We took the kids to Disney On Ice on Valentine's Day, thanks to the generosity of my employer, who received several comp tickets and took pity on me when he saw the family portrait-mural that stretches across my office wall.
"Do you really have 8 children?" he asked.
"Yeah. Yup."
I get asked this a lot and the reactions range from incredulity to pity to fear. Mostly fear. Like I'm catching. Like everyone except me received the proper vaccinations against doing something as crazy as having more children than vehicles.
"Wow," he muttered, with furrowed brow and a hand over his mouth.
"Yessir."
He backed out of the office with the same look you'd give a frothing chimp waving a razor and a can of shaving cream. He returned to my doorway a moment later and lobbed a fistful of Disney tickets at my head and sprinted away.
"Aww, thanks!" I shouted to him.
"Stay away from me."
I get that a lot.
Anyway, we don't do a whole lot with our kids because we don't really like them. That, and there are so many of them that their collective weight is a gas-drag on our car, which was not built to carry passengers whatsoever. It's more of a driveway vehicle than a roadway vehicle. It performs best when we treat it as a stationary thing.
When we do go out as a family, it's usually short-lived because we get mentally and physically exhausted from the screaming and the fist fights and the name-calling and the eye-gouging and the incessant tattling.
From their mother.
I'm driving, so I don't get my fair shot. It's ridiculous.
You think I exaggerate? You haven't lived a day in my 1998 Sebring.
Anyway. Disney. Ice. Dancing. Kids hopped up on cotton candy in Olaf-shaped bags.
We decided not to tell the littles where we were going because, well, we were actually thinking of taking someone else's kids. Some that we abducted from a grocery store in Gray. Kids who are smarter and better behaved than ours. Kids we could leave unattended while the Mrs. and I go shag in the car while the kids watched the show. Our kids cannot be left unattended at all, which means we have not shagged in a car for years. Even in our own driveway. And it's really starting to grate on me.
Either way, and what-for, we are evil. And we love surprises. Like telling Gabi and Griffin they're adopted and Bailey is our natural-born son. Boy does that piss them off. And confuse them. And give them nightmares. Well not Bailey. He doesn't understand any of it. He thinks babies come from the microwave after you've called it a "piece of shit muthafucka" three times. Same way popcorn is made, as a matter of fact.
"It pop and you take it out?"
Yeah. Something like that, Bailey.
We live an hour from Portland and, with the show starting at 11, we had to get up extra early to get everyone ready. And when I say early, I mean half-past Corrine did it all.
Valentine's Day, if you don't recall or have chosen to gin-and-coke the memory from your mind, was -13 degrees at 8 in the morning and blustery. The kind of cold winter day in Maine in which everything, including your tear ducts, crackle. When walking and breathing at the same time hurts. When you stop yourself from yelling at the kids because opening your mouth will kill you.
Corrine wrangled the three older littles into the back seat with the broken, jagged end of a broom as usual, while I strapped down the baby in her NASA-inspired, front-facing-back car seat, standing on her shoulders while pulling straps up and clicking straps across her chest and checking to see if her pupils had exploded and that she was still breathing. She gave me a little baby thumbs up. All systems go.
And we were off.
Rumbling across the perpetually uneven, tax-wasted, poorly plowed roads of Otisfield; onto Casco, whose fire station is the biggest building in town; into Raymond, whose walkers take their side in the middle of the road; and through Windham, which has a cop-to-minivan-driving-soccer-mom ratio of 6 to 1 it seems.
The kids sang Christmas carols, the same three carols they'd been singing every day since Christmas and just as poorly, therefore once and for all rendering the argument "Practice makes perfect" the biggest bullshit lie ever told.
Once we hit the border of Westbrook, 55 minutes later, the car's heat started working, which merely replaced one complaint (We're freezing to death!) with a different complaint (We're burning to death!). Because no car ride, in the history of my family, has ever gone without the conjoined outcry of deeply wronged, near-death children. Their cries of injustice and end-of-life wailing rose above the screech of the tortured heat fan and the volume of the acid rock station to which Corrine affixed the radio dial 30 minutes earlier. The noise gathered above my head and came down upon it like the jack hammer of God. It clenched my jaw, rattled my spine, and put murder in my heart.
Corrine turned around, finally, after stewing and after the veins in her neck began to vibrate and her hands shake.
"If you wake that baby...! Shut! It! Now!"
The baby woke.
"That wasn't our fault," Griffin offered. More as a defense witness than an accuser.
Corrine snapped back around, her steely gaze clamping his mouth shut and therefore trapping whatever other comments were about to escape his chapped-lip mouth. Gabrielle tended to the fussing baby by making strangling cat noises. Bailey sputtered something about peanut butter and looked out the window.
The Cumberland County Civic Center is where, at 17, I saw my very first concert - Simple Minds - and where I witnessed a couple fornicate in the men's bathroom, where beer was spilled on my shoes three times by the same man and where the pot smoke was so heavy that I thought it was merely a part of the pyrotechnics of the show.
Now, 30 years later, I was returning to the same venue to treat my kids to a Disney show and it dawned on me that the progeny of that fornicating couple could very well be in attendance with their children. Which really made me want to toke. Wicked bad, man.
As you might expect, the concourses were jam-packed with humans. Most of whom were under the age of 10 and without adult supervision. I was convinced all these kids' parents had dropped them at the door and gone back to their own cars to shag. Lucky assholes.
These kids were all wiping snot on the sleeves of the Disney costume that they insisted their parents let them wear. There were Cinderellas and Snow Whites, Beauties and Beasts, but mostly Elsas and Olafs - the two most popular stars of the latest craze, Frozen. If you've not seen this show, or heard the music from it, how was Uranus? Did you enjoy your stay?
At once, after entering the building, the kids were instantly high. The walls were lined with Disney-colored booths selling Disney products just screaming to be abandoned and stepped on and broken in children's bedrooms across the state. Disney music bombarded the airwaves with its mind-weakening subliminal "Disney is better than Jesus" messaging. And the smell had a peculiar carnival-chili-dog-after-a-Tilt-O-Whirl vibe about it. It made you want to vomit blood but also eat everything within a mile.
The kids insisted, of course, on stopping at a booth to buy something. Anything. They didn't care if was a pile of dog shit in the shape of Pluto. They had to have something or they would dieeeee! And, feeling in the spirit, I treated them to a bag of cotton candy each.
"That'll be forty five," said the overly happy girl in the Minnie Mouse hat.
"Minutes?" I asked dumbly. "You have bags already made."
"No."
"Yuh-huh. They're hanging right there. I can see them next to the battery-operated overly phallic Little Mermaid tooth brushes."
"Dollars."
"Really? Can we just fornicate in the bathroom and call it good?"
I looked down at my children, who looked up at me expectantly, wearing not Disney costumes like all the little fuckers running around us whose parents were all from Cape fucking Elizabeth, but instead wearing the clothes we bought them from Oliver Twist and Huckleberry Finn Clothiers, Ltd.
"Ok," I said and handed the woman the last of my food stamps money that I was going to use to buy beer and cigarettes and porn later that day. But, this day was not about me after all, and so the kids came away with a lesson well learned: In a public place, Daddy becomes a pussy.
So here's the thing about the show itself. It was actually fantastic. In the sense that, for the first time in quite awhile, I was able to enjoy watching my kids experience something fun and engaging that didn't involve throwing things at each other in the woods.
They sang the songs (poorly) with absolute abandon. They danced to the music. They shared their cotton candy and popcorn. They actually liked being around each other for the two hours we were there.
And yeah. I got a little teary eyed when it was finished. Happy to have made them happy, after a long horrible year of badness.
