I know I have been neglectful over the past few months and I hope everyone will forgive me.
As with the rest of the world, there is a lot going on in my little corner of the universe. When push comes to shove, it's the hobbies that get tossed aside.
Truly, I wish it weren't so. Living in a world of fantasy - that I create and control - would be a nice respite.
So, I wrote about an earlier addition to the family back in May. Having a grandchild is a lot different from having a child. I don't have to set boundaries or tell her that she can't do something. So I don't.
I raised my kids with a simple idea in mind: "If it doesn't leave a huge scar, cause permanent brain damage or land one of us in jail … have at it!"
Wanna stick a fork in a light socket? Fine by me.
Wanna see how long it takes you to smash a Matchbox car with a claw hammer? I'm interested.
I drew the line at playing in traffic or sniffing household chemicals but I've always believed that children learn by doing - even if it means they did something really stupid. Fucking up is part of life.
So is succeeding! And that's what the past couple of months have been about.
A few summers back, my wife delivered what I considered to be an accurate, if somewhat provocative, presentation at a national conference of academicians that discussed the changing face of higher education in a world where children have had almost unlimited access to knowledge since birth.
She spent more than two years researching and developing the presentation - and her colleagues absolutely hated it.
Her conclusion was that college professors had gotten lazy. They had shifted from teaching critical thinking skills. They were now more interested in pushing points of view than providing the tools for students to develop their own points of view.
My wife is what I would consider a "common-sense liberal."
Yes, I know to some that might seem like an insult and to others an oxymoron but it's my blog so I get to choose the terms.
As a professor of sociology, my wife is fully aware of life's ailments. She understands the imperfections of society far better than most people. She is aware of the perils we face in the future if we don't make radical changes in the way we do many things in today's world.
But she also knows that grandiose plans and talking points fall to the wayside when the shovel meets the dirt. She believes that we must find a way to pay for these changes without leaving hundreds of thousands of people unemployed or underemployed. We cannot sacrifice today for tomorrow, as easy as it's been to sacrifice tomorrow for today.
And she also is leery of giving a blank check to a bureaucracy that has never once in our 50 years on the planet proven itself to be a faithful steward of the public trust. Rather, the government has always reminded me of drunken Spring Breakers turned loose with their parents' credit card.
So, her presentation was centered around less activism and more mental infrastructure for the young minds that will shape tomorrow. And with the wealth of knowledge available today, the infrastructure needed to be developed far before the collegiate years. It needed to start in early adolescence, with professors putting the finishing touches on the work that had begun in middle and high school.
College would no longer be about bending students to the professor's worldview. It would be about refining the thinking skills already developed in order to help a student create his or her own worldview.
As I noted, it was not well-received. I can tell you from firsthand experience that no one likes to be told that the skills he's honed over a career are no longer relevant.
She was, however, undeterred (a trait I admire). She was the head of her department and she instituted policies that reflected her findings. She had seminars with secondary school teachers to introduce them to educational methods that didn't revolve around reciting a textbook verbatim to ensure a high score on a standardized test.
The secondary students responded well to the lessons for the most part. Some of the teachers actually permitted classroom discussions that ran counter to what the proscribed textbook ascribed as fact.
The students that matriculated to the local university (a high percentage, given tuition costs) performed better than the average student (and far better than the local students had in previous years).
It was a small sample, to be certain. Numbers don't lie but they can obfuscate.
The local school boards were unhappy. The local teacher's union was unhappy. Many of the professors were unhappy. The college board was unhappy.
But, as they say, shit happens. My wife had tenure so … fuck them all.
Then something that amazed her came along. Other people were listening and paying attention to what was happening at an insignificant college in the middle of nowhere.
My wife was approached to apply for an assistant deanship at a really nice university. I wasn't surprised. Outside of agreeing to marry me (and I'm actually an upgrade from her first husband), she is about the most competent person I've met in my life. I've known her since we were kids. She was always this way. She has terrible taste in men but she's great at her chosen profession.
I've been around academics most of my adult life (courtesy of my ill-fated first marriage and from my own work experiences). I knew as soon as her foot was in the door, she had the job.
Well, I didn't know it. Academics often lack common sense.
But for once, my prophecies proved accurate. Keep in mind that I've been predicting the Cleveland Indians to win the World Series since 1985 so my track record is rather spotty.
She was offered the job at a university that is, in academic circles, one step below the Ivy League.
No-brainer, right?
Yeah, not so much. Decisions we'd made in the past couple of years have created havoc with what should be a one-second decision.
First is one that I totally fucked up.
I worked under a contract that runs April through the following March. I renewed my contract in March without really talking about it with anybody. We had a ton of shit going on and I didn't think it needed a huge conversation. It's the only job I have and it ain't like there is a line of people out the door looking to hire a 50-year-old man with a very specific skill set (think of the movie Taken without any hint of physicality and a lot more sarcasm).
So, when they offered me a nice raise to compensate for the shit I've been doing without pay for the past nine months, I agreed.
Then two months in, I wanted out. My bosses understood. This was an opportunity my wife worked for all of her life. She deserved this.
The owners were … peckerheads. It took me a lot of time to get me out of something I could of put off if I'd taken five minutes to ask my wife if anything was going on in her life.
The other problems stemmed from joint decisions.
We are bound by a multitude of custody, visitation and guardianship agreements with various local and state jurisdictions.
I was able to keep my ex-wife from moving my son to the West Coast because I resided in the state where our custody agreement is filed. Leaving would mean we'd have to renegotiate the agreement and let's just say that the conversation would be unpleasant.. My son has adjusted to life in our household and he's doing really well. I worried about him asking to move back with is mother but the opposite is true. He wanted to stay with us - at either location.
I didn't want to undo all the strides we've made in the past year and, while I would relish a screaming match with his mother, I know that wouldn't be productive. We married because we were so similar. We divorced because we're so similar.
I don't think I need to expound.
My wife's son is entering his senior year of high school. He's OK with moving 600 miles away but we're the adults so we have to ask ourselves if it's fair to him. I don't write about this young man much in these posts. He's a private person and he doesn't really relish attention.
The only thing I can say is that he is the glue that holds our disparate households together. I brought a daughter and a son into the relationship and so did my wife. I've written about my daughter before. She isn't my kid but she's totally my kid. She's the oldest. My wife's children are in the middle. My son is the youngest.
It was an awkward melding and it might not have stuck without my stepson. He is the one who put forth the effort to integrate his family and my family into our family. He's quick with a joke and quicker with a smile. He's the kid you see helping someone with their groceries or running outside in the rain with an umbrella to walk someone to the door.
It's high time the adults in the room (and I include myself in this assessment) take his need into account. He is still bound by a custody and visitation agreement until he turns 18 - even though it's been at least four years since his father has seen or spoken to him (to the best of my knowledge).
His sister is in her junior year of college. She gets a break on tuition because her mom worked in the state system there. If we were to leave, she'd either have to transfer or be on the hook for the burdensome student loans we all know about. She could probably transfer to the school where he mom would be working but … yeah, who in the hell would want that?
My sister was my high school principal and that sucked donkey nuts. Can you imagine if your mother was the dean of the college where your major was housed? Fuck that!
My daughter and granddaughter were considerations. I'm just getting to know the Little One and I don't want it to be like it was with my own grandparents. I barely remember my grandmother because we saw her so infrequently. I only remember my grandfather as the the bitter old man we moved 500 miles southward to take look after.
Then there is our newest addition.
We started adoption proceedings six days prior to my wife being offered the job.
Needless to say, the adoption process would have to restarted if we lived somewhere else.
She has grown even more than my son in the past year. She is on probation still but that actually proved to be the least of our worries. Her PO made a couple of phone calls and found out her case could be transferred in a matter of hours - so long as a judge agreed.
It was the guardianship proceedings that really tangled things up. We were not yet the "permanent" guardians. It was a step we just didn't bother to take because, to be blunt, nobody else wanted her to live with them. We viewed it - and the courts viewed it - as a unnecessary hassle that didn't need to be addressed.
Then it needed to be addressed quickly.
We couldn't walk away from her. It would be the (legally and logistically) easiest part of this whole deal. We could have literally just say "Fuck it." They'd chuck her into a foster home for nine or 10 months and then probably into the jail system for the next year or so.
Yeah, my stomach curdled a little just writing that. She's our kid now. We'll go to the wall for her (and, honest to God, I think she'd go to the wall for us).
She actually proposed that as an option (and I don't think it was just to see how quickly we'd dismiss it.) But, yeah, it got shot down before the sentence was finished.
So, uh, yeah, it's been tough finding a little bit of time to put down sentences in a fictional world.
For a time, it looked like I'd be living in one state with the kids while she moved to a new state to start a new career as an administrator.
Then an outbreak of common sense came crashing down around us.
Honestly, I think the family court judge got tired of seeing our names on her docket every other day (and that is not hyperbole - for two weeks, we were involved in mediation or status hearings or motion hearings for one of our three cases every other fucking day!)
I think a couple of our local ambulance chasers were a little bit worried that my wife and I were a new legal team in town looking to cut into their practices.
The family court judge isn't someone I know well. She is new to the bench in the past year or two. Our guardianship papers were handled without a single interaction with an actual judge.
After a particularly fruitless mediation hearing with my ex-wife (via teleconference) that led to harsh words between not only the attorneys themselves but with the judge and the attorneys, I think she'd had enough of seeing our faces. And I know she'd had enough me and my ex-wife sniping at each other.
She ordered us to bring the children to her chambers the next morning. And when I say "ordered" I mean exactly that. It was a written judicial order to produce the minor children in her chambers no later than 10 a.m.
There were no attorneys; there were no parents or guardians; the only other person in the room was the probation officer.
My wife and I sat outside the chamber for more than two hours. The probation officers left, returned with a couple of pizzas, and completely ignored the two fretting people in the anteroom.
The clerk barely acknowledged us. People coming in and out with pressing business were shooed away and told to come back after lunch.
The first time the clerk spoke to us in more than an hour is when she handed us a notice to be in Courtroom B at 8 a.m. the following Monday.
The kids emerged a few minutes later and they weren't forthcoming.
"We just … talked," our newcomer told us. "It was … you know … what we like to do, how we're doing in school, what we think about maybe, you know, moving away."
That was the story from all of them. It wasn't an interrogation. She didn't ask them where they wanted to live. She just asked open-ended questions and let them take the conversation wherever they wanted it to go.
It took 15 minutes the following Monday - in a courtroom that was filled with deadbeat parents who were behind on child support - for her to give us permission to take the kids to Pluto if we wanted.
She had worked it out with the new state that they would share jurisdiction on my wife's case for the next year. That will see my stepson through high school. His father has the right to visitation (at his own expense) and can pay to have my stepson come back for a weekend a Christmas and a week next summer (provided he set it up before my stepson turns 18).
We were awarded permanent custody of our newest ward and she set it up for the adoption to be finalized before we were officially residents of a new state (so long as nobody else had a problem with it).
The newcomer's case was closed in one state and opened in another. Her juvie record is now sealed and will be expunged if she can go a few more months without trouble.
It came at a cost, though. She was returned to supervised probation. For at least the next six months, we will have to take her after school once a week for a meeting with her PO. She'll have to retake the drug and alcohol classes.
But she seems OK with it. She's finally free from all of that. Nobody in our new town knows what she did at 14 years old. She was a minor so her name didn't appear in the newspaper. There is no mugshot of her on the Internet. Yes, we looked (at her request).
My son is going to start his third high school in three years but he likes the new place. My wife once moved him to a new state without notifying the court or me (in violation of about a dozen state statutes and binding legal agreements). The judge said since I'd actually asked beforehand, there was no reason to deny keeping custody with me for the next two years. At that point, my son will have graduated high school. If his mom wants custody for the first year of college, then we'll revisit the situation then.
Until then, my ex-wife can fuck off (so long as she keeps sending in those sweet, sweet child support payments!). Like my wife's ex-husband, she can pay for him to visit and she gets him for two weeks in the summer. I'm OK with it and he is, too.
We're renting a house for now. In a couple of years, we're not going to need as much room as we do now. A person affiliated with the university owns the place and he gave us a decent deal. Our salaries are much higher and the cost of living is much lower so we can afford to live in a nice neighborhood (in a house with a pool!).
And, yeah, I got a new job. It was actually pretty easy.
One of the customers from my old job has its headquarters in our new location. I casually mentioned to one of my contacts that my wife had been hired at the university there and we were moving in a few weeks.
Over the past 5-6 years, I'd heard stories of their epic Friday night pub crawls and their legendary tailgate parties for the city's NFL franchise. I figured it would be nice to meet the people I'd spoken to and emailed so regularly over the years. I'd met their bosses; they'd met my bosses. We'd never met each other.
Instead, I have somehow managed to fail upward one more time. They had an opening in their marketing department for an assistant director and after a couple of rounds of interviews … I'm it.
Just as I had no background in journalism but still managed to work as writer and editor for 17, just as I had no background in design or computer networking but have managed to cull out a niche position for the past 10 years, I will take my history degree and head into yet another divergent career field for the final portion of my working life.
It's not a bad gig, actually. The company has about 200 franchises across the region but already controls the lion's share of the market. My job will be to think up and implement innovative ways to keep it. Given the low-quality of the competition, it should be fairly simple to accomplish. Plus the staff I inherited knows what the fuck they're doing so if I just stay out of their way, it should be fine.
The ultimate irony is that the owners of my old job will have to negotiate with me when the contract ends in December. Unlike most, I know the profit margin at the old place. I know how much the old company massages the numbers for maximum profit. I know how much the salesman overstates the estimates for an increased commission. And I know how much of the company's bottom line rides on those padded figures.
Yeah, it's going to be fun. And I know that's the main reason I got the job. I'm OK with it. I'll have a few months to get my feet wet and get the lay of the land. As with before, I work under contract so I'm not worried about getting the boot once negotiations are over.
The best part is that no one from old job knows where I landed. I'm going to introduced in a teleconference sometime in August. The teleconference was my new boss' idea. I think she always suspected that her company was getting fucked over but she could never get the details on just how.
Sure am looking forward to seeing my old boss' face when she sees me smiling back at her from the other end of the line.
With the good also comes the bad.
Our daughters are now 600 miles away. Our grandchild is now 600 miles away. Our sons are now 600 miles from their grandparents. My wife and I are 400 miles farther away from our families.
The girls came down with us on one of our trips. They love the city. It's only three hours from our house to my son-in-law's parents house. The city holds a lot of opportunities in my stepdaughter's field of study.
I would imagine that they might be moving closer in the next year or two. But that's still going to be a year or two that I don't want to think about. It's funny. We don't see each other as often as we could (or should) but it was always nice to know that they were only a couple of hours away.
I hope life will settle down in another six weeks or so. Until then, I will do what I can to keep everybody up to date.
Oh, and another chapter of Azkoval is in the cue. I probably should have put that at the top. My bad.