Of Human Bondage

As obnoxious as it may sound, finding someone is the easy part, especially living where I live. There are something like 20 million people living Southern California. Yes, I live on the unfashionable, smog-shrouded exurban brink of Greater Los Angeles (or as we call it, the Coughing Edge), but as long as I'm in striking distance of one of the great, gummy arteries of life, love and commerce we call the Freeway System, I'm everywhere at once. I travel to all points in space and time simultaneously, transported in a quantum blood-cell of multi-location in the coincidental shape of a 2007 Toyota Prius. There is no limiting frontier, no velocity threshold, no Newtonian or Einsteinian constant to bind or waylay me. Unless I want to run the air conditioner or encounter an incline.

Between that and the internet, what possible excuse could I have for not at least cannoning into someone interesting along the way? After something as traumatic as a divorce, it takes some time to understand your own social potency, the rhythm of courtship, the contest of romantic barter, but after a while, you develop an approach. And sooner or later, someone will decline to press charges and Burgeoning Potential is born. Kismet!

So OK, that all worked out and, yes, I've met someone. There are all the regular pitfalls of early dating: the insecurity (given and received), the mixed signals, the wild swings of emotion, the selection of an ambiguous safeword, the anonymous drop-off at the emergency room, the chafing of the awkwardly-placed splint... Typical stuff and, like I said, really somewhat easy.

The hard part is: I have kids. Three of them, don't you know. And eventually, once you've worked through all the regular stuff of deciding if someone is right, now past the potentially minutely infinite complications of two people, you've got to decide how to integrate this new person into the lives of these other people for whom you are completely responsible. Well, 50% responsible. That's not a cop-out, that's what the state of California has mandated. The good thing about that is I'm able to drop my expectations for their development by half, which is far, far less expensive. Community college would be something of a triumph.

The process has been slow, but it has at least finally begun. It starts with heavily mediated visitation time, taking very careful and painstaking countermeasures to ensure the kids don't feel any expectation to make an instant family-like connection before they are ready. Sometimes the precautions are general like limiting the public displays of affection in front of them or including them in some of the decision-making processes for our limited bonding-time activities. Sometimes they're far more specific, dependent entirely on the vagaries of the situation. For me, that usually means a strip of surgical tape across the top of the computer monitor. The kids don't need to see "liveasiansluts.org" when we're trying to organize a friendly game of family internet Scrabble or playing Dirty Ring Toss by remote proxy for a nominal fee. The mistake a lot of new families make is trying to force everything into place at once. If anyone knows that, it's my Marta. Or Corazon. Or whatever her name is, I can't really be sure. The point is, we're working up to something. The other point is: sometimes, lube isn't optional.

The long-term goal is for all of us to be comfortable together, without the awkwardness of expectation; where the kids can finally, ultimately feel able to relax completely and express who they are as people in the electronic web presence of the woman I'm pretty sure I probably love. In an ideal world, this will happen when they are old enough to have jobs and qualify for credit cards of their own. Bonding isn't just complicated; it actually costs extra.