Daddy Nearest: A Humorous Look at the Life of A Stay at Home Dad


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by Jonathan Kronstadt
Pity the poor minivan. Never before has a vehicle been so reviled by its occupants, except perhaps those army trucks that look like khaki covered wagons transporting soldiers to near certain death. But I know some parents that would rather take one of those to the front than take their minivan to the mall.
We baby boomers came of age in cool, bohemian wheels--VW bugs, roly-poly Volvos, and the odd Ford Pinto. I had one of the limited edition exploding Pintos. Then we moved into our mid-20s, started making a little money and, having neither participated in nor really studied World War II, we decided car cool came only from Japan. We bought Hondas, Toyotas, Nissans, Mazdas, hell, we'd likely have bought a car called Nagasaki if it came with a place to put change and a locking gas cap.
Then came marriage and child number one. This was not a problem. We had this covered. Just purchase a top-of-the-line child safety restraint, spend a day and a half figuring out how to get it into the car while still being able to get both arms out of the car. Hint: You'll need your teeth. Then plop the little genius into the back with one of those goofy toy bars velcroed across his or her field of vision, and off we went to museums, zoos, nature centers, and politically correct potluck dinners, where everyone brought but no one ate tabbouleh. Bulgar wheat? More like vulgar wheat.
Then we had a second child, either because we a) read that Ted Kazinsky and Geraldo Rivera were both only children and couldn't pass it off as an ugly coincidence; b) hardly ever got to use that $180 REI baby backpack before our first child got too big for it; or c) once had just enough time to have sex as long as we didn't waste any time with that silly birth control device.
But this was still not a problem. We could make this work. Except that we, or in this case I, had never bothered to sit in the back seat of my Honda Civic wagon before I bought it. I was single at the time, and figured that if someone ever had to sit in the back, it sure as hell wasn't going to be me. I later discovered that there was only enough leg room back there to accommodate small furry creatures of the forest. This was fine as long as we could put our first child in the middle back seat so that her astonishingly long legs could dangle between the front buckets. I even taught her to shift gears with her feet, which came in handy on hills. But there was no way another car seat would fit back there, unless we got one of those laser beam guns that shrinks things real small and then zaps them back to full size, and I hear they're really hard to find.
Some boomers had those nice big Honda Accords, with more than enough leg room for two munchkins and really big trunks. Big trunks are key, because when you go away for the weekend with two small kids, you appear, to the untrained eye, to be moving to Iceland. The second child rockets your stuff quotient exponentially. For those of you who skipped trig, that means really a lot.
But we take scads of long car trips, largely because neither my wife nor I is the brightest bulb in the lamp. So we needed a minivan. My wife grew up in Manhattan, where cars are less transportation than they are random projectiles. She was already ticked at me for dragging her to live in the suburbs, and now could see the last vestiges of her coolness fading away in the rear view mirror of a Honda Odyssey. I'm six years older than she, and am already way too tired to even try to be cool anymore. Besides, I tried for 25 years and never got within sniffing distance of cool.
In an effort to catch her off-guard, I decided to argue practicality. I may not be cool, but I'm way closer to cool than practical, so she was appropriately stunned. Eventually I wore her down, and we bought an Isuzu Oasis, which is essentially an Odyssey with an inferiority complex. It was shiny, clean, and smelled good. It took about an hour to erase those qualities for good. The first to go was the smelling good part. Sometimes as I'm driving, I while away the minutes playing "Name That Stench." I clean the car almost thoroughly before each trip, and when we arrive it looks like the county fairgrounds after a two-week run. A melange of stickers, mashed bananas and Ritz Bits blanket the carpeting, and juice box straws have punctured the ceiling fabric. Empty baby bottles and pages of a Barbie coloring book are tossed away like coupons for hemorrhoid cream, and the film on the inside of the windows appears to be moving.
I do have one hard and fast rule about eating in the car. No tabbouleh.

This work is copyrighted by the author, Jonathan Kronstadt. Reproduction of any kind is prohibited with out the express consent of the author. Please feel free to let Jonathan know what you think of his work by sending him an email.