A Bob's Life

I think I may be living my life backwards in some kind of Benjamin Button distortion where I still age normally but all of my life-shaping events are happening at the end of my life instead of the beginning. At the tender age of 57 I have a house full of children, a wife who gets up every morning and teaches at the local Middle School, and a pony-tail. I will now attempt to explain how I got here.

I came to Florida for the sun and the beach, and I have spent the last 20 years or so making sure I got my fill. Skin cancer aside, I discovered I enjoyed playing beach volleyball even more than the indoor version and started playing almost every day of the week. Tournaments, leagues, night games, all day in the sun. If there was a game I was in it. Funny that I was never that good, but in my defense I was already 35 and short (5'7) so not that amazing that I couldn't block a 7ft tall 18 year old at the net. Didn't stop me from getting out there, just didn't get me any trophies. Playing so much did put me smack in the middle of the volleyball community, which is a lifestyle for Floridians who enjoy the game. This meant I played at "my" beach, knew everyone who walked by and enjoyed outside activities with the people I played volleyball with.

So here I am, approaching middle age, working through the meat of my third career, making good enough money to buy a house near the beach but not good enough money to attract a trophy wife, so I'm single and chasing around every good looking volleyball girl on the beach just like my movie idol; Austin Powers. Most of the beach crowd were struggling 20 somethings who needed a little help here and there, so I had a string of roommates at my place. They got a bed and a place to put their stuff, while I got inclusion into gatherings I might otherwise have missed. Sometimes I would even get paid rent.

After a couple of years almost everyone had either stayed at my place or been there enough that it became party central for the core group, and then evolved into an actual event, every weekend, without fail, for almost 10 years. Now I didn't have to go anywhere. People would talk during the week about what food they were going to bring, what they wanted to see on the big screen tv, what the topic of the party would be, whatever it was, it would automatically be at my place. I facilitated this by supplying multiple televisions, vcrs, disc players, game consoles and games. Wii in the front of the house, Playstation and Xbox (RockBand) in the living room. Computer in the back and a projector on the deck right next to, of course, the jacuzzi.

All good things come to an end eventually. Rollercoasters, Movies, Weddings, Parties. After some 400+ party weekends by my count, things started to fade a bit. The core group were now in their 30's and had time-consuming jobs and houses of their own, and that big time-waster, children. I had a good bachelor rotation of women going on but was starting to come to the realization that there was a missing element in there somewhere if I could only put my finger on it. The missing element turned out to be an intelligent, beautiful woman, who decided somehow that I was the chosen one and would not take no for an answer.

She had been part of the group for the entire span, originally someone else's girlfriend and even fake married to him at one point, meaning they had the ceremony but never filed the paperwork to make it official. She kind of bounced in and out of my bubble for years before losing her mind and setting her sights on me. I sidestepped and did evasive maneuvers and built a time machine to change history but somehow, no matter what I did, we ended up together. We have been married since 2012 and at the tender age of 51, I had my first child in 2015.

In 2017 we took in a foster child who needed a home after both his parents were incarcerated. In 2019 his 3 month old sister joined us and in 2020 my job became one of the early Covid-19 victims. Having the kids home all day and an infant in the house, I started looking through the gig economy to see what might be available, and I'm still looking 9 months later. Meanwhile those checks and extensions and reimbursements keep coming through. My wife and I decided to give her career a chance to flourish since she got picked up early and I would stay home and play Mr. Mom for at least as long as the school year.

Now I manage our 2 houses, keep up with the bills, find ways to slice off any useless payments and take care of the endless list of household chores. Laundry, shopping, cleaning, delivery and pickup of the kids, etc, etc. I got solar panels on the roof, got rid of our car payments and ended up with a soccer mom van, all while growing out one of those mid-life ponytails I see a bunch of older guys sporting. My wife is vegan while the children and I are decidedly not, which makes for a lot of fun picking who is going to cook what for dinner. We're not going to get rich this way, but so far, we're not getting any poorer so life goes on. Both foster kids are ready for us to adopt, that may happen before the end of the year. We just made it through the holidays and now that everyone is back to the routine I had a chance to write this small part of my story. Hope you like it :)