TRIUMPH of the GOAT...

You might be forgiven for assuming that the Goat had in fact triumphed long ago. But that was just over me, and we all know how much of a battle that was: Irresistible Force meets All-Too-Movable Object with decidedly round heels and an Irresistible-Force-shaped hole in its heart...

No, this past weekend the Goat met my eldest son, and though I was apparently nervous enough to drink rather a lot in the process, the event turned out to be very cool, even to my twitching eyes. Then we all drove up the following day to visit my mother.

Tableau.

Once again, I was nervous, and drank not a little on that occasion as well, although both parties had expressed an interest, a decided interest, in meeting each other, and all was charm and flattery on all sides. After several hours of this exchange of very pleasant pleasantries, I took advantage of a lull in the meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society to plead exhaustion, leave my son with his grandmother, and head home with the Goat. Strictly speaking, I was tired but not sleepy, as the ensuing hours proved, but my little ruse did help the weekend reach its true potential.

God help me if this "relationship" ever comes to the kind of end I keep anticipating. I have gotten so used to having him around to operate the safety valve on my hysterical worrying that I am not sure what I would do without him around to do it...

Run out into the street and flag down the nearest Asian body-builder, I suspect...
or just weep interminably on whatever comes to hand...

The real issue of the moment is the fact that now that the school year has kicked back in, we both have less time than we did over the summer, and the Goat has seriously Less Time, OK, so he has practically No Time, to worry about extra-curricular activities, and who has to drive how far to provide them. There is the added stressor for me in the knowledge that he is used to having hot and cold running attentions twice a week during the school year delivered to his home -- the RBF having been nothing if not attentive, and well over two hours closer to the Goat's school than I. Not that they are likely to get back together -- too many things long stored up as ammunition did in fact get said in the end -- but there is always the fear that someone else will come along and throw himself at the Goat as someone I'm not particularly proud of did last winter... is anyone else that stupid?

Well, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and I guess the evil of my day this winter is going to be the fact that I will wind up doing most of the driving, and not enjoying it very much. In the scheme of things, it's a small price to pay, but it does eat up both money and time, neither of which I feel I have in abundance.

OH...

The best part of the weekend? We arrive at my mother's, and she allows how my eldest brother, he whose response to my coming out was to rant about lesbian real-estate investment in his county, on his road, had called up and tried to invite his family to dinner once he heard that the Goat was expected. My mother, bless her heart, was quite comfortable meeting the Goat "alone" the first time, so she fobbed him off with an excuse about the difference between cooking for four and cooking for eight [which she has spent years saying made no difference whatsoever, but never mind].

It turned out she also thought that I was harboring deep resentment against him for his bad behavior that first night, but in actual fact he and his wife have been charming since then, even if it would never enter his head to apologize -- even after I apologized to his kids for having been so hard on them in the fall, passing right over the fact that I was only hard on them because they had been insufferably rude...

Anyway, the following night, after the Goat had taken off for the Big Woods, I returned to see my son, and discovered that we were all invited up to Big Brother's for dinner. OK... Now, here is what he does that drives me really crazy. He never mentions that he was miffed about not being invited to dinner. OK. Many people would not. He never mentions that he even knew that the Goat was at my mother's; he knows I know, I know he knows, he knows I know, but nothing is said. That drives me nuts. But as I was packing up to head home to finish off the work I had due for my afternoon job the next day, my sister-in-law pulls me aside and asks me how it went. I say that my son and my mother seem to have taken it all pretty well. "No," she insists, "how did the Goat do? Did he survive?"

I could only say: "Well, yes." Isn't that rich? Well, I guess she is trying to distance herself from the PaterFamilias, and who can blame her? But it is still weird to go from my being the apparent source of contamination by the Daughters of Bilitis to the Goat suddenly being the focus of fond attention. Never assume, as children do, that a couple thinks as one person...

There is another possibility, though: maybe it was all just part of the ongoing Household Wars. There has been an undercurrent of unspoken tension between the two households for almost twenty years. [Unspoken being what Big Brother does best, apparently.] They have lived 500 yards apart all those years and both maintain that the others are completely impossible to deal with. I'd give my brother credit for impossibility long before my mother, but then, I don't live down the driveway from her as they do. Even I have to admit that she does, for all her manifold qualities, occasionally drive me mad. At moments like that, I go into the bathroom and breathe deep for a few minutes, repeating: "None of it matters, none of it matters, none of it matters..." Mostly, it's little stuff that in fact does not matter.

Oh, well, at least the Goat met two of my favorite people and liked them.
Speaks well for him, don't you think? I do.
Good weekend, for all the highway driving...

Hang in there all.
C