Dating for Dads by Ellie Slott Fisher

Author:Ellie Slott Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553904628
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

4

________

Feeling Sixteen Again

Without Acting It

Admit it—all of this excitement makes you feel sixteen again. Yet at sixteen you didn't have to tear through your Rolodex looking for babysitters or cancel a date to help your anxious twelve-year-old study for a math test. You may feel sixteen . . . you just can't act it.

When you find yourself dating again after a long interval of marriage, round-the-clock diaper changes, interminable school assemblies, and heart-wrenching soccer games, you can feel as invincible as you did years ago when you scored the winning touchdown during the homecoming game. It's easy to get so swept up in dating again—charged by a surprisingly renewed interest in feeling, touching, and sleeping with someone—that you behave poorly. In fact, you act like a teenager at a time when your unsettled kids need their parents to be mature and stable role models.

As is the case with a lot of newly single men, Robert's passion-filled dating caused him to neglect his responsibilities as a father. Sex with his wife had become as predictable and hackneyed as yet another Police Academy movie, so he was dazzled when he found himself physically drawn to a woman at work. After two dates, he slept with her. It might as well have been the Fourth of July. Robert, who by all accounts is a very good dad, succumbed to this attraction, allowing it to eclipse his responsibility as a father and causing him to make a stupid mistake. He waited until late at night, when his children were sleeping soundly, to call his new girlfriend on the phone.

“What are you doing right now?”

Robert asked, visualizing every tantalizing inch of her.

“Lying here. Alone. My kids are at their father's.”

“The one night you're by yourself, I have my kids.”

“Are they asleep?”

“Yes.”

“I wish you could sneak out.”

Robert thought about his kids sleeping down the hall from his room, his youngest only nine, and said, “I can't.” And then he thought about the smell and feel of this woman, sensations that overpowered the good angel on his shoulder and released his unchecked, fun-loving devil. “I'll be there in ten minutes.”

Taking a cue from Ferris Bueller, Robert puffed up his bedding to mimic his sleeping body. He snuck into his car, put it in neutral, and let it roll down the driveway so that the noise of the engine starting wouldn't wake his kids, then stealthily took off down the street. Minutes later, Robert was in bed with his girlfriend. They became so punch-drunk with their lovemaking they barely heard his cell phone ringing.

“Dad, where are you?”

Robert's youngest daughter had been awoken by a bad dream.

“Uh, my stomach was upset. I ran out to the store to get some Pepto-Bismol,” he said, relieved that he'd come up with a fairly believable excuse, but suddenly nursing a real need for the antacid.

“Then why did you make it look like you were in your bed?”

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