the mad dad

Dan Indante -- aka The Mad Dad -- is a bitter, vindictive attorney who is 10 years removed from writing the seminal relationship book: The Complete A**hole's Guide To Handling Chicks -- quite possibly the most offensive work in the history of American literature. Now, with two kids and a wife, 43-year-old, fat, balding, unrepentant Dan pretends to be a model parent during PTA meetings and Little League games while secretly writing MadDadzBlog.com, a website that rages against the banality of modern parenting. Dan lives and works in Beverly Hills until the creditors from his various real estate projects catch up to him.

we lost the turtle

BY DAN INDANTE

Raising kids is a pain in the butt. You find yourself continuously teaching your children something that you believe should be second nature. I mean, you -- the 40-year-old -- know that sliding down the side of a mountain in a bathing suit is going to result in a couple of bumps and bruises. Why doesn’t your stupid 5-year-old?

Anyway, because my kids don't know anything, and because I apparently have not provided enough genetic material to figure it out, I am constantly trying to teach them pretty much...everything. Since I am clearly a hyper super-genius based on my ability to spew out 800 words/day of inane, scatological drivel on a blog site, I assume I am uniquely qualified for this task.

I have broken down all of the various lessons I give to my kids into one thing: consequences. Whenever I have a discussion with my daughter about making some choice, we always talk about it in terms of the consequences and then she makes the decision. (My 6-year-old, chip-off-the-block son, like me, already knows everything there is to know. Accordingly, he and I only talk when he needs me to get him to the next level of Super Mario.)

But for my daughter, who occasionally listens to me, we analyze the situation. "You want to eat a sixth scoop of ice cream? OK, the consequence is that you will be sitting on the toilet until next Tuesday. What do you think you should do?" Or, "You want to go to Susie's house? She's the meanest girl in school. You can do it, but the consequence will be that she is going to hit you in the mouth with a bat. What do you want to do?"

You would think that the answers would usually be obvious, but, as your kids get older, everything becomes more nuanced. For example, my daughter got a turtle for her birthday. Not from me, from one of our, um, "guests." This guy, who bought a live animal requiring five years of continuous upkeep as a gift for a 7-year-old, was later found dead in a wood chipper, but I have no idea how he got in there or why my favorite gloves were shredded along with him.

In any event, the turtle is small and my daughter can hold it in her hand, unlike her other pets: my two golden retrievers who are each the size of an Abrams M-1 tank and capable of causing far more damage. One day, my daughter asked me if she could take the turtle out of the tank. At the time, I was extremely busy watching the highlights for a Royals-Padres baseball game, so I responded with my standard parental admonition:  I grunted and turned up the volume. I, too, forgot that there are consequences for not talking about consequences when your child asks you a question.

Not hearing me say "no" is generally an invitation for my daughter to do whatever she pleases, and she carried the turtle into the living room. She has an army's worth of Littlest Pet Shop figures set up on my piano and I guess she thought the turtle would be a great addition to the cavalry. Unfortunately, while directing the charge of the Pet Shop Light Brigade, something happened to distract my daughter from her game, something like, I don't know, the wind blowing, or a light turning on up the block. Whatever it was, my daughter left the turtle to act as gunnery sergeant for the plastic infantry while she investigated the leaves falling in the street.

Needless to say, you know what happened next. When my daughter returned, the turtle was gone. Her shrieking roused me from my Baseball Tonight-induced coma and I ran into the room.

She told me the turtle was missing and we sent out a reptilian APB. We searched everywhere, high and low, but couldn't find it. After 30 minutes, I had to tell her, "Honey, he must've fallen in the piano and there's no way we can get him out." This sent her into complete hysterics, although the first question she asked did give me a little feeling of pride. True to her and my Jewish lineage, she screamed: "How much can a piano be worth if it's got a dead turtle inside?!?" I appreciated her disdain for life itself, as opposed to financial considerations, and made a mental note that I have to start teaching her the family business.

To show you the depth of my concern, though, I literally started to disassemble the piano one screw at a time before realizing it was a hopeless task. It's not like this was an end table from Ikea. It's a full baby grand and a dope like me with a Philips screwdriver covered in gefilte fish has no chance of making it inside without destroying the whole thing. Or choking myself with the piano wire.

I leveled with her. "Sweetheart, I'm sorry but the consequence of you playing with the turtle and leaving it alone is that you will forever more be known as a turtle killer." This didn’t turn out to be as comforting as I hoped and she cried for a while longer. Eventually, she realized the futility of the tears and said to me, "Dad, wouldn't I really be a turtle loser? Since I never actually saw it die?" The fact that her 8-yr-old brain already had legal skills that her lawyer/father would never acquire made me proud, and we went to get ice cream to celebrate the turtle's life and passing into that great turtle terrarium in the sky, via our Steinway.

One week later, our maid found the dehydrated turtle under our couch. We won't be worrying about consequences regarding the turtle anymore, however, because now he has a lock on his tank.

sleeping in the bed

BY DAN INDANTE

Like most parents, when we first brought our daughter home from the hospital, she slept in a bassinet next to our bed. By that time, I was 35 and already getting up every hour on the hour to hit the bathroom, so listening to her squawk a couple times a night didn't bother me. Compared to my prostate, which was actually bigger than her, the crying was a minor inconvenience.

There was something oddly soothing about having our baby sleep in the same room. Maybe it's because my wife would spend most of her time with the kid and leave me the hell alone. More likely, it was because, when our girl was sleeping in her own room, my wife slapped me in the head every seven minutes saying "What was that? Is the baby crying?" Fortunately, half the time she swung at me I was already in the bathroom. Peeing. Again.

Anyway, I'm not sure when, but at some point my daughter graduated from sleeping next to our bed to sleeping IN our bed. Maybe it was my fault -- night after night of falling asleep on the couch after watching 16 straight hours of SportsCenter probably gave my little girl the opening her little 3-year-old mind needed to entirely shut down whatever remained of my and my wife's sex life. (Speaking of that, I'm getting a little sick and tired of my kids watching 16 straight hours of Disney Channel every weekend. Where did they learn that?)

But regardless of the reasons, my daughter flat-out moved in. And kids don't just come into the bed and fall asleep. No, they need to kick you in the face, elbow you in the mouth, and pee a little on your pillow before they get real comfortable. I've been in street fights where I absorbed less punishment. The second she closed her eyes, her limbs would start jerking around like The Flying Wallendas. Half the time, I'd wake up sucking HER thumb. Plus, can somebody explain to me the reason that children need to sleep diagonally, spread eagle? How in God's name could a 36-inch long child require so much space that we could barely fit a pillow on our king-size bed?

Naturally, we started to get tired of this whole deal. Every psychologist on the planet says that you should get the kid out of your bed before age 4. Of course, Tom Cruise tells us that all of those psychologists are full of shit, so how can we really believe them? Still, we tended to agree that having our 3-year-old co-star with us in a surreal version of Three's Company wasn't going to work out well for anybody.

So, because we're horrendous parents with backbones resembling Play-Doh, we decided to bribe her rather than do what the shrinks tell us: i.e., kick her out of the bed and just listen to her cry for a couple nights. (Viva Tom Cruise!!!) In a stroke of genius, we figured that if we turned her bedroom into a toddler paradise, she'd actually want to sleep in there. I turned that goddamned room into a circus. Part princess shrine, part Barnum & Bailey, the only thing it was missing was a bearded lady. For sure, my daughter was going to want to be in that bedroom rather than the adult one that always had a documentary or Shark Week playing on TV.

The same day I finished putting in the popcorn machine and the lion cage in her room, I dragged myself back into my own room and, what d'ya know, my daughter's crashed out on our bed, snoring louder than a lumber camp, and drooling a bucket's worth of spit on my new down comforter.

While the whole situation was a big pain in the butt, I was still able to handle it up until the day I got a 60-inch TV in my bedroom. At that point, I clearly wasn't watching the 11:00 p.m. SportsCenter on that microscopic piece of shit 52-incher in the living room. Our girl had to go.

With Chris Berman as my motivation, I sucked it up and planted the little monster in her bedroom every night at 8:00, listening to her scream bloody murder. And then I'd plant her there every hour after that when she'd wander back in to our room. The second time around, the screaming would get so loud, I half expected a SWAT team to show up in our cul-de-sac. Nevertheless, although she had a couple conversations with her family law attorney confirming that punitive damages were unavailable, she stopped the shrieking about a week later. My next door neighbor sent me a thank you card, and I had to come up with a new excuse not to have sex with my wife. Anybody else want to sleep in our room?

the delivery room

BY DAN INDANTE

Here's the deal: guys should not be allowed in the delivery room when their kids are born. When dudes think about their woman's vagina, they want to envision a 19-year-old blonde virgin running through a field of daisies. They don't want to know that the reality is blood and guts and gore and a remake of Alien.

It's a relatively recent phenomenon to have the husband (or boyfriend, or the guy the woman met for 12 minutes on a booze cruise) in the actual room when the kid's delivered. When I was born, my dad was in the parking lot, smoking Marlboros, eating raw meat, and shaving with a butter knife. He had a son being born? Screw that, he was on a pay phone with a client trying to get a job installing toilets.

Nevertheless, times change and community property laws have made it difficult to just walk away from the bleating shrew in her ninth month of pregnancy. So, when my time as the expectant dad rolled around, I reluctantly accompanied my wife to the hospital. After filling out a forest's worth of paperwork, they wheeled us into a room that had more electronic equipment than an episode of CSI. I figured it's just a kid, we're not splitting the friggin' atom here, are we? But I guess I'd rather have a tech expo in there than a Guatemalan chick banging a lizard against a hot towel and chanting. As you'll see, it turned out to be a good thing later on.

Anyway, my wife had that pre-birth courage where she loudly proclaimed to all who'd listen that she was going "au naturel" and would push the kid into the real world without the use of any painkillers. Hoo-rah!! However, when the first contraction hit, my wife's head spun around like Linda Blair and she drank damn near a gallon of the epidural before the doctor could reach for the hypodermic needle.

We spent most of the rest of the day dealing with false contractions, which was great because there was a deli across the street that served all-you-can-eat pickles. But, eventually, the kid had the decency to start making her way down the tube. Just like a woman to spend all stupid day getting ready for the party.

Now me, being a dude, had no idea what to do or when to do it. The only thing I did know is that I had remembered to charge up the battery on my video camera, and I wasn't getting near any of the action until my new baby daughter was 100 yards clear of my wife's lady parts. I recall a bit of a commotion with the doctors right before the birth, but I was too busy staring up at the ceiling hoping that I wouldn't catch a glimpse of the bloody potato sack making its way out of my formerly lithe wife.

Well, the kid comes out and they immediately throw her into an incubator which, for all I knew, could've been an iron lung or a Cray Supercomputer. The thing had more controls than an F-18 and I'm thinking: "Hmm. That's a bit of overkill, isn't it?" But, assuming any child who comes from me will be perfect in every respect, I jumped into the game and started filming my new daughter, figuring the video would be worth something when she won the first of her three Olympic soccer gold medals. I look over at my wife, assuming she'll congratulate me on my courage or mention my Ansel Adams-like skill with the camera but, actually, she's crying.

Then I realize: My kid hasn't cried yet. Holy sh*t, she hasn't breathed yet!!! The nurse taps me on the shoulder and says: "You shouldn't be filming." Always observant and informed, I ask: "Why not?" She says: "Um, sir. We're trying to revive your baby." She would've punched me in the mouth, but I'm sure she'd have felt bad about pummeling the retarded. Turns out, the iron lung is what they use when the baby's born near death. Ummmmmmmm, yeah.

Despite having an IQ hovering around room temperature, I was able to determine that my daughter had been born with the cord around her neck and nearly strangled herself upon arrival. I slumped down on the couch, immediately wondering whether I could return the crib and stroller and get some money back. My wife looked over, knew EXACTLY what I was thinking, and threw a bed pan at me.

Miraculously, the crack team of doctors and nurses, who had all shown up in the room within 3 seconds of somebody pressing a button alerting the entire ward that the moronic father's kid was in trouble, had my daughter bouncing and crying -- and breathing -- in less than a minute. I was still too stunned and scared and flat-out stupid to say much other than "thank you" about a million times. They all took turns spitting on me and the video camera as they walked out. My wife would've done it, too, had her daughter not flatlined just minutes before and been saved by the greatest set of OBGYNs the world has ever known.

The good news is that, after the 30-second nightmare, my daughter made it through like a champ. Her eyes were open and, true to her female form, she was grabbing for my wallet before we made it out of the nursery.

Fifteen months later, my son was born in the same hospital, and I spent the whole day in the parking lot, shaving with a butter knife and scarfing down all the pickles I could eat.