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The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

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Children

It Was A Magic Childhood

January 26, 2017 by Jack Steiner 2 Comments

It is some time in the early or mid-seventies and we are running around the neighborhood and schoolyards talking about or singing School House Rock Songs.

We hear our parents talking about the Vietnam War, Watergate and how the Kennedy’s were shot and killed.

Sometimes they tell us about Dr. King’s Assasination and talk about how we should treat others.

I hear stories about who used to be a hippy and who still is as well as who never was.

It never occurs to me that decades later I’ll think about my own magical childhood and wonder how my children will look back upon theirs.

James Bond Comes To Life

Some friends ask how often I talk to my kids and when they are moving out.

I tell them my daughter Facetimes and Snapchats me daily and that my son and I communicate via text or phone.

“It is funny to think about how we used to dream about this stuff. We wanted to get the same cool things as James Bond or Dick Tracy and wondered how long it would take.”

My buddy laughs and asks me if my daughter preps and primps before she Facetimes.

I tell him I am not sure and then mention there have been times I didn’t Skype or Facetime with some people because I was wearing boxers and a t-shirt and didn’t want to put more clothes on.

“Truth is I probably don’t care if most of those people saw me that way, but I don’t want them to be uncomfortable and you never know who else is on the other side.”

He laughs and tells me to prepare for when my daughter really gets interested in boys.

“My girl is a little older than yours and let me tell you, at 17 she will not allow any boy to Facetime with her unless she has fixed herself up.”

We go back and forth a little bit and I tell him sometimes I wish our kids didn’t have access to tech the way they do now.

“I look around and I see a lot of kids who are a little chunky. I don’t see them running around the neighborhood like we did. I don’t see them singing I am Just a Bill while they ride their bikes.”

He tells me I am a cranky old man and I say he is right, but I am not wrong either.

“Maybe we ought to build our own wall away from Trump and create our own safe enclave to raise our kids in.”

We both laugh and then I sigh deeply and tell him I have to go, “it is almost midnight and I am beat.”

Safe Enclaves

I lay down in bed and grab my Kindle to do some reading before I drift off to sleep.

I do like tech but it took me a while to break down and buy a Kindle because I prefer the feel of a book in my hands.

But there is something nice about bringing a library with me wherever I go and so I compromised. I have the Kindle and I still have real books that I read too.

Under the covers I read the words on the screen and think about safe enclaves.

I am not sure they truly exist and when I think about my childhood it is easy for me to wonder about some things.

It truly was magical and I loved it but if you look at it from a different perspective it can seem like a very scary time in some ways.

I was born in ’69 and there is no doubt the sixties were a pretty turbulent time.

If all we could talk about was the assassination of a president and then a few years later his younger brother, a senator, we would have lot.

But we have the civil rights moment and the murder of Dr. King in there too, not to mention Vietnam.

Some of that turbulence from the sixties rolled into the seventies as we dealt with Nixon and Watergate, the end of the war and a host of other issues.

The point is that as a father I sometimes I have to remind myself how easy it is to forget how some of the best times for us may have felt uncertain and imbalanced for others.

Life never stops moving and we are stuck on the giant wheel that means that we get to repeat certain events.

They may not be identical, but they are close enough and while I could let that depress and disappoint me, I choose not to.

We’ll manage the current crisis and challenges too and hopefully with a minimal amount of chaos.

But what I really hope is that when my kids look back they think of their childhood as having been magical too.

Filed Under: Children

Can Blogging Help You See The Future?

January 23, 2017 by Jack Steiner 8 Comments

I want to say yes to the question I posed in the title and I suppose if I wanted to I could make a case for how it can.

We would talk about how you could use older posts to track how certain things went and use that information to make some informed predictions.

Could be kind of fun to do that but the areas I most want information on aren’t the sort that are easily speculated upon.

That is because we are talking about people and there is often no rhyme or reason to why or how we make the decisions we do.

We like to say there is but if you dig into a lot of those decisions you find you are buying Honda because your father always bought Honda and that has relieved you of the need to really check them out.

Maybe you analyze prices and review dealerships, but the hard research might already be done just because that is what dad bought.

That is not a value judgment or me saying it is bad, it is just acknowledging there isn’t as much logic and reason done for decision making as we sometimes like to believe.

Situations & Circumstances

I am working on finding a solution or solutions to a situation that I have been dealing with for almost a year now.

That is in addition to a couple of other things that have been ping ponging around for a decade or longer.

It is frustrating because it feels like my ability to act as I wish is limited by situations and circumstances that are beyond my control.

Sometimes I am very good with handling those things because if I can’t do any more than I have done I just shrug my shoulders and move on.

But there are things like the aforementioned but not described situation where I feel frustrated because I am certain we are close to a workable and practical solution.

Certain that if I can just get the parties involved to open their eyes they’ll see the door and walk out of the rooms they have locked themselves in.

Convinced the only reason they haven’t is because I haven’t done a proper job of illuminating the idea and lighting the path.

So when I don’t see things going the way I want it makes me crazy and then I think about what I say to my kids about banging our heads against a wall.

I take a deep breath and ask myself if I am really going about it in the right way.

There Is a Cat

There is a cat and if I were like our new president I wouldn’t ask for permission to just reach out and grab it.

But I am not him and so I have to ask not that it matters because the room is so dark I am sure where I ought to try grabbing first.

Of course if I could use the blog to see the future I would be more relaxed about all this because I would know what was going to happen and could plan accordingly.

I can’t so I sit here thinking about a variety of things and hearing a couple of phrases echo in my head:

“You are only as happy as your happiest kid.”

and

“Little kids, little problems, big kids, big problems.”

Manage Life

Right now I am doing my best to manage life and all that comes with it as best I can.

Got one hell of a stomach-ache and a whisper inside my head says maybe this won’t pass, maybe this is the one that sticks around for life, like luggage.

But I also have my Taurus determination and willingness to dig in and go through, over, under or around the wall.

There very well may be a solid solution that I haven’t thought or come across and that optimism pushes me to go forward.

You miss every pitch you don’t take a swing at, so I am swinging.

Filed Under: Children, Life

Welcome President Golden Showers

January 10, 2017 by Jack Steiner 4 Comments

I always knew there would be times when being a father would be more challenging because of something unforeseen and unexpected.

What I never imagined was a time when reality television would have any role in a presidential election in which we discussed and debated whether a foreign country had tampered with things.

That little surprise got turned up a notch today when information was released that suggests our incoming president likes to get wet and wild.

Suddenly I was faced with trying to figure out if I need to talk to the kids about the report our incoming leader is a little freakier than others.

Welcome President Golden Showers and thank you for giving me this opportunity to wonder what to do about this.

Computers & Cellphones

My children are in middle and high school which means not only are they equipped with computers and cellphones so are most of the others around them.

If you haven’t dealt with this is in simple terms it means they have access to all sorts of information and see news reports that we might prefer they don’t.

More importantly, I can’t control what the other kids share with my kids and know that they will dispense, disburse and discuss things that I might prefer they did not.

So I have kept an open door policy in which the kids have been told they can ask me about anything.

It is tied into the honor code in which I ask them not to dig for things that are inappropriate.

Between you and me I expect that honor code to be broken from time to time. As long as it is not a regular occurrence I am cool with it.

I have to be, because if I would have had access to computers and cellphones I would have been all over the place.

Hell, I am today. Curiosity leads me all over the place, but it is different when you are an adult and ready for more mature content.

Understanding

A while back Steiner the minor asked me some questions about sex and I did my best to answer them.

Some of his friends are engaging in different activities and curiosity got the best of him.

He didn’t really want to delve too deeply into things but he didn’t want to tell the guys he didn’t understand it.

I know he conducted a basic search online and found the results to be more detailed than he wanted.

“Girls will make you feel and do stupid things. You need to do your best not to let the confusion and uncertainty make you lose your head. Don’t forget, I could say the same thing to a teenage girl by substituting the word boy for girl.”

He nodded his head and I did my best to make it clear we don’t lose control of our ability to make choices and that we need to do our best to make smart decisions.

“There have been moments where I was so in love or lust with a girl that I would do practically anything they asked. It is a great feeling but scary too.”

That is a normal conversation and one I was perfectly happy to have.

I am less happy wondering if it is better to wait and see if the kids ask me to explain what a golden shower is or if I need to take preemptive action and discuss.

Thanks Donnie boy, I am a terrific father and people sing my praises bigly, but this is unwelcome.

Filed Under: Children

Bloggers: About That Parent Blogger Space

January 6, 2017 by Jack Steiner 4 Comments

Sometimes you come back from your vacation feeling more tired than when you left.

If you are like me you find that aggravating because a vacation is supposed to be a time for recharging your batteries and renewing your energy so that you can live and not just pass through life.

This last vacation wasn’t of the sort I prefer and though it was fun, it left me feeling a bit drained and I have spent this past week feeling like I am dragging.

It is part of why I haven’t written as much as I wanted to but it is not the only reason.

Some of it is because I am still in that funny place where I want to be part of the parent and dad blogging communities and yet find some of it exhausting.

Why?

It is not because I have shared every thought or told every story, even after 13 years in the blogging game there is plenty to say and share.

But some of the passion for participating isn’t what it used to be and I can’t decide if it is because so many of the bloggers I used to run with have decided to hang up their keyboards or if it is just a moment in time.

What I am certain of is that my place has changed and that I have little interest in the stories about infants, toddlers, breast feeding and all the other young kid stuff.

That is not to demean or diminish any of it because it is of tremendous importance, but I have been there and done that.

My focus is on the middle and high school years because that is where my kids are at and that transition changed everything.

It Is Harder

Those of you with little kids might not like hearing this, but the little kid stuff is generally easier than the bigger.

That is provided we are talking about children who don’t have special needs or major health issues.

It is different when your kids are older and you have to deal with the drama that comes raging hormones, teen drivers, dating and middle school madness.

When your kids and friends are on social media and think it is funny to post videos of themselves doing stupid crap but never think of potential consequences you find yourself in a different position than being sleep deprived.

You might not like the four year-old who doesn’t share but you really aren’t going to like the boyfriend/girlfriend who rips your child’s heart out and there is not a lot you can do about it.

The days of putting them in the crib/play pen/room whatever are gone.

And if we circle back to social media for a moment let’s not forget the kids and their friends sometimes Google themselves and find posts you have written about them.

This hasn’t happened to me because I never used names but I know people who had trouble because the cute story they wrote about a two-year-old was used by other students at school to endlessly tease them.

Outraged By Outrage

I tell people all the time they can’t tell me what to be upset or not be upset about. My feelings are my feelings and I am not a robot.

But there are many moments when I am outraged by the general outrage. In our effort to create more tolerance we create so many moments of intolerance.

I can’t keep hearing about privilege as if it is the only reason good or bad things happen to people.

Sometimes you are a good person or an asshole and it has nothing to do with age/gender or skin color.

It is just who you are.

Live More, Write Less

It is my unofficial motto for 2017.

I am a writer by birth and by need. I can’t stop writing any more than I can stop breathing.

But I can pull myself away from the computer and the phone to focus on living in the moment and experiencing things live.

It is something I have been doing and talking about for a while now.

Sometimes it is hard to put the phone down and not take pictures because I wonder if I’ll regret not having a recorded history of that special moment.

But there is magic that you miss when you spend your life looking through a lens.

Same goes for putting everything down on paper as it happens.

This is a year for reminding myself to live and love hard, but first I need to take a nap or drink some coffee, I am freaking tired.

I need a vacation to recover from my vacation. 🙂

One last note/thought to share.

Filed Under: Blogging, Children

The Simple & Hard Truths Of 2017

January 3, 2017 by Jack Steiner 6 Comments

The Simple & Hard Truths Of 2017 isn’t supposed to be deflating or demoralizing nor is it supposed to be inspirational.

It is a starting point I am going to use to measure/look at the year that follows or so goes the theory and we all know that theories are a work in progress.

  • Teenagers know how to press every button you know about and some you don’t.
  • My closer to 50 than 20-year-old body doesn’t care if age is a state of mind, some things don’t work or respond as they used to.
  • I am mentally tougher than I have ever been and it has everything to do with life experience.
  • Being tough doesn’t mean you don’t get tired, frustrated or feel like you have enough support.
  • I don’t know how to just give up and quit but I have learned how to pivot and adjust.
  • I am a couple of small victories short of feeling pretty cocky about a lot of things.
  • I have the tools and ability to make it all happen, whatever all means.

Tools & A Musical Intermission

I was going to write about picking the right tool for the job, but instead here is a small sample of what is flowing through my ears while I write, work and exercise.

  • 6th Avenue Heartache- The Wallflowers
  • Adam Raised A Cain- Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
  • 99 Problems- Jay-z
  • An Affair To Remember- Harry Warren
  • After Midnight- Eric Clapton
  • Against The Wind- Bob Seger
  • Ain’t Got You- Bruce Springsteen
  • Back In Black- AC/DC
  • Back In The Highlife- Steve Winwood
  • Superstition- Stevie Wonder

Teenage Blues

There is a teenage boy that is making me crazy now because in some ways he is far too much like his father and that hard head of his is leading down the wrong path.

Some people have been riding me about trying to figure out how we got to this place but I refuse to acknowledge their concerns because the timing is wrong.

When you see the car heading for a cliff or a wall you don’t stop to figure out when you made a wrong turn you focus on stopping the damn car first.

Understanding what and how led to that place only comes after you know your driver and passengers are safe.

What is killing me is the feeling this teenager is going to insist on standing in the middle of the fire to prove he can and that he’ll exacerbate things by pouring gas over his head.

It is frustrating because I can’t seem to reach him and in the past I always have.

I hope he hears what I am saying and is being hard headed for whatever dumb reasons adolescents do what they do.

That is spoken by a man who remembers being young and dumb and had hoped to use his experience to properly parent around this moment.

Doesn’t look like that is going to happen and it makes me feel sad and angry, but I am ever the optimist so maybe I’ll be proven wrong.

I sure hope so.

Back In The Saddle Again

Went away for a very short vacation which was a a lot of fun but not nearly as relaxing as I really needed it to be.

I didn’t get as much mental downtime as I needed so I am not entirely ready to be back in the saddle again.

That is the unfortunate truth but as stated in the bullet points above, I am a couple of small victories away from adding some swagger to my walk.

Just need to push a little bit longer and a little bit harder and instead of walking I can strut or sashay around town.

Probably won’t because I’ll feel self conscious and goofy, but it would be nice to feel like I have earned it.

‘Final’ Thoughts

I am going to do my best to remind myself I can only control myself and that I can’t make others do things just because I want them to, no matter who they are.

Hopefully my control will include healthier eating combined with a new exercise regimen.

Don’t mistake that to mean I haven’t been exercising because I have, but I need to adjust it based upon the person I am now and not who I once was.

That is not an easy adjustment but it is doable and once I get things going there I expect good things to come from it.

Happy New Year.

Filed Under: Children, Life

Daughter Stumps Father: Hard Questions

December 28, 2016 by Jack Steiner 2 Comments

I am rarely at a loss for words and even if I don’t know the real answer to a question I am fast on my feet and easily capable of providing something that sounds like it might be right.

But there was a moment in time in which my daughter caught me with a question that I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to answer.

It wasn’t something I had ever thought about having to discuss in the sort of detail she wanted so I punted.

“You probably should ask your mother.”

P.S. If you want specific details click on the link above and then come back to read the rest of the post.

We’ll wait.

Daughter Stumps Father: Hard Questions

I thought about it because my darling girl asked me today to share the hardest question she ever asked me and I decided I didn’t feel like having that particular talk with her.

Don’t mistake that to mean I haven’t or won’t talk to her about boys because I have and I will.

But I am certain the “halfway through 7th grader can’t wait to be older” would be horrified if I told her exactly what she said when she was 6.5.

So I redirected the conversation and asked how many boys she is talking to on the school chat and how many she interacts with on Instgram and Snapchat.

“Dad, were you listening to me talk to Kathy?”

I shook my head no and asked why.

“Because I gave her advice for how to deal with Dylan. Are you sure you weren’t listening?”

I smiled and told her no but she said she didn’t believe me.

“You hear everything, even when you don’t look like you are listening, you usually are.”

“Dad has superpowers and super hearing. Don’t forget that.”

She rolled her eyes at me, gave me a hug and asked me to leave her room.

“I want to have girl time with my friends. You can go now.”

Things Are Different Now

Girl time doesn’t mean that she had friends over because in the modern world technology means you can have friends over via Facetime or any number of other video chatting services.

I hadn’t gotten out of the room before the giggling started and muted voices called after me, “Ask her about James” followed by my daughter telling her friend to hush because I might actually ask.

His name is one I haven’t heard before which makes me wonder if maybe there is something to him, at least in her eyes.

I made a point not to react, nor did I ask her about him later. Better to make a mental note to follow up later on.

Too much attention to these things might cause her to shy away, just as no attention might make it awkward later on.

****

I have worked hard to make sure she knows she can ask me questions about anything and have promised to be honest with my answers, and I have been.

But there are moments now where it feels like I am winging it more than ever. That is not a bad thing, just a part of how it goes.

Still if you asked my darling girl, she would tell you it is because things are different now.

All Things In Their Time

I used the quote to prove to my daughter that some things never change.

She sort of rolled her eyes at me, but smiled and I smiled back.

It is a little game she and I sometimes play. She likes to tease me about being old and I like to pretend to fall asleep while she does it because you know us old men need our naps.

****

One of the other old men in my group of old friends called the other day to catch up and to ask a favor.

“Do you want to beat up a 17-year-old boy for me? If I see him I think I might have to run him over with my car..”

“Is death too good for him or will a simple beating with rubber hoses and hammers work?”

He laughed and told me to just wait.

“One day your daughter will have a boyfriend and you’ll be subject to all sorts of fun. She’ll have you on the roller coaster. Heart break to happiness to heart break to happiness and it won’t just be her because her mom will use that as an opportunity to practice her future mother-in-law skills.”

I laughed and told him all things in their time.

“You think you have control, but hormones don’t care what parents think.”

I said he was right because I remember what it was like to be the kid with raging hormones but I figure there is plenty to worry about without being concerned about dating.

The unofficial rule is that it can’t start before 16 but that is sort of a fast and loose decision that was made without any real thought.

Can’t say yet whether it will be enforced or if it will need to be. I just know that as of this moment in time, I still have time and I am going to take advantage of it.

Filed Under: Children, People

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