It turns out I was asking the right questions. We needed a new car and a new house; we got Ford’s least-monstrous SUV and a three-bedroom rental that cost as much as my old Brooklyn one-bedroom. And then, in the final weeks before our son arrived, we started watching “Game of Thrones.” By the time our boy was born, I didn’t want to swaddle him; I wanted to thrust him to the heavens on top of a parapet and declare, “All this will be yours!”

“Game of Thrones” cares about children. Children are heirs. There’s no hemming and hawing about how they’re desensitized to violence or they cost too much to send to college. They’re a blessing — in many ways the only blessing — and even the evil ones have parents who love them.

I tried to remember this as I changed my son’s diapers with the DVR paused and him screaming his head off. If I were Ned Stark, right-hand man to the king and Season 1′s exemplary patriarch, I wouldn’t dare to complain about him. You’re so strong! I thought as he kicked me. A hale and hearty lad! A darling babe at the breast! If Wildlings ransacked the house, they wouldn’t kill you. They’d raise you up to be King-beyond-the-Wall! It helped, and when I unpaused with my wife, I attempted to learn some lessons from “Game of Thrones” about being a dad.

1. If you’re not kicking ass for your family, your son should do it for you.

“Your Baby’s First Year for Dummies” (which is a great book) explained that no matter what I did, I could never prepare for the moment when I brought home a little creature who was completely dependent on me. That’s true, but the good news is it goes the other way. When Ned Stark is shamefully ambushed in King’s Landing, Theon Greyjoy urges his son Robb to take revenge: “It’s your duty to represent your house when your father can’t.” I fully intend to use this line on my son if I ever get arrested.

2. Wean your kid.

Young Robin Arryn’s breast-feeding was voted “Most WTF Moment in GOT” at Fanpop, and it’s easy to see why. There’s something unnerving about breast-feeding to begin with. Oh sure, it’s beautiful and natural and it saves money on formula, but it’s a fundamental repurposing of a woman’s body: What was once A is now B (and maybe a little bit of A if the kid’s asleep). The hijacking that starts in pregnancy continues until — well, for Robin, it appears to have gone on way past my wife’s rule: “If he’s old enough to ask for it, he’s too old for it.”

3. The bigger the family, the better.

Once you have a kid, it’s amazing how quickly people ask, “So are you going to stop at just one?” (It’s the third question they ask, after “How’s he sleeping?” and “Are you breast-feeding?” Kids are like privacy repellent.) My simple answer is “no,” because there’s balance in my life right now between the time I spend with my son and the time I spend being me, but “Game of Thrones” has shown me that it’s good to keep an open mind. On the show, you have as many kids as you can. Your kids protect you. They run the castle when you’re away or dead. Little Bran Stark can’t shoot an arrow to save his life, but his sister Arya can. Father Ned smiles: insurance.

4. Give your kid a dog.

I have an issue with dogs — I can’t pick up after them. It’s nothing personal; it just makes me feel like a servant. I limit my janitorial duties to my son, but after seeing the Stark family’s dogs, or direwolves, rip into anyone who threatens their keepers, I’m thinking it might be worth changing my policy. Still: I’m only getting a dog if it’s telepathic and can sense when my son is being menaced by a home invader.

5. It’s supposed to be embarrassing when you introduce people to your father.

Tywin Lannister, father of Tyrion (the antihero dwarf played by Peter Dinklage), is one of the unheralded dads of “Game of Thrones.” He’s fiercely loyal to his children and apt to say things like, “Family is all that lives on.” But he’s tough to love — filthy rich and scary stern — so when Tyrion shows up with his running buddies Shagga and Bron, it’s not a comfortable moment. But you know what? It shouldn’t be. My father would always answer the phone in a Vincent Price voice to scare off my friends. I intend to do the same. I am not my son’s friends’ bro. I am to be feared.

6. Child-proof your house.

OK, if I had more kids, chances are pretty slim that they would fight near a fireplace and one would shove the other’s head into the flames. But those chances are a lot slimmer if I don’t have a fireplace. This is why Sandor Clegane, the fighter whose scarred face is evidence of such an injury, teaches us not only about the emptiness of chivalry, but also child safety. My wife and I noticed quickly after our son was born that there are a ton of rip-off child-safety products out there, including fences that will fall on kids and drawer latches they will choke on. The easiest way to keep your home safe is just to not have things. No pool, no fireplace, no dining-room table, not even a dining room. No scars yet.

7. Don’t cheat.

Cheat on your girlfriend and get in trouble. Cheat on your wife and end up in arbitration. Cheat on the mother of your children, though, and you’re creating a world of hurt for innocent kids — including the bastards you might sire. Jon Snow, illegitimate son of Ned Stark, is so alienated from his half-siblings that he joins the military order of the Night’s Watch, and before he enlists he cuts short his last chance to make love to a woman so he won’t sire an unwanted child like himself. Tragic! Ned tries to reassure him, “You might not have my name, but you have my blood,” but it’s really a father’s responsibility to provide both.

8. Lead by example.

Samwell Tarly, the cowardly whipping boy of the Night’s Watch, confesses that he was told by his father, “You’re not worthy of my land and title” before he was stripped of his inheritance and sent into service. Now, Sam can’t fight, he has bad eyesight, and he hasn’t really been taking care of his body — but I’d like to see his dad. I bet the man isn’t a paragon of courage or self-control. Kids learn by example, and it starts early. When it comes to food, for instance, I thought my wife’s pregnancy would let us both load up on pickles and ice cream, but she said that her condition was no excuse to turn her body into a garbage dump, and she kept me on the straight-and-narrow, too. Now our son eats Brussels sprouts and mackerel. If I go up a pant size, I feel like I’m letting him down.

9. Whatever you do for your family, it won’t necessarily be enough.

“Game of Thrones” is going to have to work hard to top the heart-wrenching death of Ned Stark, but even crueler than his beheading is the lesson behind it. Ned has a chance, when he’s brought before Joffrey the false king, to speak truth to power. He lies to save his family — and gets executed anyway. No matter what I do to keep my family safe, I could end up with my head on a spike (or, more likely, crushed under a bus), so I really should have life insurance.

10. Love all your kids, no matter what.

My favorite father-son moment in “Game of Thrones” is when Tywin Lannister says of his dwarf son Tyrion, “He might be the lowest of the Lannisters, but he’s one of us.” Of course this is a lesson about loving your children no matter how they come out, and I’d like to think my wife and I have the courage to welcome any future additions no matter what prenatal testing reveals, but it’s that “one of us” that gets me. The best part about having a kid, so far, is that I’m an “us.” I’ve managed to go from being alone to helping pilot a unit. It’s like going from private to general, from the mailroom to CEO, but oddly enough I’m less anxious than I was before. Instead of worrying about a lot of little things, I worry about one.

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.

“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.

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.

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?”