A couple weeks ago I attended a 6-year-old’s birthday party. When you’re on the divorced dad schedule, you don’t attend as many as you’d think, so this introvert enjoys them. Prior to the sudden end of my marriage, I was looking forward to some quotidian qonversations about which virus was going around and who’s truly responsible for all the fart jokes.
But then I met my enemy. Dude had blow-dried yellowy-gray hair — the version of gray that blonds and redheads get. His jeans looked tailored. He wore a denim jacket and Varvatos boots. He’d definitely had some skin work done to remove liver spots and maybe a brow lift. He was the wrong kind of tan. He was another divorced dad.
He he parachuted in on my conversation with one of the only moms I knew and coopted it, edging me out of it in a way that’s not hard. I’m a pretty typical introverted-extrovert who enjoys one-on-one chats, but is relegated to chiming in awkwardly in groups. It really brought me back to high school, when I’d get five minutes of quality time with my life-threatening crush at a party, then lose it to some Big Dave Handsome with Totally Normal Teeth. The mom here wasn’t single, and no one was flirting, but the template was the same.
In AA you’re always having to look at your role in any resentment, and I totally get that I’d lost a Divorced Dad-off, and while he was 90s-fashion DD, I was more like League Fits wannabe DD, with my EDC shoulder bag screen-print tee and big ol’ Joakim Noah poof. He crowded me out of my lane, yes, but I’m also pretty sure I’m a completely ridiculous person and didn’t want to be reminded of that.
My lane is Old Dad. I was 44 when my son was born, so I probably had at least a few years on the other parents. It’s also an odd place in life because most of my non-school parent friends are in their late 20s. It’s a constant reminder that time is just math.
Anyway, yesterday I took my son to his swimming lesson, which is one of those strip-mall indoor joints where you share the pool with circles of new parents raising their 6-12 month babies up and down to get them used to the water. All these Moms and Dads getting used to their new parent bodies. Then afterwards we went to an indoor playground for my son to burn off any remaining energy, where I watched all these oddly proportioned little trolls run up and down padded stairs.
Every person I saw yesterday was the most beautiful person in the world to someone.