OK, I'm back but I don't know for how long.

I never really wanted children before I got them, but afterward I wouldn't have been without them for anything. Oh, they were trouble, as many kids can be, but they were my trouble, created and loved by me. Some people may considered that a tad possessive, but they ARE mine, would not have existed without me and they are without doubt the most important things I have ever produced.

So my first wife says, "I'm pregnant." She wanted kids, you see and somehow the pill failed that one time or else, maybe, she forgot. Turns out she wasn't pregnant, but she stopped taking the pill before we found out for sure (pre-EPT, you know) and by the time we found out she wasn't pregnant, she was. Maybe there's a lot of trouble nowadays for couples getting pregnant, but she had no trouble at all.

Now since my parents were poor, I had to work to pay for college (that's a whole 'nuther story) but still managed to get married (and yet another) during those years. I had graduated and was finally making some "real" money (650 per month) working at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. About that time, however, I got word from a professor I knew at NMSU that he could get me a fellowship to get my Master's degree. Decisions, decisions. Well, decided to return to college and it was during the year there that David arrived.

Now I wasn't about to let a child rule my life so I set about making him into a little adult, even acclimitizing him to an adult college student life style - you know, staying up until midnight and sleeping in the next day. Years later when he was a teenager, I, like many parents, would pay for him having that kind of schedule. Anyway, I graduated and went to work at Los Alamos Scientific Lab where Chris came along. Now two kids were more than enough for me (especially in the light of the "population" problem - you see I was a liberal in those days, silly me), so I made sure I wouldn't have any more (oh, and are there some funny stories I could tell about that).

Now Chris and David are about as different as two brothers can be. And at the same time they are amazingly alike. I always said that the older one should have been a lawyer because it seems he can argue anyone into anything. The younger one's main talent seemed to be in the artistic bent, but he really could have been anything he set his mind to. Now, as much as David could get what he wanted, Chris was the exact opposite. Once when he was a teenager I told him that he needed to stop fighting the system and start using it. His reply was "I don't know how." And I think that was probably true. I learned a lot from Chris in a lot of ways.

A story will illustrate how Chris's mind worked. One day I drove into the driveway and there was Chris with the spare garage door opener making the garage door go up and down. Nothing unusual in that, small boys (he was about 8) are prone to disobey and do things that they aren't supposed to. He saw me and ran into the house where I found him sitting calmly on the couch watching TV. I asked him why he had been doing something that he was told not to do (it wasn't the first time, you see) and he looked at me and as calmly as can be said, "I didn't do it. It wasn't me." I don't know, maybe he actually believed it, but I know he did it, I know he knew I knew, but he would never admit to having done something wrong. And that was his pattern through life, deny and NEVER admit you've done something wrong. Even refusing to admit that he had played with the polaroid camera even though he left a picture lying on the dresser, a picture of his reflection in the mirror taking the picture. Thinking about this now, if David should have been a lawyer, maybe Chris should have been a politician. Combine that attitude with a total lack of fear (oh, what stories) and you can see, he was headed for trouble in his life.

Anyway, David was a husky kid, Chris was slight (he ate more than David and yet never has had any trouble with being pudgy, plump, or overweight, still doesn't). So their brotherly "love" consisted of Chris teasing David, aggrevating him, and David punching him in reply. Chris had no chance against his brother, but he wasn't about to stop tormenting him. It finally got so bad that in one house we put Chris's bedroom on the 2nd floor and David's in the basement. They met in the kitchen on the 1st floor to fight.

Well, my first marriage had ended in divorce and, hard as it was, I agreed to let her have the kids. Less than a year later she was killed by her boyfriend who then killed himself. Her parents offered to take and raise the kids, but they were mine (that possessive thing again) and nobody was going to raise them but me. Well, that's not really true. By that time I had my second wife and she was considerably younger than me. So she helped me, except she really wasn't any help. She was one of the worst mistakes I've made in my life and my kids paid dearly for that mistake of mine.

Anyway, eventually that relationship fell apart (whole lot of story there, ever hear of a "group" personality), both the kids had decided they were too smart to continue school, drugs and booze here and there. Oh, it was classic. Finally the two boys had such a violent confrontation that something had to be done. David (17 then, I think), decided to move out, saying "If I stay here I'm going to kill him."

Now Chris got so bad that I ended up putting him into a lock-down teenage psych ward sort of thing popular in those days for parents trying to get some peace in their home. He rapidly learned out how to manipulate that system so it really didn't do any good. After he got out he and I had it out about his behavior and he moved out (at 16). Meanwhile my second wife had gone into the hospital for her psych problems and I was all alone.

So 10 years go by, requests occasionally for money from the kids, a few courses in tough love for me, they're living from hand to mouth on the street (I believe Chris ended up actually living in a hollowed-out hole in a dry riverbank outside Tucson once), some army duty, some AWOL, some trouble with the law, etc. But they both ended up, again, back in the same town as me.

Then they meet women who for some reason wanted them. Slowly, they begin to realize that they did have to work in order to live, to support their women. David went through one marriage ("Why are you getting married?", "Why not.") and into a second. David's 3 kids come along (by this time I had married for the 3rd and last time, she had 3 boys, one of which managed to have kids before David), and he finished his transformation from troubling youth to man. I am amazed at how good a father he is, don't have the slightest idea where he learned it.

Chris refused for years to marry his woman, although he undertook the duties of father to her child (who's now about 14 and looks fully grown) from a previous marriage. Finally, when he was well into his 30's (he just turned 35), she got pregnant, they got married, and they had a little girl. I have never seen anyone so goofy over their kid as my youngest son is. He stays home with the baby while she works (10 years of living on the street appears to have killed any materialism in Chris and so he just doesn't care to put in the extra hours necessary to build up a career, so he always has had menial jobs anyway).

Anyway, a little about my kids. I had no idea how to be a father, was mostly just confused all the time. I thought I knew what they should be, but they were very insistent on showing me that I didn't. As I said, my kids taught me a lot, especially Chris. He taught me that every individual is going to be what they're going to be and they can be warped only so far before breaking or snapping back. And, as hard as we want to try, we parents cannot be responsible for what our kid's become. What Harrison Ford said in "Six Day, Seven Nights" about an island is true about kids too. "If you don't bring it with you, it ain't here." If it's not in a kid, you can't make it happen. And if they do something wrong, it's not necessarily because of you, it could just be the way they are.

Anyway, Chris called the other day to apologize for how he was as a teenager (would you believe it?), maybe because their teenager is doing some of the same stuff and he's finding out how depressing and frustrating it is. And David has confessed in an answer to a blog (although he may have been joking) that it wasn't me that made him get into all that trouble, it was all his idea.

Quick, someone give me some ideas for future posts. I'm sure everyone is getting tired of all this "way back in '03" stuff. Oh, that's right, it's '03 again. Anyway, you know what I mean.