How does a single father ever get laid?

I have two kids to raise, a dating scene to navigate, and a rubber vagina in my drawer. Bachelorhood is off to a rough start.

Editor's note: Excerpted with permission from "Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood" (Modern Times, 2008)

By Trey Ellis

Read more: Children, Memoirs, Divorce, fatherhood, Life

Feb. 7, 2008 | At the end of the day, I was bathing the kids, unloading much of a bottle of conditioner onto Ava's scalp so I could run the padded brush through her hair without making her cry. The explosion on top of her head is her most dramatic feature. When it's clean and out, she looks like a miniature Macy Gray, a mini-supermodel-rock star. She looks like her mother, Carmen. It was usually her mother or our weekday nanny who wrestled with Ava's hair, but I was slowly learning. In attempting a braid, I could only get through a turn or two before the hair rioted, so I'd just seal off the relatively controlled part with a barrette and let the rest poof out like fireworks. Almost always the braid would be high and outside, but Ava was sweet enough not to complain. Instead, while looking at herself in the mirror, she would tilt her head over her shoulder to center the poof and say, It's good, Daddy.

Back when Carmen and I were still together, Ava often asked me why she didn't have straight hair like all her friends. The first time it happened I lifted her up to my height. Carmen and I had dreaded this day. We had read her "Happy to Be Nappy" and "Nappy Hair," but how could that counterbalance being the only brown-skinned person in her preschool? I explained to her, as many times as she needed to hear it, that girls with straight hair pay thousands of dollars to make their hair curly, and girls with curly hair pay thousands to make theirs straight. The trick is to love yourself for the way you are (and spend all that money you save on chocolate).

After the kids were dry, I put them to bed (I think I ended that night with a creaky but oddly soulful rendition of James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James") and went down to my default dinner: a bag or two of the prewashed carrots the nanny always popped into Ava's lunch and a few jagged slabs of supermarket rotisserie chicken. Instead of swiping a couple of juice boxes from my kids, this night I rubbed my hands with glee in anticipation of the treat that awaited me. Tonight I didn't despair that this burnt orange piece of crap refrigerator with the broken plastic shelves and jangly handles was an insult to all of refrigeratordom. I didn't despair because I had bought a six-pack of Pepsi the other day, something I do only a very few times a year because as soon as it's in the house, I end up sucking them all down like crack.

I laid out my bachelor's feast on the table in front of the TV and loaded a DVD of the documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys." I turned out the lights so it would seem more like the movies, and I'd snuck in food. Just as I pressed play, our new 24-year-old weekend nanny Linda walked in.

"Hel-lo," she said, as if singing a song. "Whatcha watching?"

I told her.

"Cool."

She dropped to the couch, caving us into each other.

"Oops," she said. And then, "Pepsi! Can I have one?"

A great excuse for me to rebound off the couch.

"Sit, silly. I'll get it."

It occurred to me that back in '78, when this house was full of promise, the carpet was a recognizable color, and my side-by-side refrigerator was a symbol of status, Linda was just being born.

Linda fidgeted. "You're really into this, aren't you?" She asked.

"I remember watching these guys on TV and then begging my parents for my own skateboard with polyurethane wheels and sealed bearings."

"Well, boss, enjoy your trip down memory lane."

She pushed off from the couch and took all the dishes to the kitchen with her on her way upstairs to the bathroom. A few minutes later, she clattered down the stairs holding her clothes, one towel around her body and another around her hair.

"Good... night?" My voice cracked for maybe the first time in two decades. I winced, but it was too dark in the TV room for her to have seen me.

"Sweet dreams," she said. "Dream about me."

I stopped the DVD to collect my thoughts. The direction that our nascent relationship was going was leading me straight toward a tawdry, scandal-ridden hell. I had hired her so that I could get out and begin living like the newly single man that I now was. Yes, there were issues. I didn't really drink, hated bars and the last time I'd been on the prowl Phil Collins was topping the charts.

All right, that wasn't completely true. I had gone out once a few months ago, right as Carmen was leaving me. My friend Yule had dragged me to The Brig, our local meat market. It was a Friday night, and when the big, black bouncer eyed my driver's license, I joked that I was almost old enough to be legal two times over. His only response was to tug his huge head toward the door. Inside, as I watched a carpet of twenty- and thirtysomethings shout at each other and spill beer on each other in an attempt to have sex with each other, my stomach convulsed. Out of the hundreds of sweaty yuppie girls in this room, I was positive that not one of them could I ever love. I could have collapsed to the floor in a sobbing heap -- if it hadn't been so crowded that my arms were pinned to my sides.

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