Ah ha moment while watching Arrested Development

When you’ve read this, you will be thinking to yourself, “why?” So, please understand that there were extenuating circumstances and let’s just leave it at that, for now. Okay?

I used to have in my mind Stephen Colbert or Rainn Wilson, or a mutant child of the two of them, but now I have had an epiphany and realize that it is Buster from Arrested Development. This is who my child’s father really is most like. When I heard the actress say the line “people find you odd and alienating,” it made me gasp in recognition. I studied the sweater over the button-down shirt. I looked at the dorky glasses, the high forhead, the receding hairline that makes the non-existent hairstyle look that much worse, and especially the awkward smile and speech patterns. And I knew. My daughter’s father is who they modeled Buster on. They must have followed him around the Cape for a while, studying how he likes to sit alone at a bar and drink PBR and pretend he’s slumming. While he watches boat racing on the TV. Because so many blue collar regular guys closely follow the America’s Cup.

Yes, my poor, poor child is the biological descendent of a person who took for granted his parent’s money and their provision of a good education, squandered it over five years and two schools, finally and barely getting his degree in History, only to spend the next sixteen years in a series of sporadic, menial, dead-end entry level jobs, moving across the country and back, living in crappy cheap apartments, making few friends and fewer impressions, but managing, through some ironic twist of fate, to stop off in Colorado long enough several years ago to impregnate me.

Whenever I consider how his family must feel about him, I think, sardonically, “They must be so proud.” He is now living with them, doing god knows what, and I can only be grateful for the 2023 miles that keep him from being more of a colossal pain in the ass to me than he already is. A master of nothing except being supremely passive aggressive, he recently told me he wants to – over the course of the next few years – acquire the “skills that I can support myself with.”

Did I mention that he’s almost forty?

*sigh*

Lately, his shenanigans have been getting me down. There is no personality disorder I find more tedious and aggravating to deal with than passive aggressiveness. It is no accident that my mother is a master of this game, as well. To have two of them in my life, simultaneously, both of whom have a stake in my daughter’s life… well, it’s no wonder I drink. Please be gentle with me. I know where I went wrong.