Pants

The note I got home from school today said Dylan took his shirt off in class and they asked him to put it back on. When I turned around to scold him, he was sitting on the chair pantsless...

-- Text from my wife, February 28, 2022.

Over the past two years of the pandemic, we all, or at least I, have gotten to experience something that Jude and Dylan did every day before the pandemic and still do now: wearing pajama pants most of the time.

The boys are not big on pants. When they were little, they wore jeans, baby jeans with the crinkled waist in lieu of a belt. They had overalls, too, because that was a specific part of my vision for the boys.

When Joy and I were originally discussing having additional kids, the three oldest ones nearing the time they would graduate high school, I was not 100% sold on the deal. The older kids, even though I think of them as mine, weren't biologically mine; they were from her first marriage. That never bothered me. I don't pay much attention to biology or bloodlines, and if you'd grown up in my family, you wouldn't either. "Blood is thicker than water" is nonsense and also nonsense is the idea that being biologically related does anything more than give you first crack at having someone in your life. It's what you do with the relationship once it starts, and while it's going, that matters.

So it didn't really bother me that I didn't have biological kids of my own. I had kids that I'd helped raise. I'd taken them to amusement parks and helped them ride bikes and misguidedly tried to get them to be more physically fit, a project that had the net result of them all hating exercise now, mostly, because I tried to force it on them when I was young(er) and dumb(er). I'd helped them with homework, inventing once something I called the "Metric Twostep" to help them learn how to convert metric measurements by stepping forward and backward. I expect they hated it but they didn't tell me to my face that they hated it so God bless them, right? I tried to stop fights and I tried not to fight with them and I bought them all hamsters that died horrible deaths, the way hamsters do, and bought them cats that did not die horrible deaths and were very beloved.

I took them outside to hunt fireflys. We have a picture of it, a picture from the days when you had a camera and a flash and film and a trip to Walgreens to develop them to see if you'd have a photo of the firefly hunt, or just a memory of it that would fade over time and might not even exist at all anymore, the way my memory of a supposed trip to The House On The Rock does not exist at all anymore. Joy swears that we went to The House On The Rock. We have been together twenty-five years and I thought I remembered all the important details of our life, like tourist traps we'd been to near our house. But I have no memory of going to The House On The Rock, and no memory of being inside it. Joy wouldn't lie to me. I suspect she is just mixed up, and she went there with her family or a former boyfriend or possibly someone that looked like me back then, but I can't be sure and maybe I do have a huge blank spot in my memory of some supposed trip to The House On The Rock. It would not bother me so much except that everytime I think of The House On The Rock I want to go there and then Joy insists that I have, and while I could just go there anyway I don't feel right about it for some reason.

But I do remember hunting for fireflys with the older kids, as we call them. Having had the boys, Dylan and Jude, the children are now divided into "the kids," the three older ones, and "the boys," Dylan and Jude. It's understood that "the kids" doesn't include the boys; to loop them all in we have to say "all the kids" or something like that.

And I do remember my first image of what I thought my biological son would be. We had this old couch back then, a gift from Joy's aunt, that was set up in front of the big-screen TV we had then, too, one of those massive projection TVs that we'd bought with a Xmas bonus I'd gotten, because it was on sale. It was HUGE. It was nearly as tall as me and was heavy and wide and great until the lamp started to malfunction and you had to buy new lamps all the time and install them or your picture looked like it was being projected through pegboard but for a while at least we loved it. When it was finally obsolete and we were moving I put it on Craigslist at $200 or best offer and I got an email from someone who was angry with me saying that I was defrauding people because others were practically giving those TVs away. I ignored him. The projection TV ended up being thrown into the dumpster when we moved.

My first image of what I thought my son would be was this: a little blond kid, with wispy hair, sitting on the pink couch from Joy's aunt, watching the projection TV, wearing overalls and drinking from a cup of juice. I don't know what this kid was watching, but he was supercute and quiet and friendly and I loved him before he even existed.

So I agreed that we'd try to have another kid, and while that's a long story that doesn't directly involve pants and I won't go through it here, that try ended up with us having twins, something we hadn't considered could happen. That was the first of the many things the boys were or did that we hadn't considered could happen: they doubled up. Instead of one cute little boy in overalls on the couch, we'd have two.

They wouldn't stay in overalls for long. I don't remember exactly when they began to object to pants. There's so many things to remember! So many milestones and sad parts and happy parts and little changes along the way and big changes along the way that you can't store them all up, even in an era where you can take digital pictures and store them on a laptop computer forever, keeping the laptop in a box in your basement behind the Xmas decorations because someday you're going to charge the laptop up again and put them all on a hard drive and then maybe figure out a way to look at them regularly. Even with that, you couldn't mark every little and big and medium event or change in a kid's life, especially when they're swirling all around you like asteroids and you're just a little triangle circling around with very little control over your thrusters.

At some point, though, they stopped wearing jeans or dress pants, and moved exclusively to sweat pants and more often, much more often, pajama pants. I think this started around the second grade, but, again, I'm no more sure of that than I could tell you what is in The House On The Rock, so take it for what it's worth. It just sort of happened one day that they no longer wore jeans and they mostly wore pajama pants, out in public and to school and to the dentist, where at one point Dr. Dan told Jude "I like your pajama pants," and Jude responded indignantly, saying "Dr. Dan, these are fluffy pants."

It's hard to tell if the boys are aware that they are different than almost everybody around them, and harder to tell if they care much, but comments like that sometimes cause me to wonder. Was Jude saying they were fluffy pants because that's what he calls them? We've never called them that. We just say "your pants," and we mean pajama pants. So maybe Jude invented the term because that's what they seem like to him, as opposed to pants that are not fluffy, like the corduroys I love to wear but only between October 1 and March 1, because that's when corduroy season is.

But maybe Jude was aware that most people don't wear pajama pants out in public, especially not to the dentist, and maybe he was aware that this made him different. And maybe because of that, he tried to rationalize that he was not different after all. That he was not wearing pajama pants, which are clearly only worn when one goes to bed, but simply wearing fluffy pants which could be a category of pants everyone wears anywhere they want to, albeit a rare category that one almost never sees others wearing, but, nonetheless, perfectly normal.

Pajama pants aren't the only thing that set the boys apart from others when we're out in public. Dylan, in particular, requires additional accoutrements. He has a harness that we call his "safety" because I don't want to say I'm putting a harness on my son. It looks like the kind of straps you might associate with rock climbing or parachuting, to which you could attach ropes or parachute cords or something. We put it on him so that he can be belted in safely on a bus, because lap belts aren't enough to keep him sitting in his seat. He has to be clipped to the seat and held there, or he might stand up or maybe climb out the window or just do something, we don't know what. So he wears his safety on the bus. We also put it on him when we are going someplace where we might need to keep him under control, like places that are crowded or near streets or pretty much wherever other people might be.

In the past, when we went to those places, we would simply hold his hand, or pick him up and carry him, or hang on to his jacket pocket loosely, just to have a bit of control over him to keep him from bolting after something or running off scared or just knocking things down. But he's 15 years old now, and 5'10" tall, and 250 pounds, and he doesn't want us holding his hands or his arms or clothes when he's in public. Again, I'm not sure the reason why. It could be that he doesn't want us touching him, or that he doesn't like the feel of a hand on his hands (sweaty?), or doesn't want to be controlled, but it also might be that he's 15 years old, and 5'10", and 250 pounds, and what teen wants his dad holding his hand?

Like the fluffy pants, assuming that Dylan objects to us holding his hands because he's 15 and doesn't want too hold hands in public with his dad makes you assume that Dylan knows it's different to be 15 and need your hand held when you are walking through the grocery store, and he doesn't want to be different. But it's harder to reconcile that with the fact that he doesn't seem to mind wearing his "safety," because the safety is very visible and he lets us keep a hand on the straps of the safety, so maybe he just doesn't like the contact.

Dylan also sometimes has a helmet, for use when he gets upset and hits his head. He mostly hits his head with a fist or the palm of his hands, right in the middle of his forehead, and even with the helmet and even with the help of many, many prescription medications and lots of interventions, he's done it enough over 15 years that he ha sa sort of permanent bump there. So you might see Dylan walking through the library with his fluffy pants, his safety, and his helmet on, and he doesn't seem to mind any of that, although truth be told if the helmet is on, then Dylan has bigger things going on than caring about what you think. If he ever does care what you or even I think.

Dylan also has a wetsuit that he wears in the pool. This is how Dylan came to require a wetsuit. He and I and Jude were swimming at the outdoor pool one day at the health club. It was a bright sunny day, a weekday that I'd taken off to spend with the boys. In the summer I usually take every other Friday off from work to spend with the boys. This gives Joy a break from them if she wants one, because they are demanding, and it gives me some one-on-one, or one-on-two, time with them when we can do boy stuff, like walk down to the health club pool and have a jumping competition to see who can do the best jump into the deep end.

That was what Jude and I were doing. We were three of the five people in the pool area, the other two being a mom or grandma (hard to tell) and a little girl, who was swimming in the shallow end of the pool.

Dylan doesn't jump in the water. He won't willingly put his face under water, and never has wanted to. Instead, when he swims, he mostly stays where he can stand in the water up to about his shoulders, and he flaps his arms, and bounces on his toes, and splashes, and tries to keep away from people. Also, he used to sometimes pull himself around the edge of the pool, hand-over-hand sort of, inching his way around the entire perimeter of the pool. Joy says he can tread water, but I've never seen it. He can float, though; he will lay back and spread himself out like a starfish, and drift around in his little area.

(When the boys were very little, I gave Jude the nickname "Mr Bunches." This came about because of how he and Dylan slept. Dylan slept spread out like a starfish in his crib, his arms and legs splayed out as far as they could be from him, all as straight as possible. Jude slept curled into the smallest ball he could possibly get into, and one time I said that he slept "all bunched up." Hence the nickname. We never called Dylan "Mr Starfish" though. He had a different nickname, the best nickname in the world only the world would not cooperate with us so he doesn't really have it anymore, except for us.)

On this particular day, Dylan was just bopping around in the shallow end; the boys were about six or seven. Jude and I were twenty feet away, at the "deep end," which was five feet deep, taking turns doing jumps. Jude would say "Jump like the letter T" and you had to do that, and then he would say who did it better. In between jumps, I'd glance up at Dylan to make sure he was doing okay. Ever since Dylan ran away we couldn't really take for granted that he wouldn't do it again, but at the health club pool we could be more than a few feet away from him and even take our eyes off of him, because it was surrounded by an 8-foot-tall fence and the only way out was through the door into the health club, which was behind me as Jude and I jumped, so Dylan could have more freedom than he usually gets in this life; most of the time, someone is within 10 feet of Dylan regardless of where he is, unless he's locked into his bedroom where there's almost nothing he can break or hurt himself on or with.

After one jump, I climbed out and cleared my eyes and glanced down at Dylan to see how he was doing. And I thought this: "That's weird: the water from this angle makes it look as though he's not wearing his swim trunks!"

After a second of musing how weird water perspectives could be, things sunk in and I thought "Oh crap." I told Jude to hang out by the pool and not jump without me because I know in my heart that the first time I let him jump into 5 feet of water without me right there to save his life, he will need his life saved and I won't have been there and if that happened I would have to kill myself because I couldn't go on living if one of the boys got hurt because of me. That's how Joy wins arguments when we have a disagreement about what the boys can or cannot do. I will say something like "I think they can go to the waterpark and go on waterslides" and she will say "what if they die," and at that point, she wins, because not only has she made me realize that the boys might die if we do my thing, but even worse, if that did happen, then they would have died because I made them do it over her objection, and there is no coming back from that. How could you go on being in the same world as a mom who told you not to take her kids somewhere -- I know they're your kids too but they're always more mom's kids than dad's kids -- and after she told you not to take them there because they might die you took them and they died? How could you even look her in the eye again? You couldn't, that's how. (To be clear, I do not want any of my kids to die, but I especially don't want them to die in a way that makes me lose an argument.)

So I told Jude to hang out by the deep end but not to jump in so he wouldn't jump in and drown, and I swam my way down to the other end of the pool as quickly and subtly as I could, trying to swim in a "my kid's not naked at the pool" kind of way which is harder to do than you might imagine. I got there and the trunks were floating near him. I grabbed them and said to him that he was being crazy and how was he doing and just talked in general while looking to see if mom/grandma and the little girl were aware of this at all. Mom/grandma was wearing sunglasses and reading something, and the little girl was on the steps of the pool doing something with a swim mask, so maybe we'd gotten away with it, so far. I wrangled Dylan to the other side of me, putting me between the other strangers, and tried to get his swim trunks on him quickly and without drawing undue attention to what was going on. This was exactly as hard as it sounds, especially because Dylan was EXTREMELY proud of himself for having gotten his pants off and was very obviously finding swimming in the altogether to be quite grand. He had little intention of just going back to the way life had been a few minutes before, dull and encased in cloth.

But I got the shorts on him, and he only got them off one more time that day, which is really a victory in my book, if you ask me, and I of course reported the situation to Joy when I got home, and the decision was made that we would have to watch him more closely in the future, because we didn't know what else we could do. Swimsuits don't have locks on them and this is not a situation that I had ever heard happening to anyone before. I mean, sure, babies do stuff like take off their diapers but when they do it's cute and everyone laughs and nobody feels like they have to file a Title IX complaint.

But you can't keep a sharp eye out all the time, or, rather, Joy certainly can and maybe you can but I can't. So it happened again that he took his swimsuit off, despite my best efforts -- keeping in mind that my 'best' efforts are not necessarily what could be considered the Platonic ideal of 'best' efforts. We were at the lake near the zoo in Madison. This was back when the boys would still swim in lakes, and I took them to swim in lakes because lakes were free and you could always go to different beaches and it was like it was a different lake, so it was like a whole different thing, so it was like life was constantly new and we were able to provide the boys with a variety of experiences despite the fact that our constant lack of money meant that we were really reliant on things that were free, and on the illusion of variety rather than the actuality of variety.

Dylan was the first to decide he didn't want to swim in lakes anymore, a decision he communicated to me by not swimming in lakes anymore. People ask us "How does Dylan let you know what he wants?" and we respond with "he has his ways," and sometimes those ways are very direct. He one day just wouldn't swim in the lake anymore -- any lake. He sat on the beach, playing with his innertube, or throwing sand, or both, but would not go in the water even when I tried to lead him into the lake. And he has not since then swum in a lake. There's a lot of stuff on the internet to the effect of "there was a time when your parents picked you up for the last time and you never knew it," but that's true of everything you do: there's always a last time for everything you do, and mostly you will never know it. I think Dylan, though, knew it. I think the time before he refused to swim in the lake, he'd made up his mind not to swim in lakes anymore, but couldn't say it to us. So when I announced that we were going to the beach that next time, he knew he wouldn't be swimming in the water. He just didn't have a way of telling me that decision until we were at the water and he didn't go in. There's no combination of buttons on his little iPad program that helps him talk that would say "I am not swimming in lakes anymore," and even if there were, he didn't have that iPad then.

Jude stuck with lake swimming for a while longer. The thing that killed it for him was when the UW-Madison people stopped trimming the weeds near their pier. There is a pier at the UW-Madison Memorial Union, and the water is about 10 feet deep at the end of it, and the pier is about 5 feet above the water, so it's fun to jump into the lake from there and Jude loved to do that. Once a year I'd take him to go jumping, as he called it, until the last year, when we went and there were underwater seaweed weeds that were really long and thick and you couldn't avoid them when you jumped in, so you'd jump into this patch of plants and it felt kind of gross. We tried to tough it out, but we didn't do much jumping and Jude's refused to go in the lakes since. And with that, we don't go to beaches anymore and don't swim in lakes anymore, but this time I kind of knew it would be the last time, because I know how Jude is. Once he's over something, it never comes back. A few times I've suggested that we try it again, see if maybe the weeds aren't there, but he's vetoed it each time.

Back when we were still swimming in lakes, Dylan wore his swimsuit, because I thought it was maybe a temporary aberration that he'd removed his suit that day, and because also what else could we do? You can't reason with Dylan, because he won't reason with you and you can't always tell if he understands what you are saying. You can't punish him for the same reason: if he took his swimsuit off, and I said "Dylan you can't do that, and if you do it again you will be grounded from swimming for a month," I have no idea what amount of that sentence he understood. And if he did it again, and I didn't let him swim for a month, I have no idea if he would understand that the not-swimming-for-one-month was the effect driven by the cause of taking-off-swimtrunks.

So our response was to try to make sure he kept his trunks on, and I was doing just that when we were swimming in Lake Wingra that day. I mostly stuck by Dylan, and didn't do much with Jude, just watched him swim around while splashing with Dylan and keeping him pantsed. But after about 30 minutes, I decided that he didn't seem interested in taking his trunks off, so I started playing with Jude, but we kept in Dylan's vicinity, playing tag and hiding underwater and doing whatever it is you do in a lake (just those two things, that's it, that's all you can do in a lake, unless you also have a Frisbee, which we did not), and Dylan was being really good, and not stripping, so I began to worry less about it.

After about 20 more minutes of that, I tried to play with Dylan for a bit. I don't like to ignore Dylan, or seem like I'm ignoring Dylan. He mostly doesn't want anyone to play with him when he swims, but I feel like as a parent I should make clear to him that he has the opportunity if he would like, so I periodically check in with him to see if he wants to play with us, or me with him, splashing or just bouncing around or whatever.

This time, when I checked in with him, he was about chest deep in the brown, murky water of Lake Wingra, and I went over to him and asked if he wanted to play. He didn't answer, of course. He wasn't using back then even the few words and sounds that he sometimes gives us now. So I hung out by him for a second or two to see if he'd respond in anyway, and the waves dipped a little and I thought I saw his bare butt.

This time, at least, I didn't think it was some sort of trick of the light. I moved right up to him and checked as well as I could. I did that by reaching down to see if he had swim trunks on. I felt skin where I should not have. He'd gotten the trunks off without my noticing, and even though I'd not been devoting 100% of my attention to him I still kind of gave him credit for his maneuvering because game recognizes game or whatever the youths say.

I looked around for the trunks. Wouldn't you assume that swimming trunks would float? I assumed that swimming trunks would float. If they do float, then these trunks had drifted out of our sight somewhere. Or if they don't float they'd sunk to the bottom of the swimming area. The lake was nearly opaque beyond about 1 or 2 inches, even with goggles on. But I tried. I called Jude over, and he and I dove around, and scuffed our feet around, and waved our hands, and tried to find those trunks, wherever they were.

We could not find them. We searched for about 10 minutes with no luck. So I had to call it a day swimming, because I couldn't let Dylan continue to swim in the buff at a public beach. But that posed its own problem: how could I get him out of the water and back to our car, which was about a quarter-mile away?

I worked out a plan. Jude was told to go back to the beach and get us a towel and my tshirt, both sitting where we'd left them. He did that, carrying them back carefully so they didn't get too wet. Luckily I'd worn a dark blue tshirt that day. I put that on Dylan, letting it fall into the water. I'd used my tshirt because I am 6'1", and he was about half that at the time, so my shirt fell down below his knees as he walked out of the water with us. Once we were on the beach entirely, I wrapped the towel around his waist, too, and tried to help him keep it there while we made our way back to the car, slowly, with me trying not to look around so that I couldn't see if anyone was watching us and/or calling child protective services.

We made it to the car without any incident. I got Dylan in the car and we went home, with Dylan finding it a grand time to be riding in the car sans pants.

We tried a few more times to get him to wear a swimsuit, but he wouldn't. We're not sure why, of course, because he can't tell us. The only ways he has to tell us things are these:

1. He can use some sign language and some words, although the sign language and the words tend to be the same ones just applied to different things. His current favorite word is "umma," which generally means "water," but can mean "french fries," or " banana" or just "hey I need you for something."

2. He can point to something or drag you to something and point to it. He might take your hand and lead you to something, and then point your hand at it, to say he wants it. He did this one time with a bird at the Milwaukee Zoo. He seemed to really like that bird.

3. He can just go do it, like if you are in the grocery store and he pulls away from you and charges off towards the bakery and bread leaving you to holler to Jude that he should stay with the cart and you'll be right back and you tear after him to keep him from throwing something or worse, and then you realize he just wants a drink from the bubbler.

4. He can tell you things on his iPad, through a program that has little icons with pictures, so you can program in things like "pool" or "cheese puffs" or "ride in Dad's car" or (as I did and haven't taken it off yet) "Jude is a fart." He can then hit the button and it will say what that button is, in an incredibly weird artificial voice that pronounces "french fries" as "french frees" and "play outside" as "play a-ow-oh-tside."

None of those really help say why you don't want to wear swim trunks anymore, and anyway we didn't have the iPad back when he first started this, we had little laminated plastic squares with velcro, but whatever your tech level you would still have to have preprogrammed in a phrase that would let him say "I don't want to wear swim trunks because..." and somehow finish that sentence.

(Whenever I think about his options I feel so distresssed that he can only say things people have in advance decided they want to let him say. If he did want to say something, but we hadn't programmed it in, he couldn't. He has workarounds, like before we had "floss" on his iPad he kept hitting the "take a bath" button, and eventually Sweetie figured it out because he was also trying to get her to touch his teeth, so she put 2 and 2 together and realized it was floss, which he associated with taking a bath because she flosses his teeth when she gives him a bath.)

In any event, we were at a loss as to what to do with a little boy who likes swimming more than almost anything else -- and it was one of the few things he liked, period, at that -- but who didn't want to do it in a way that the public would agree was acceptable. Until we hit on a wetsuit.

It came kind of as a surprise that you can even buy a wetsuit, since I know that wetsuits exist and people who wear wetsuits must be able to buy them, but it's one of those things that when you first think of it you're like "Huh, yeah, I guess there must be a place that sells wetsuits, right?" And that place these days is the Internet. I am acutely aware that the boys' lives, and hence ours, would be drastically different without the Internet in a jillion ways, and one of those ways is that we didn't have to drive around the city trying to figure out who would sell a wetsuit, we could just go online and order one.

The benefit of the wetsuit is that Dylan can't take it off. We buy the kind that zip in the back, and while they have this long string attached to the zipper so that scuba divers can unzip their own wetsuits, Dylan has either never figured that out, or has never cared to exercise that option, because he doesn't try to take his wetsuit off. He never has. He just wears his wetsuit and swims around in the pools and enjoys himself and we don't have to worry about him suddenly being naked, which is nice because that just leaves everything else in the world to worry about.