Art and Artifice: Sneak Peak No. 4

[Below is Chapter 7, titled “Life With a Toddler,” from my soon-to-be released memoir, Art and Artifice: A Memoir. This is the final excerpt I’ll release before the actual book launch, planned for mid-September 2025. You can read Chapter 1 here, Chapter 2 here, and Chapter 3 here.

In this sneak peak that follows Chapter 3, I’ve jumped ahead four chapters and about 8 months. Paul and I are now a couple, living together, and I’m adjusting to something I’ve never dealt with before: a toddler in my midst. This chapter also starts with a quote from another book I read recently, and seemed appropriate to the theme.

A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing.

—Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead

One big adjustment for me was that we had Danny on weekends. Their final custody arrangement was that his ex-wife would have the child during the week and we would have him from Friday evening until Sunday evening. When Paul had Danny on weekends in his own apartment, that was one thing. But now it was happening in my place, and there was no escape for me.

Naively, I initially thought this was no big deal. I liked Danny, he was a sweet boy, it would be fine. My friends, on the other hand, thought this was insane. How could Paul possibly make that kind of agreement?! They didn’t know anyone with this kind of custody arrangement and kept asking me: “How are you going to have a normal weekend? How will you even go to dinner, or to a movie, or do anything you like to do? Why didn’t he ask for every other weekend?”

I soon found out what they were talking about. All of a sudden, having my weekends hijacked by an all-consuming toddler was more than I had bargained for. Having never had children of my own, I never had to make this kind of sacrifice before and it came as a shock. Sometimes Danny was in a good mood, but most of the time he wasn’t. He was very attached to his mom, so Friday nights when he made the transition to our place were often nights of crying fits and temper tantrums. Either that, or he was constantly sick. Paul’s wife was a smoker and she smoked in the house, and their son had asthma, so the smoking made him sick all the time. The fact that she wouldn’t quit (or smoke outside) for the sake of their son’s health boggled my mind.

Once or twice when I made a comment about her smoking around Danny, I would get shut down.

“Gail—don’t. Just don’t. Stay out of it, OK? We had endless fights about that when I was married to her and she wouldn’t quit smoking. Now that I’m no longer there, I have zero control over that, so making your little comments doesn’t help anything.”

Friday nights with my ex-husband Don used to be a dinner date and a movie—we’d done that for 14 years straight. It was ingrained in my psyche, nothing I liked better after a week of work. Now, my Friday nights were spent listening to Paul try to soothe a hysterical child to sleep after a disastrous dinner where Danny refused to touch any of the food I’d made.

This was uncharted territory for me, and I tried to stay out of it as much as possible. This was Paul’s third child; his other two kids were young adults now. I don’t think his other kids were this young when that marriage broke up, but he must have had some experience with the back-and-forth of custody arrangements before. I knew one thing: he knew a lot more about how to handle temper tantrums than I did, so I let him handle them.

It was a trial-by-fire introduction to what weekend custody meant. After spending a quiet, idyllic week together, all our weekends were wrapped up in Danny. We took him to the Houston Butterfly Museum. We watched kids’ movies endlessly on repeat: Shrek, Shrek 2, The Incredibles, Shark Tale, Finding Nemo. We played with puzzles, Legos, coloring books, toy trains. Walks to the pond to see the turtles. In all of it, I found that a 3-year-old has the attention span of an ant.

For me the movies were the worst; I just couldn’t sit through them. I can’t even watch an adult movie of my choosing more than once, much less a kids’ movie. But Danny hated sitting there alone and always wanted one of us with him. Paul liked to dabble with cooking dinner because it took his mind off work, so he tried to get me to sit with Danny during a movie to keep him occupied. But I always bailed. I just had no patience for it.

We had a fight about it one night. After leaving Danny alone once again caused him to get whiny even before dinner started, it ruined a Friday evening early. He wouldn’t eat and went down to bed fighting after that. Paul came out of Danny’s bedroom hopping mad.

“Why couldn’t you do what I asked? Keep him distracted just for an hour, so I could make dinner? Look how it totally blew the night!”

It was true, but I still tried to defend myself.

“Paul, don’t you know me at all? I have no kids of my own. I have no experience at this. I didn’t even babysit that much. Not only that, I was the youngest of seven kids, so I didn’t even have any younger brothers or sisters. Hell, my next siblings were 5 years older than me. I was essentially the ‘only child,’ growing up last in that household! I had to fend for myself, learn how to entertain myself. No one sat with me, keeping me company watching movies or putting jigsaw puzzles together with me. I was on. my. own.”

He goes, “So? So what? That has nothing to do with Danny.”

I held up my hands in surrender. “You’re right…you’re right. I guess subconsciously, I’m expecting that Danny should be able to do the same thing. Should be able to be on his own and play by himself and shouldn’t need constant companionship and entertainment. But he’s a different kid and has different needs. I’ll try to do better. But you also have to understand where I’m coming from—that I have zero experience with this…and I might add, zero interest level. This is extremely difficult for me.”

“Zero interest level…?”

“That’s right. I didn’t get together with you because I loved kids and you had a toddler. Don’t ever forget that. I’ll make my best effort with Danny, but I’m in this because of you.”

“So you never even wanted kids? I thought you guys couldn’t have them…?”

I looked at him, exasperated. “Paul…I feel like I told you this already. Why we never had kids. But besides that, don’t you think, if I’d been one of those women who was desperate to have children, no matter what, that I would have made it happen? Even in my single years? There is such a thing as artificial insemination, you know. I could have done it, if it was that important to me. But it wasn’t, never has been. It’s been a deliberate choice on my part.”

* * *

One Saturday afternoon, Paul thought Danny would enjoy the Houston Zoo, so we made the trek down to the Museum District, about a 30-minute drive from where we were living. Entry tickets are expensive if you don’t plan ahead and get a CityPass (a discount pass that gets you into several venues across Houston), so this set him back more than $100. Being May in Houston, it was already sweltering outside.

I was reluctant to go along that day, as I had a million things to do. But I agreed to go, trying to be a good sport.

Within 20 minutes of entering the gates, we heard Danny say, “Daddy, I’m hot. I want to go home now.”

I’d been walking a little ahead of them, looking for the monkey exhibit. I spun around and said, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding!”

The look on Paul’s face was crestfallen—that his son was already bored, that his girlfriend was already irritated, and that the money he’d spent and the effort he’d made to have a nice day seemed to be wasted. No one seemed to appreciate what he’d done.

He grimly picked Danny up, popped him onto his shoulders so he wouldn’t have to walk, and said, “Hey, let’s go find some monkeys! And then the elephants after that. Those were your favorites last time!”

He didn’t look at me as he marched past me, but I could tell he was pissed off at my outburst.

* * *

Other than lean on friends, one mistake we made was that we didn’t get any professional help regarding blending a family with a young child, or helping Danny to transition. Our friends didn’t know any better either—most of them were either single or were “dinks”: dual income, no kids. We just winged it and tried to figure things out as we went along, and most of the time we made bad decisions.

I didn’t know how much of Danny’s behavior was normal for a 3-year-old, versus how much could be blamed on the stress he was experiencing at having to shift households each weekend, especially with me at one of them. He was very clear on who his mom was and who his mom wasn’t—and he didn’t like this new person his daddy was with.

Often if we were going out of town for the weekend and needed to pick Danny up from his mom’s, I would be there in the car. If we needed to drop him off at the end of the weekend, I would be there for the handoff. It made the whole atmosphere uncomfortable. Paul’s ex-wife would never acknowledge me or look me in the eye; often she would be crying herself. For us, it was just a matter of convenience—we lived in the Energy Corridor and she lived in Katy, a good 15 miles away. The logistics of getting Danny back and forth were not easy. But I know now that I was just a constant irritant to the situation, a reminder to his ex-wife of how quickly she was replaced. It had to have made the hours before each handoff in her household that much more tense. No wonder Danny was a wreck every Friday night.

We thought, he’s young, kids are adaptable, he’ll adjust quickly.