I jerked awake to the sound of whispering children. “Let’s go see him!”
I called out “Let your uncle sleep!”
Gleek and Patches paused before continuing down the stairs. “He’s awake. There’s a light under his door.”
“Even if he’s awake, you need to leave him alone until he comes out. He’ll come out when he’s ready to play.”
Gleek sighed. “Okay. We can’t go in anyway. The door is locked. We’ll just watch.” And so the two of them went to set up their vigil on the door, ready to pounce on my brother the moment he emerges.
My brother has definitely earned this Desired Playmate status from my kids. I’ve never seen a man so patient and so willing to crawl around on the floor. Last night Gleek was teaching him how to play Monster in the Dark, which included howling and growling and my brother being used as a beast of burden. He played with a smile. I watched and remembered when this brother stayed with us for a month in 2004 while he was job hunting. Then it was Kiki and Link who set up a nigh daily vigil outside his door. Although their choices of games were probably more to my brother’s innate taste. They kept asking him to play chess.
I keep an eye on the play and sometimes I go rescue my brother. He does wear out, and with no kids of his own he’s not always sure how to make them understand that he is tired. He’ll escape upstairs tired and rumpled, but smiling. If anyone deserves to have kids, it’s this man. Unfortunately he first has to find a wife, which has been tricky for him. He’s a computer guy, very distractable and not very aggressive. And women between 30-45 who are geeky while sharing our religion can be hard to find, particularly in Florida where he lives. I wish he lived closer so I could help him network socially and meet more people.
At least this morning my brother has a door to retreat behind and lock. For most of the weekend he’s been sleeping on the family room floor because my parents had the guest bed in my office. Gleek and Patches assured me that they were not waking up my brother every morning by jumping on him. I knew they weren’t but I also know that a young child sitting nearby and trying to be quiet is one of the noisiest sounds in the world. Especially when “nearby” means “three inches away.”
My brother will be leaving today. He needs to travel to Idaho to visit my other brother before returning to Florida. My kids will be really sad to see him go.
Finding someone in that age range who is geeky and LDS isn’t so easy even in Utah. Believe me, I know. I wish him luck, though, as he sounds like a good guy 🙂
I wish him luck, though, as he sounds like a good guy 🙂
Ditto on that. Though I know a few LDS women here in OKC that would fit the bill, but we all have teenagers and issues of our own.
Though, if that doesn’t scare him, I have the strong impression that one of these sisters might be a match for him (not me – I’m too quirky for anyone but another eccentric and I think I may have found the right guy already). She’s very nice, but she is bipolar. She on medication for it now and last we talked she was doing great on it. Her eldest is a teenage boy, but I think her youngest is five year old girl. I am at my parents and don’t have my ward roster with me and my daughter only knows the son.
No obligation though. Long distance relationships are difficult to say the least. I only mentioned her because I just had this strong feeling I should. Perhaps it was only to show that there is hope for your brother that these women do exist.
I know the feeling, re: finding someone geeky enough. You’d think it’d be easier to find a geeky guy than for a guy to find a geeky girl, but not in hip Seattle. 🙂 Part of me feels lucky that I can be a chameleon, finding enough in common with non-geeky guys that it’s not necessary to have that in common.
We have a midsingles group here that runs 30-45–does he have something like that? Even if he does, the pickings tend to be slim on even “normal” people because getting to your 30s unscathed as a single Mormon does tend to be rare. (And by “normal” I mean not suffering from some sort of developmental delay, or perhaps just congenital obnoxiousness, which is one of the guys attending FHE lately is suffering from.) Lately I just figure that the best I can hope for is the status quo that came so easily in my 20s in singles’ wards–finding enough good friends with whom I have enough in common that wherever I am I create a family of sorts.
As much as I love my nieces and nephews, sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever really want many kids of my own now at my age, even if I were to get married and start a family tomorrow. I wanted 7 or 8 when I was younger, but the older I get the more tired I get. And right now nieces and nephews are enough–and I can let them go home again when I get tired. 😀
My second brother is the “fun uncle” brother. My kids and my other brother’s kids LOOOVVEEE him.
It’s REALLY nice to have a “fun uncle”, since my other two brothers are like this for my kids, “Um, what’s your name again?”
(plus we only see those other two brothers once or twice a year.)
“the pickings tend to be slim on even “normal” people because getting to your 30s unscathed as a single Mormon does tend to be rare. (And by “normal” I mean not suffering from some sort of developmental delay, or perhaps just congenital obnoxiousness, which is one of the guys attending FHE lately is suffering from.)”
You could equally well strike the word Mormon from that (and BTW, no offence intended) – generally, IME, the people that age or more who aren’t attached are mostly the ones who don’t really want to be. That’s my experience, that and the sadly increasing number for whom it didn’t work out and they’ve split up again.
Personally, I love being “uncle” to a variety of friends’ kids. Some of them I’m more closely “uncle” to than others, some I don’t often meet. And, somewhat to my surpise, I now have a real genuine niece to be uncle to, which is rather nice.
Personally, the way I see the world going, I’m no longer sure that I want to bring kids into it – it looks to me that their lives are going to be harder in many ways than mine is. By the time things get really difficult, if we (global we) carry on as we are, then I’ll be too old to really care, or dead anyway, but they won’t. I hope that we can avert this impending doom, but I’m no longer sure that we can.
Meanwhile, I collect “nephews” and “nieces” when and where I can – I think the essence of this is that I’m not worried by thinking and acting at their level. Sometimes, grown-ups can be too serious, and forget what it’s like to be a child – mostly, this is a good thing as it makes them better at doing the repsonsible grown-up stuff which you do need to do in order to be a successful parent. Me, I don’t rate the grown-up thing, seems to me that kids have more fun. OK, I might wear the body of an overweight 40+, but inside, I’m still a teenager. This means that I’ll never be “successful” (by grown-up criteria) and if I’m ever rich it’ll be by luck, like winning a lottery or something. But overall, I have enough money and enough fun, and I can quite happily sit and play silly games with pre-teen kids…
Dagnabbit. That wasn’t meant to be anonymous. Somehow, I got logged out.
Have you considered Online Dating?
Hi.
Have you considered convincing your brother to join an Online Dating site?
There’s JDate for Jews, and there probably is a site dedicated to LDS (google suggests
http://www.ldssingles.com/). It is a good way to meet new people when you’re a working professional (unlike college, when you always meet new people).
One note – you have to be relatively aggressive with these sites, or you’ll get nowhere. By aggressive I mean – send emails, send emails, send more emails. Short, fast, cute emails. Send detailed love notes after she shows some interest.
I’ve discovered that the ratio is approximately one date/reply for every 7-10 emails sent.
Oh, one more thing – if you do convince him to join that site, please do him the favor of going over his profile (maybe asking one of your girlfriends to help as well) and revising what he writes.
Good luck