lucky overrated jackass.”

My father picked me up at the airport and I was strung tight. I hugged him with one arm instead of two, hanging on to my suitcase with the other. Don’t say anything, I thought at him, so hard he must have felt it. If you say a word about your divorce, I am back on that plane.

When my father and stepmother first split up, he got a new job and a small apartment. He cut his life down to its bones — cookbooks, a few fishing rods, the ties and plain white shirts he had to wear to work. He lost 40 pounds. He stopped, as far as I knew, watching football. Once he called me during a game: “Who’s playing?” he asked me, and I told him — it was the Vikings that night—and he laughed a sad sort of laugh and said, “I have to ask you who’s playing.” I watched games at night knowing that my father wasn’t watching them with me.

From the airport we went for Tex-Mex. It was beautiful out, high 60s and sunny. We went in the restaurant to order and he pointed to two spots at the bar. “Why not outside?” I asked him and he grinned a little, looking sheepish, and pointed at the television over the bar: the Houston Texans, who had just clinched their first playoff spot, were on.

“Have you been keeping up with the Texans?” he asked me, as we settled in.

I told him that the games weren’t shown in St. Louis. “We have to watch the Rams.” I ordered a margarita, and drank it too fast. My head pitched a little.

“I heard commentators talking about how that Rams-Seahawks game was the worst Monday Night Football they’d ever seen,” he said. “I didn’t watch it.”

“I went to sleep in the second quarter.”

The screen kept cutting in and out, and every time it went out, the noise in the bar rose and rolled with groans. Every time it came back, there was a cheer and a collective leaning forward.

My father asked me what the sports writers were saying about the Rams. “What are they going to do about it?” he asked, sounding exasperated. I reported what the writers were saying: For god’s sake do something about the defensive line. Poor Sam Bradford. Fire the coach.

I took bites from the food on my father’s plate when I finished my own, and ordered another margarita. Houston was losing to Carolina, bitterly; I alternately celebrated and smacked the bar with my hand in disappointment. Next to me, my father celebrated and smacked the bar at the same time.

A few weeks later, during the first half of a Saints-Falcons game, I texted my father. “Are you watching this?” I asked him. “It’s pretty good.”

“It’s VERY good,” he texted back.

I knew he was sitting in front of the game with a whiskey or one of his home-brewed IPAs. I was eating kettle corn straight out of the bag, my feet on a pillow. We were waiting for Drew Brees to break the single-season passing record, which he did, beautifully, on a touchdown pass that came after such a string of missteps that it almost seemed he’d set up the drive that way on purpose.

: Annalisa Grier's writing has been published online at The Awl and in print in Confrontation and is forthcoming in Cream City Review. After stints in Taiwan, France, and England, she now lives in St. Louis. More Annalisa Grier

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When my father became a woman

After Dad had gender reassignment surgery, he promised he'd be the same person. Then why do I miss him so much?

By Danielle Brown

(Credit: pandapaw via Shutterstock/Salon)

Topics:Real Families, Fatherhood, Gender, Life stories

The Castro. A place we can wander freely, without fearing for my father’s safety. All rainbow flags and crowded sidewalks. Ads for nightclubs and escort services stapled to telephone polls. A cookie shop whose walls are plastered with pictures of half-naked people that sells, among other things, penis-shaped macaroons.

My father, dressed in jeans and a sweater with a pashmina wrapped loosely about her neck, walked ahead of me, her girlfriend at her side. My father’s extensive collection of jewelry and her outfits still startle me. Everything is so form-fitting! It is cheating, I think, to wear women’s jeans and not have hips.

“It’s not fair,” I told her once. “You get all the perks of being a woman but none of the pain. You don’t have to get a period every month.”

I was forgetting about the procedures, the hormones, the electrolysis. But still.

We were in search of breakfast, which with my father in San Francisco means walking for at least 20 minutes to reach a restaurant I have yet to try because a repeat visit is unthinkable to her.

But I don’t like waiting for breakfast. I don’t like getting sweaty first thing in the morning. I like cars. And my hunger had reached a dangerous level. I was finding it hard not to shout at people, not to hit them with my leather bag or scream at them to get out of the way.

We turned down a side street lined with tall, narrow houses. A lone man walked toward us. The only other person on the quiet street.

“I’m too hungry for this, Dad,” I said — and suddenly forgot to breathe.

I remembered too late. Remembered only after the word had left my mouth. The word I wasn’t supposed to say in public anymore. The title my father had suggested I not use any longer, because if I did, I might make a mistake, might let it slip in public.

My father said nothing. Didn’t look back at me. Didn’t glare. Just the sound of feet hitting concrete.

My heart pounded in my throat and my eyes darted back and forth – man to father, man to father. But the man made no move. Didn’t reach into his jacket for a gun. Didn’t pull a knife from his pocket. Didn’t step in front of us and seize my father.

He walked right by.

“Sorry,” I whispered once the man had passed. My father didn’t answer.

——

My father had gender reassignment surgery four years ago at a hospital in Arizona while I was taking final exams at the end of my freshman year of college. She’d been living full-time as a woman for a year and had already had the facial surgeries and breast augmentation. The “Big Surgery,” as I called it, didn’t much change my perception of my father. For me, the transformation had already occurred.

No one told me that when my father changed her identity – her name, her lifestyle, her body – that my father would change, too. That the role of father would blur. That our father-daughter routine would seem sacrificed to the gender gods, something lost in the transition into my father’s new life.

In my father’s San Francisco apartment I don’t know where my place is at the table, despite the fact that it is my table, the table that once belonged in our family’s kitchen in Minnesota, the table where I ate dinner for the majority of my life, where I consumed full plates of pasta and baked potatoes and vegetables and eggplant parmesan, my father’s favorite.

“I want you to feel at home here,” my father says, but there are pictures of strangers on the refrigerator, people I have never seen before. Even the refrigerator magnets are unfamiliar, nothing like the magnets we used to have, which were plain, unadorned – simple pink spheres that got the job done. The magnets on my father’s refrigerator are exclamatory, geology-themed. My father’s girlfriend works in the field. “Geology Rocks!” says one.

There are houseplants in my father’s apartment, mostly in the living room. Houseplants behind the sofa, beside the sofa, and on the side table. A tall plant hovers by the doorway like another person in the room. I am settled, my father seems to say through her décor. This is my life now. And there are houseplants in it.

For a long time I couldn’t see the father I used to know. I saw clothes, makeup, impractical shoes. I saw my father’s new girlfriend, my father’s new life, my father’s new home, filled with accumulated artifacts from my previous life, remnants of my past. Even now, years after the divorce and my father’s transition, I visit and feel jarred by bursts of recognition. Hey, I know that mug. I remember this painting. I know the stories behind things. I look at the coffee table with black metal legs and remember that at age 8, I rested my ice skate against it as I tied up my laces, creating a long, jagged scratch along the edge of the table. I’m the reason the corner piece is broken off.

I know that if I wanted to wreak havoc, I could talk about the furniture. Could say to my father’s girlfriend, “You know, this stuff used to be in our living room. I used to sit on this black leather sofa every night with my mom and dad.”

I could tell her I was with them when they bought it. That we got it from this upscale place in Minnesota. I’d loved going to that store. One room just for lights. Lights everywhere. Lights hanging over your head, lights beside you. Every light on, glowing. One room – huge – used exclusively for mattresses. The lighting dim and blue, like a bedroom at night. There were a few rooms with children’s beds and dressers, but I hated those rooms, the pale woods and pastels and primary colors. I preferred the dark mahogany reserved for grown-ups, the sophisticated leather chairs, the ornate lamps and chandeliers.

I could tell her I spent most of my time in a room downstairs meant to keep children out of the way while our parents shopped. I’d loved this room most of all. Free hot chocolate. The rich kind that left a coating on your tongue and made you feel like vomiting after you drank it.

Upstairs I’d found my mother, father and a salesman gathered around a sofa. Black leather.

“Do you like it?” asked Mom.

“Not very much,” I said.

It was delivered to the house soon after. Placed in the family room with the wooden coffee table, where we’d rest our feet every evening, where our golden retriever would wedge in, lying on the carpet in the space between sofa and table, lying beneath our outstretched legs.

I could tell my father’s girlfriend I was there when they bought this sofa, the one she and my father sit on every morning and every night. I was there. Because it was my family. My mother and my father. My dad. Not this person she knows now. Someone else altogether.

- – - – - – - – - -

There is more than one kind of death.

With my father it was a death without a funeral, a death without a body, without casket or burial or sermon or church, without fellow mourners to hold my hands. This was a death with the deceased still breathing, still putting her arms around me and speaking to me in the voice I’ve always known.

“I’ll still be the same person,” my father said before the transition. But how can this be true, when the scar on my father’s forehead is gone, when his short silver-blond hair and his body no longer exist? When the word “Dad” has become something to avoid? If my father is still the same person, why do I miss him so much?

I don’t know what fatherhood looks like when your father becomes a woman, when your father uses the women’s restroom and carries a purse and gets her nails done.

Gone is the scene I once witnessed nightly – my father coming home after a long day of work, dressed in black shoes and dark pants, a button-up shirt and tie. The comfort of familiar clothing. All these things that seem small, inconsequential – the way your father parts his hair, the line of his jaw, the heaviness of his wristwatch, the shoes he wears, how he comes home late after playing volleyball Sunday nights, smelling of breath mints and beer, how he calls you “honey” when you’re feeling sad – these things mean something. They add up and become the things we remember, the things we miss, the things that make your father your father. These are the details that bring a person into the world. They anchor us. They allow others to anchor themselves to us.

I know my father loves me. And I know my father misses me. I know this from the way her voice sounds the night before I leave to go back home. “You could always stay another day,” she says. She speaks in hushed tones, gives me long silent looks. But I can’t stay another day.

“You’ll get up at your usual time then?” she asks, knowing full well that if I do we won’t have breakfast until noon and I won’t be on the road until it’s too late. She wants to keep me, I know, even if I’m asleep in the next room.

I feel our father-daughter relationship most strongly when things are ordinary. Then flickers of our former roles come back – like when my father’s voice bends in sympathy when I’m sick with a fever, or when my father says, “That’s my girl,” a phrase once uttered on a regular basis, back before things changed.

When my father met my boyfriend for the first time, we were thrown abruptly back into traditional father-daughter roles, despite the fact that I hadn’t called my dad “Dad” in years. At least not to her face.

“You can’t tell embarrassing stories about me,” I warned my father. “OK? Promise?”

“I promise,” she said.

“And don’t ask him about his intentions or anything like that, OK?”

“Fine, fine.”

It was funny, almost.

My father asked my boyfriend questions about himself, quizzed him on his plans for the future, gave exasperated sighs when he kissed me for too long while in her line of vision. “Kids,” she said, and I wanted to bask in the feeling of familiarity, of safety, the expected dialogue of a father meeting the daughter’s boyfriend. It rolled over me in waves, this quiet gratefulness, to have my father again in a way I could understand. In a way that felt as ordinary as the wristwatch he used to wear, the shoes he kicked off at night, and the black leather sofa in our living room.

: Danielle Brown has a degree in psychology and is working on a book about her relationship with her father. More Danielle Brown

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Our year of toilet training hell

What began as a typical parenting struggle became a drama that nearly wrecked our lives

By Josh Reims

(Credit: Ilya Andriyanov via Shutterstock)

Topics:Real Families, Fatherhood

My 6-year-old son is amazing. I promise he’s cuter and smarter and funnier than any 6-year-old you know. Even your own. He’s just started kindergarten, and I’m pretty sure he’s been chosen to give the commencement address already. He knows what five plus five is. And if you think that’s too easy, he also knows what five plus six is. When I make a funny comment to him, he says, “Are you being sartastic?” My wife or I could correct that — but why? Even his mistakes are cute. All of which is to say he’s your normal everyday kid. He has tantrums some of the time, is selfish most of the time, and fights with his older brother all of the time.

Oh, also, one more thing you should know about him. He won’t crap in the toilet. I hate to be so crass, but that’s the fact of it. Peeing? Sure. Put him in front of a urinal, and he’ll spray that toilet with his lack of aim. But “poop in the potty,” as they say in the parenting biz? Not happening. Ever. When he needs to go, he asks for a pull-up, goes about his business, and then gets changed.

I don’t remember exactly when it first happened. But if the subject of potty training was raised in his presence — I’m sure the parenting books tell you never to mention potty training to your kid, but I could fill a large binder with my parenting “mistakes” — he wasn’t interested in it. Like me with the gym membership. I understand other people do it; I understand it’s good for you and makes you feel better. It’s just not for me. But this isn’t your typical story of tough toilet training. This is a trip into the bowels — no pun intended — of hell.

Because not only did he refuse to go on the toilet, something worse started happening. One day my wife turned to me and said, “When was the last time he pooped?” I had no idea. I couldn’t remember. (And yes, normally I could remember.) It had been days since I’d seen any of those plastic trash bags with the dirty pull-ups inside. (Destroying the environment one day at a time!) Even when he asked for a pull-up, he hadn’t actually deposited anything inside. He was going on strike, like those prison inmates who stop eating because they want better food. My son was taking a stand. The only problem was, no one could tell us what his demands were.

What followed was a year of pure torture.

The first thing we realized was that toilet training was out the window. You can’t train someone to go on the toilet when they won’t go at all. As the days dragged on, still no poop. Five days, six days, nine days. His stomach became distended. He looked like Jackie Gleason. Our brother-in-law happens to be a pediatric gastroenterologist. No joke: The most convenient doctor of all time for us. He suggested we increase the Miralax laxative we were already giving him. Basically, blow the crap out of him and he’ll get used to it. Sounded like a plan.

So we gave him more. And more. And yet, he still wouldn’t go. I mean, this was one serious show of stubbornness. If it weren’t so frustrating, it would’ve been impressive. If he could’ve channeled that willpower into something positive he could’ve invented the next iPad or something. Instead, he used it for evil. Well, not to be graphic, he actually was going, but only in drips and drabs so to speak, and without his knowledge. And the thing was, he was now regressing. He was wearing a pull-up all day. And when I say “a pull-up,” I actually mean 12 of them, as we had to constantly change him thanks to the Miralax effect. The SpongeBob underwear passed down from his older brother was a relic of times gone by. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of a pair when I was grabbing some socks for him, and I could hear the mocking from SpongeBob himself. “He’ll never wear me again!” in that annoying SpongeBobby voice.

But there wasn’t anything cartoon-like about this. He was in pain. Constantly. He spent most of the time writhing on the couch, on the floor, on the bed, moaning. Always lying down, clearly working his hardest to not let anything out. But the longer he withheld, the more stomach pain he had. There were days we couldn’t send him to school. The moaning became like torture. Not for him. For us. Imagine having someone in your living room playing the violin as horribly as humanly possible. And then imagine the violin is your son. It made me want to pull out my hair – and I don’t even have that much left. Our other son couldn’t even be in the same room with him. There were tears from everyone. Obviously we felt awful and wanted to help. But we were also 45 seconds from a nervous breakdown. We went back to our brother-in-law. He was as frustrated as we were. He had fixed cases like this thousands of times. But this was the most difficult case he’d ever had. Hooray for us! And hooray for him, because he was working for free.

He performed a bunch of tests — stomach palpations, anal inspections — but they just confirmed there was nothing medically wrong. The only real effect on my son was a new distrust of his uncle, and especially his uncle’s finger.

This situation was particularly difficult for me, being the father. I felt it was my job to teach my boys how to do this. And let’s be honest, men spend more time in the bathroom letting out what he was holding in than women do. I tried to explain the joys of this activity. If he only knew how many Pulitzer Prize-winning books I would never have read if not for that special time. Or the relief he would feel after a job well done. I found myself envious of a guy taking his dog for a walk. As the owner bent over to clean up the mess, plastic bag worn like a glove, all I could think was: That lucky bastard.

But my son would have none of it. He was scared. Of what, he couldn’t say. Or he didn’t like the feeling. Or he was trying, but nothing was happening. There was a different answer every day. He missed school, he couldn’t go to play dates, and we were spending tons of money on wipes and pull-ups. When we went to Mexico on vacation, we put him in the pool wearing his bathing suit and three swim diapers to prevent any chance of leaking. And if somehow something did slip out, and the pool had to be evacuated, I’d already found the perfect kid to blame it on. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to point out that obnoxiously loud 3-year-old kid as a perpetrator.

So what did we do during this time to try to fix this? Pretty much everything. We played with the Miralax levels as if we were mixing crystal meth in a back alley lab. We yelled at him. We coddled him. We ignored him. We rubbed his stomach. We rubbed his back. We gave him medicine, which did nothing. We gave him a stronger laxative, which brought about the loudest screams of pain yet. We tried to rationalize with him. We tried to understand. None of it worked.

My wife and I would console each other by reminding ourselves that at least he wasn’t sick; there was nothing seriously wrong with him. But when your kid’s in pain 90 percent of the time for months, that rationale only goes so far. We had seen specialists in the field of encopresis (“it’s all his brother’s fault”), a psychiatrist or two for us (“he’s obviously trying to hold on to something” — really? You think?), and one for him, which didn’t work because he was too young and also couldn’t sit still due to the discomfort. There was no progress on the withholding. You’d think he had government secrets up there.

And then, imperceptibly, things started to change. The moaning receded. The pain lessened. He still had discomfort some of the time, but it wasn’t a 24-hour nonstop moan-a-thon. And we noticed we were using fewer pull-ups. I’m sure CVS wasn’t happy about the loss of income, but we were thrilled. And slowly but surely we made it back to where we had started. The holy grail of underwear returned. He still asked for a pull-up when he needed to go, but he now had a little more control. Things got back to normal, relatively speaking. We were so emotionally drained after the year from hell that we didn’t care that he wasn’t toilet-trained. I mean, when you summit Everest, you don’t need to go climb another mountain right away, do you? We told ourselves we’d get to that later. Well, we’re still getting to that.

I’m sure now is about the time people reading this think we’re terrible parents, or maybe they thought that four paragraphs ago. If we had only done X, he would never have withheld, and all would be peaches and cream, whatever that means. Well, here’s what I say to them.

Stop it. Right now.

Just stop. We can’t take any more advice. The only advice I ever give to parents, unless asked about something specific, is to ignore everything everyone else tells you. Everyone is an expert about your kid. Everyone knows the solution. Everyone can tell you exactly what you’re doing wrong, especially your family. We have received more advice about this, solicited and not, than Dear Abby gives out in a month. We’ve conferred with “experts,” read books (the poop book business is huge!) and been bombarded with every answer you can imagine. And the one thing we’ve realized? There is no one answer. If someone suggested one solution, somebody else would suggest the exact opposite five minutes later. When I searched the Internet, I could find nothing there we hadn’t heard or tried. The only thing I found helpful was the stories of the thousands of people going through the same thing. I especially enjoyed the ones who had it worse than we did. (Whatever, I’m a bad person.)

So where does that leave us? Right where the story started. But we are slowly moving forward. And I do mean slowly. He still wears a pull-up when he goes, but he’s not allowed to do his business anywhere but in the bathroom itself. We’re nudging him forward, while letting him feel he’s leading the way.

And we’ve learned something obvious but important. That every kid is different. You can’t tell me what will work for mine, and I can’t tell you what will work for yours. It’s easy to judge everyone else’s parenting style. But after going through this, we don’t — at least not as much as we used to. There’s no manual for this. No one loves going to the bathroom more than my other son. He was a dream to potty train. It’s his favorite place. He literally reads entire books in there. But for some reason, that’s just not the case this time around.

As my wife and I often remind each other when the other gets a little insane/panicked about it: We’ll get through this. Someday we’ll look back and … well, we won’t laugh, but we’ll look back. After all, by the time he’s in college, this will all be a distant memory.

Though I should check if the Princeton student store sells pull-ups.

: Josh Reims has been writing for television for the past 15 years. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons. More Josh Reims

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The ridiculous things I did to avoid a play date

As a stay-at-home dad, I avoided that dumb parenting ritual of scheduled fun. Then I met a mom who forced my hand

By Francis Litzinger

The ridiculous things I did to avoid a play date

Topics:Real Families, Fatherhood, Life stories

I grew up in a household dominated by strong masculine figures. My father took great pride in the fact that he couldn’t cook, clean or shop. Both of my grandfathers ruled their households with an iron fist that would make any Latin American dictator envious.

We’ve come a long way since then. My wife and I have a real partnership. We work together on everything, and try to do the best for our kids every single day. After years of failing to find work, I grudgingly accepted the new economic reality and became a stay-at-home dad. I like to think I’m a good father, a modern man, but even I have my limits. There is one thing I absolutely will not do. I will not do a play date.

The thing is, I don’t like interacting with other parents. It’s enough that I shop and try to cook a nutritious meal every single night. Now I have to yammer on about my girl’s love of kitties or stuffies or the Wonder Pets? That’s valuable time taken away from my rapidly shrinking male pursuits.

Even the concept of the “play date” rubs me the wrong way. When I was a young boy, you went over to your friend’s house and hung out, until you heard your mom yelling down the street to get your you-know-what home. The moms and dads were never involved in this activity. Why would they be? I wouldn’t have wanted Mrs. Krula on my dirt-bomb team for all the Fantastic Four comics in the world.

Unfortunately, that’s gone the way of the three cocktail lunches. Now what we have in its place is an appointment made between parents. It’s a testament to how busy we are that we need to set a date just to play.

As it turns out, I have a beautiful 4-year-old girl who is embarrassingly popular at her preschool. During the mad rush that is drop off and pick-up at her daycare, the other parents make it a point to tell me just how much their kid loves playing with mine. Which is great. I’m happy for her. But the problem is that it doesn’t stop there.

Lucky for me I’ve developed a series of maneuvers that work on any parent when the dreaded “P word” is thrust upon me. It can be a faked illness, like my daughter having a bout of nasty diarrhea the night before. Or, if I’m in the mood, I’ll use the distraction technique, which involves me telling said parent that my mother or father is in the car waiting to see their granddaughter and that I really should be going. Sometimes I’ll just say, “You know our schedules are kind of wonky.” I’ve always gotten out of it. That is, until recently, when I met that parent. The uber-mom who finally broke me.

I was collecting my daughter and the junk from her overcrowded cubby one afternoon, and I was using my standard “I’m a selfish, bumbling, incompetent dad who can barely manage raising kids” routine, which usually keeps parents at a distance. I dropped her clothes, her artwork, spilled a little of her snack to sell the schtick.

But this particular mom took it all in stride. Leaning over to pick up my girl’s clothes, she said, “It sure is hard to keep everything together, isn’t it?”

This mom had some game in her and wanted to play in the big leagues. Fair enough. But she didn’t realize I was a pro.

The next day came, and here she was at my daughter’s cubby again. Only on this day she decided to ramp up her play. She kept her son Max beside her:

“Please, mommy, can Sally come over to play, please, mommy, can she please please?”

But then I played my seasoned hand.

See, whenever I pick up my child, I always hold her close to me — tight. Sure, it’s to show some love and say hi after being apart, but the truth is my kid will bolt if I let her go. So that’s what I did. In the middle of the chorus of pleases, I subtly let my hand go limp and gave my wee one the slightest of pushes. And bam! She was off like the track star I hope she’ll one day be.

It’s my “break in case of emergency” action. Every parent, by sacred unwritten decree, cannot dispute you dropping everything when your child runs away from you. Conversations are stopped in mid-please, and it is now your parental duty to run like a fool to collect your fleeing spawn.

It was so sublimely natural that no one would ever suspect it wasn’t genuine. “I’m sorry, she’s just so silly sometimes, sorry,” I stammered. “Oh, and we’ll talk! Come back here, Sally!”

By the time I caught up to my girl at the bottom of the stairs, she had this anxious look on her face. She thought she had done something wrong, so I completely baffled her when I swooped her up and told her how much I loved her. A second later she was in the car with me drinking her juice box and eating her cheese string like it was just another day. She gave no thought to the fact that only a day ago her daddy told her never to run away and now he was strangely happy that she had.

I drove home confident the matter had been settled.

But I was wrong. The mom was all laughs and smiles the next time we met over cubbies, and I had no choice but to promise to look at my calendar and let her know soon.

The next few days were ridiculous, even by my standards. Instead of dropping my daughter off at 8:30, as usual, I acted like some drive-by dad who drops his kid off as soon as daycare opens. And at night, I replaced my leisure drop-in times at 5 or 5:30 and now waited until the last possible moment to collect my daughter, in the hopes that no one else would be around.

My play date phobia was getting the better of me. Even worse, it was messing with my little girl, who through no fault of her own was losing out on every social invite because of her dad’s silliness.

The next afternoon I happened to arrive at the daycare early, and before I could rush in to pickup my girl I saw her laughing and playing with the little boy whose mom had been so relentless. It was time for me to toss in the proverbial towel – again.

“Uh, how’s this Sunday for a play date?” I offered the mom when I saw her the next day.

Of course the mom accepted. Of course my daughter had a great time. And of course this woman made me pay for my previous games. And so it was that when I arrived to pick my girl up, Mrs. Play Date walked onto the porch and said, in full view of my daughter and her son, “Well these two little darlings played like two peas in a pod and had a lovely time, but I think your girl wants to ask you something.”

“What’s that sweetie?” I asked.

“Daddy, can Max come over to our house for a play date tomorrow — please Daddy?”

: More Francis Litzinger

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Daddy is a wimp

I can't throw a ball. I'm afraid of heights. But my biggest fear is looking like a coward in front of my daughter

By Matt Mendelsohn

Topics:Real Families, Fatherhood

“Daddy, can you win me a Domo?”

My daughter and I were walking briskly through a gigantic amusement park, past a huge pegboard loaded with bizarre, oversized dolls resembling Sponge Bobs on steroids, when Alexandra popped the question I was dreading.

“Please, Daddy! I really want a Domo! Puh-leeze!”

In her six years on this earth, the word “Domo” had never before left my daughter’s lips, not once, not ever, but that’s the nature of the beast. Silly Bandz and Uglydolls yesterday, some Japanese TV mascot called a Domo today, a yet-uninvented fad tomorrow. But the problem wasn’t my daughter’s fickleness. The problem was something else.

I glanced at the arcade in front of me. Not one of those ring-the-bell-with-brute-strength things. Whew. I’m no weakling, but strength has never been my, well, strength. Nor, thank God, did it involve a hoop. The last time I played basketball, Captain & Tennille were topping the charts. And I was quite relieved to see this particular game didn’t require shooting anything with a gun. My scientist father played tennis my entire childhood: white sneaks, white socks, white shorts, white shirt. An NRA family we were not.

Nope, in this case the skills necessary to win said Domo were pretty straightforward. A bucket of baseballs, painted strike zone, canvas muslin backdrop. And in an instant — because those of us who spent half of junior high gym period in the boys’ room pretending we had to go reaaallllllly bad will tell you it only takes an instant — I figured a way out.

“I thought you wanted to go on the Zoom Flume,” I said, seamlessly changing gears. It sounded plausible. Plausible enough, because what I should have said was this: “Daddy can’t throw to save his life.” Of course, you don’t say things like that to your 6-year-old. You just think them, over and over.

——

I used to love amusement parks. Places like Adventurer’s Inn in Farmingdale, N.Y., where in my mind Billy Joel will forever be singing about some bottle of red. No death-defying rides back then; today’s coaster industry was just on the verge of exploding when I was a teenager. But you didn’t go to places like Adventurer’s Inn for the scary thrills anyway. I’d go to see if Raina, my first crush, was there that night with her friend Laura; or to discuss Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s newest 11-minute song, and how it compared to ELP’s previous 15-minute opus; or to spend an hour engaging in an intense grammatical debate with my friend David over whether the place was named Adventure’s Inn, Adventurers’ Inn or Adventurer’s Inn, singular. Geeks Gone Wild.

Mostly what we did there, actually, was play Skee-Ball, the bowling game with the wooden balls. Those tickets spitting out like sausages! I was a bit of a prodigy, carefully mastering the art of the bank, the only way to nail the big scores. Fifty-six consecutive plays, 790 tickets and that puka shell necklace would be mine.

Something in those nights must have left an impression. Later in life, as a news photographer, I was a risk taker. I raced across Panama’s Bridge of the Americas during the U.S. invasion, 90 miles an hour in a Humvee, screaming with excitement the whole way. Though my wife doesn’t believe me, I’ve jumped out a plane. Twice. I wriggled my way through an Egyptian tomb that hadn’t seen a torch since 1200 B.C. and had rocks thrown at my head during the Los Angeles riots. Like any good journalist, I kept the rocks, which now sit in a plastic tub in the basement, “L.A. Riots ’92!!” scrawled in Sharpie upon them.

Now, as the half-century mark looms, those things seem comical if not downright impossible. The reason my wife doesn’t believe that I jumped out of a plane is that she’s had the unfortunate luck of having to sit next to me in turbulence on one too many a cross-Atlantic flight. Errol Flynn? She’s convinced I’m Elmer Fudd. And she may well be right. I don’t even have to be airborne to be a mess of anxiety. Driving over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge will do just fine.

But of these phobias, the one that fills me with the most fear has nothing to do with heights or bridges or small spaces, or pretty much every ride at the amusement park in which we currently find ourselves. What I fear most is being a chicken in front of the one person in my life whose brain is still soaking things in, not leeching things out.

Years ago, when the croc guy, Steve Irwin, died tragically, his young daughter Bindi said, “Everyone thinks they have the greatest dad in the world. But I really did.” Except for the crocodile part, which I would never do, needless to say, that’s pretty much how I feel about my own daughter. From Alexandra’s first memorable, cohesive sentence at 3 — “Daddy, I think I need to ask my doctor about Lunesta” — to her dutiful memorization of Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” at 4, sparing me at least a year of the Wiggles, my daughter is pure joy. And each year brings more: a twig of a kid playing ice hockey, a wicked sense of comic delivery, a love of artichokes, the way she pronounces the word AWE-some, all first syllable.

Because of her, I know what a narwhal is (a whale that’s apparently been crossed with a unicorn), what owl pellets looks like (regurgitation souffle), and who’s hot on Radio Disney (I sometimes find myself listening to Selena Gomez and the Scene a good 30 minutes after I’ve dropped her at school). And because of her, the thought of looking like I can’t walk up the stairs of a silly water park ride, no matter how many there are, or how high and unprotected they may be (Hello?!? Is there an OSHA inspector in the house?), is out of the question. Alexandra may have a short memory — “win me a Domo!” has morphed into “Zoom Flume! Zoom Flume!!” now — but her daddy remembers everything.

And some of what I remember is this: The reason I spent so many gym periods hiding in the bathroom back in the mid-70s is because I didn’t know how to hit or throw or catch. I never once played catch with my own father.

——

“Are you sure you don’t want to get some frozen lemonade?” I ask, which I’m told in Swahili means, “Daddy is terrified of heights.”

As I say this, I happen to be standing underneath a gigantic, two-story bucket of water near the kids pool, one that slowly fills itself until dumping its load on the bathers below. My kind of ride. I look across the park at a line of people in bathing suits snaking up an endless set of stairs and my pulse begins its own steady climb. A minute later we’re ascending, ever so slowly, me fixated not on the thrilling raft ride down but on the dizzying ascent up. I chat up a father and son who are in line behind us, mainly to take my mind off the fear, though it does give me a chance to do the requisite, manly there’s-nothing-to-be-afraid-of spiel in front of another parent. “This is gonna be AWE-some!” Alexandra squeals and I, lying through my teeth, concur wholeheartedly. Half an hour later, giggling down a raging rapids, the fear finally turns to fun. “Again!” Alexandra yells, though I thoughtfully remind her about that lemonade.

And that’s when I fell into the trap, how I met my Waterloo at the water park. You see, to get to the frozen lemonade, you’ve got to walk right past the softball toss game, which, like its baseball pitch cousin, had disaster writ large. “Daddy, can you win me something? Please, Daddy?”

No escape this time. One softball into a basket wins. Easy. I hand the kid $6, but like a Vegas croupier he points to a slot and motions for me to push the bills through. The attempt ends as quickly as it starts: three balls, three misses. Alexandra looks a bit crestfallen, but I’m just getting started. “Let’s go again,” I tell the kid, a circular motion of my finger, and another six bucks are pushed through the slot.

Pffft! goes ball number 1 as it hits the surrounding straw. I’m sweating now and it has little to do with the brutal heat. I toss again. Pffft! Last ball. Pffft! This is just like Vegas, I think — it’s a freaking money pit. I reach deep into my cargo shorts, still soaking wet from the Zoom Flume fiasco, and pull out my last six ones.

But wait. My guy is trying to tell me something. This young kid, not some grizzled carny but a name-tagged teenager destined for the Ivy League, or at the very least a William and Mary, a young man whose own parenting days still lay light years ahead of him, leans in.

“Don’t go for the basket,” he whispers, like a guy giving a tip at the racetrack. “Hit the top rim. It’ll deaden the throw and the ball will fall straight down without bouncing.”

The Rosetta Stone! The secret of the Houdini’s water torture trick! Who “You’re So Vain” is about! For the first time in my life I’m on the inside, and with my last three tosses I will finally reclaim my rightful place in the pantheon of fatherhood.

Pffft! goes number one.

Pffft! goes number two. I look around — Roy Hobbs nowhere in sight.

Deep breath. I line up my throw, steady my hand, and aim straight for the top collar of the basket. Deaden the throw, he said. I release the ball. But this one doesn’t just miss the basket, it misses the actual game, rolling on the asphalt path that lead back towards the water rides.

Tears well up in Alexandra’s eyes. Not the tears of a whiny kid who wants a cheap-o stuffed animal, mind you, but of a girl who just wants her father to succeed. (And hadn’t I? Surely they’ve got some prize here for a kid who can singled-handedly expose all of her dad’s weaknesses in one Kings Dominion outing. Perhaps a smaller Domo.)

Panicking, I feel an overwhelming need to rescue her. But Alexandra, frozen lemonade running down her chin, senses her daddy needs a bit of rescuing himself. So with a sigh and a cocked eyebrow, her version of a poker tell, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is the inheritor of at least some of my DNA, my daughter looks at me and says, “What about Skee-Ball? You’re great at that!”

I look down, past the eyebrow, past the smirk, right into the space where her front teeth used to reside, and the need to win a jackpot evaporates instantly. I know I got that already.

: Matt Mendelsohn is a writer and photographer living in Arlington, Virginia. He has worked at UPI and USA Today as a photojournalist, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and AOL News. More Matt Mendelsohn