DrLoveGun is being a wimp. He wants to meet other daddies, and complains all week about how no dads groups meet on his days off, the dads he’s found just want to drink, blah blah blah.
Ha! I found him a Daddy group that meets today, in an hour, at a park we’ve never gone to, near where we intend on moving.
DrLoveGun has now chickened out. It’s the depression and isolation and anxiety about meeting new people talking. Better to be alone and isolated than go and run the risk of having people suck and getting let down.
Moreover, I need him to go bug other people than me, for once.
Help me to convince DrLoveGun to go to the Silicon Valley Dads group today.
You need to promise him mindblowing sex if he does this. Tell him you’ll invite a girlfriend to join if he continues to go.
Seriously Dr.LG, it’s going to suck. But probably not nearly as much as you expect. And the next one will suck less and be easier. And so on… Journey of a thousand miles and all.
Well, I may have missed the window of ooportunity here, but in the future, remind him that he needs to get an early start on bragging about how superior your child is as compared to his peers.
It was very much like taking a stubborn kid to his first day of preschool.
So I finally convinced him to get in the car, and pretended I had given up on making him socialize. When he realized where we were going there was a lot of refusing to get out of the car and saying I was a terrible person and betrayed him and he didn’t want to talk to me and how he didn’t believe it was for his own good, etc.
Finally he got out of the car, but took the baby to the swings away from the other dads. I introduced myself to a dad and explained DLG was being very shy.
The baby peed and we went back to the car to change him. DLG refused to go meet the other dads, who were now staring and gossiping about him. I told him he was causing people to stare. I finally convinced him to come throw the diaper away at the trash near the dads. He grumbled all the way across the parking lot about how he wasn’t going to talk to them and we were leaving and he wasn’t talking to me, either.
At the trash a dad introduced himself to DLG and made a joke about bringing his wife. I took this as my cue to go to the store for sandwiches and water. When I got back, I offered to go, but DLG said, “No, we can eat here.”
We stayed another hour. DLG played well with his new friends, and is signing up for their yahoo! group.
Really, it was like taking a stubborn kid to preschool.
Ok fine. Yuck it up everyone. We can all laugh at me, it’s cool, I can take it. I didn’t want to go because I wanted to do stuff with my family. Yes I want to find a group of people to hang out with, but today I wanted to hang out with my family. So I put on my cranky pants. And damn it, I had fun anyway. but I do not like being betrayed by my wife, no matter how cute she is. It fills me with grrr. And I was thinking we were going to go to the Mystery House today. Oh well.
Have you been to the Mystery House yet? You probably had more fun in the park with the other dads.
My uncle is with a men’s group (near Boston, so the commute would kill you), but he credits it with helping him keep his sanity. He’s the stay-at-home, and my cousins can be a handful, so there’s definitely a need for sanity.
Well, good for you, DrLoveGun .
I belong to a group of moms which has been meeting since my older child was 6 weeks old—over 2 1/2 years. Sometimes we drag the dads along for ‘fun’ things like brunches and bithday parties at the playground and the like. My husband always grumbles, and often I give him a ‘get out of brunch free’ card or whatever.
There was a brunch last month and, as usual, he was grumbly about it. He did buck up, though, and accompanied us. He spent the entire brunch chatting with the other Dads like it was nothing, and there was a good 45 minutes there where, for whatever reason, no one said a word to me.
Grumbly is as grumbly does, I guess.
