...every child must play.

I have no kids, as my actions have demonstrated time and time again.

I do, however, make a very good cool uncle.

A little irresponsibility, after all, is important to the development of a well-rounded, fully-formed person, and parents overprotect children, so it’s the job of every cool uncle to break kids out of their parentally imposed comfort zones.

In short: I do not apologize for buying your four year old a Chucky doll and leaving it in his room while he slept.

When the nightmares finally end, the love of classic horror films it imparts will last a lifetime…

Family's End

…kids, come in, have a seat.

Your mom and I have something very important that we need to tell you, though we know you might not want to hear it.

The two of us will be separating, and I’ll be moving out. I know this comes as a shock to you, but trust us, we’ve done everything in our power to keep this marriage alive, but it’s just not working out and we’ve grown to realize that it never will, and so it would be for the best that we no longer live together.

I know this must come as a shock to the two of you, but I want to make this perfectly clear: This does not mean that I love your mother any less. I love her just as much in this moment as I did the day I first proposed.

I have always loved her.

I probably always will.

It’s just….

It’s you kids. You guys are the worst.

When your mom first became pregnant, I was naturally concerned. I’d never considered myself the fatherly type, didn’t even know if I wanted kids, but all our friends who had their own assured me that, once you were born, I’d grow into the role. They told me that the moment I held my newborn child my whole world would change and a wave of love and connection to you would come over me, washing away any doubts I might have regarding parenthood.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

When I first held you, Timmy, I felt nothing but resentment at the opportunities lost, the hopes and dreams that, saddled with a new, squalling little monster that I was expected to be responsible for, I would now never be able to pursue.

I resented you so deeply, Timmy. So, so very deeply.

Please don’t hold that against me. After all, I sacrificed eight years of my life for a person for whom I felt nothing, gave up any interests I might have had, just to make sure you didn’t die during that period where you were utterly worthless on every objective level. In exchange for all I gave up, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that you cut me a little slack.

Sarah, I wasn’t nearly as resentful when you were born a year later, but part of that is just that, for the second child, I’d already adjusted my ambitions downward. Yes, I’d have liked to not have a second child, but really after the first the damage is basically done.

Plus, I just like you better than Timmy. Timmy is just the worst.

Sorry Timmy, but let’s face it, you are.

Still, Sarah, don’t take the fact that I resented you less than Timmy to mean that I felt any meaningful connection to you on any level, because I would hate to accidentally imply that. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to do so and I pride myself on my intellectual honesty.

Or did, at least, before childrearing robbed me of any lingering sense of self that I might claim pride in.

So no, for the record, I’ve never felt any warmth or love toward you either, though I admit I liked you better than Timmy. I don’t know why I didn’t, you’re a perfectly acceptable kid and deserve appropriate amounts of parental fondness, I just don’t feel like we ever connected.

Maybe it’s me.

Maybe it’s my fault for feeling that love should be earned.

Maybe I expected too much from you. From both of you.

I expected you to be more… loveable? I guess?

I’m sure the fault is mine, most parents do manage to love their kids, or at least to fake it believably enough that nobody questions that they do. I just don’t have it in me. I’m too honest for my own good, too honest with myself and, now, too honest with you.

Still, poor of spirit is the man who shuns knowledge of himself. I’m an awful father, I feel nothing for either of you, and it would be unfair to all of us were I to continue wasting my time on this whole project. You deserve better, and I deserve much, much better.

Anyway, I’m leaving. Your mother has sole custody, since she seems genuinely fond of the two of you, and I doubt I’ll be visiting. I mean, I have visitation rights, I just can’t imagine any reason why I’d want to. I wish you both the best of luck in all your future endeavors, and I hope that this little incident doesn’t scar you emotionally. I may not love either of you, but you’re both good kids, well, mostly you Sarah, and though I have no interest in raising you and watching you grow, I do sincerely hope that the two of you grow up into the fully realized, interesting human beings that you aren’t right now. You do deserve that, everyone does, and though I have no intention of supporting you, either emotionally or, more importantly, financially, I do wish you all the best.. Have the happy life you deserve, kids.

Or don’t.

I’m not the boss of you.

And to be honest, it would take a team of German scientists and the worlds most powerful electron microscope to determine how little I care what you do one way or the other….

The Thief of Childhood

He was a monster, worse than an animal, skulking through the neighborhood and terrorizing the children.

Stealing their innocence.

Disgusting.

He’d stalk his prey and, once no adult was watching, creep up on them, to whisper his poison into their innocent ears.

“You’ll never be as well-off as your parents,” he’d tell them, “no matter how hard you work, or how smart you are. The age of that kind of prosperity has been over for nearly a decade, and it’s never coming back.”

And in their hearts they knew it was true.

And so he left them, weeping in despair...

Bees

I don’t even remember their names now, but that’s to be expected, it happened more than twenty years ago.

I was young, eight if I had to guess but I can’t say for certain. My parents owned a cabin in the woods by a lake up north, and we’d weekend up there whenever we got the chance.

It was beautiful area in the summer. It was miserable in the autumn. I have a number of memories of the place, some fond.

As I said, I don’t remember their names now. They were friends of convenience, we had nothing in common other than the fact that we were the only three kids within a hundred miles of the lake, and I never thought to maintain contact with them when my parents finally sold the cabin years later.

Not that I could have. It isn’t like Facebook was a thing that existed back then.

Still, friends of convenience or no, they were friends, and for the weekends our parents brought us there we were inseparable.

We’d swim, or explore the forests surrounding our various cabins, or “rock climb” the nearby hill. I’m sure the hill was nothing more than a gentle slope, but the time, to my eight year old mind, it was Everest.

It was climbing the rocky hill where it happened.

One of them, I want to say his name started with an R, Ryan? Roland? One of them, at any rate, stumbled partway up. This is no surprise since we rarely, if ever, made it all the way to the top. It did get pretty steep toward the end and we were children, after all. He stumbled, caught a nearby bit of bush with one hand, took two steps back, and righted himself, breathing heavily from adrenalin at so nearly having fallen down the hill. He looked gleeful that he hadn’t.

Then he looked down, noticing the ruined nest he’d stumbled into in his attempts to maintain his balance.

They were on him in a heartbeat, a tornado of black and yellow with Richard, or Reggie, or whatever his name was at it’s center, screaming in pain and fear as they defended what was left of their home.

A good friend would have done something to help him. So would a responsible adult. Sadly neither one was available so me and the other kid, I can’t even guess what his name might have started with, stared with a shock mingled with natural childlike curiosity, unable to look away, fascinated by the process as they tore him apart.

“Are they bees, or wasps? Or hornets?” One of us asked.

“I don’t think they’re bees, don’t bees die after they sting somebody?” The other replied.

We agreed that this was so, but still couldn’t decide if they were wasps or hornets. For eight year olds, we had a distressingly limited knowledge of entomology. We argued over the matter, choosing sides at random and switching them often, as the insects continued their work and our “friend” continued screaming in vain for our help.

We continued arguing over it until the hornets, or wasps, or maybe they were bees after all, realized that the person who’d destroyed their home wasn’t alone and turned their attention to us.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been stung on the eyelid by an angry bee, but I have and I’ll tell you: The experience is unique to say the least.

Suddenly we were running, the three of us, the two relatively untouched helping the third along as his face started to swell and his breathing became more and more labored. We ran, though we had no idea where we were running to, and the swarm of angry insects followed us, nipping at us as we went, not catching up enough to swarm us properly but never falling behind far enough to lose interest.

We ran, propelled by terror and pain, blind and screaming, no plan or destination in mind, like a comet with a tail made of bees.

Or wasps. Or hornets. I suppose in the end the distinction didn’t matter.

Eventually, one of us screamed “The lake!” and we hooked a sharp right and plunged through bushes and trees toward the lake we hoped we could use to ward off our attackers.

By this point parents had been alerted to our screams I’m sure, though we wouldn’t see them for a while.

We plunged into the cold water of the lake and, after I don’t know how long, the insects flew away. We thought at the time they’d lost interest in punishing us, but looking back I realize they were probably looking for an appropriate place to die. It wasn’t as though they had a nest to go back to, after all.

Our parents lost their minds when they saw us, and Rex, or Rufus, I wish I could remember what he was called, had to be taken to the hospital. I don’t know if that was the last I ever saw of him, but he certainly makes no further appearances in my memories of the place. I’d only been stung a half-dozen times and was more or less better by morning, and the other kid got off even easier. Two stings. A swirling maelstrom of angry bees and he got stung a total of twice. I figured he was the luckiest kid in the world, not once stopping as the ambulance pulled away from our cabins to think that so was I.

We kept going to the cabin on weekends for a while after that, but I never enjoyed it as well as I’d done before that day. Eventually, the bloom gone from the rose, my parents sold the place and I couldn’t bring myself to care that those weekends up north by the lake were gone forever.

I got on with my life, no lasting damage done either emotionally or physically by that terrifying childhood experience.

Except….

Except, sitting on my couch more than twenty years later, I’m thinking back to that day, and taking a long hard look at my life and my work.

And I’m realizing: Angry Bees really are a trope I go back to time and time again, both in my comedy and in my fiction writing. Is that because there’s a lot you can do with the notion, or is it eight year old Munsi inside me, trembling, still holding his breath underwater, afraid he might drown but more afraid of what would happen if he let his head break the surface of the lake, even for a second?

The things that touch our lives as children, do they haunt us to our graves?