But then I met Lana.
She was newly out of law school and working for a prestigious firm in New York City.
I was serving tables at a restaurant near her office between acting gigs.
We started flirting, then fucking, and lo and behold, despite our best preventative efforts, I knocked her up.
It was her choice to keep the boys, which I begrudgingly accepted.
I was a complete twat about it, warning her that I’d be a dreadful co-parent and that she’d have to carry the majority of the load.
But now, approaching fourteen years later, I’m grateful that she was infinitely wiser than me when that pregnancy test returned with a positive result.
That she forgave me for being a twat.
That she carried the vast financial burden of providing for them—and sometimes me as well—while I was still attempting to make it in the acting world.
That I now have two young men in my life who are both so much like me that it sometimes hurts, while also being so very different from me that they confound me on a regular basis.
I’m not prone to declarations of people being my very world, but if I were capable of assigning such magnitude to another human being, it would be for my sons.
Since they were born, my life has been split into the months that I’ve acted as their primary caregiver while Lana was exceptionally busy with work and the times when I’ve felt as though I’ve misplaced a body part when I would land a role that would take me away from the boys for anywhere from days to weeks at a time.
Having an entire uninterrupted summer as their default parent, as Lana calls it, to watch them grow into young men is a treat.
Except for moments like now, when I must act as the disciplinarian.
“You’re to apologize to Ms. Best for booking her services without properly alerting me so that I could ensure security would allow her on the premises without issue,” I tell them both as we navigate the car park where a line of food vans are all set up at the edge of the lake in Athena’s Rest’s Harmony Park.
Mondays are food-trucks-at-the-lake days in the summer.
How bloody brilliant to take the sting out of the start of the week by encouraging outdoor lunches.
I’ve been told the town population is at a low point, with students from the nearby university mostly away for the summer months, but the shady areas around the small lake are nonetheless full of picnickers. Business people and business casual people and parents and children and people who seem to be on dates are seated at various picnic tables and on scattered red checkered picnic blankets.
Quaint and perfect.
“Is she truly the best, like her name says she is?” Eddie, the older of my twins, asks me. He’s more like me in the face, with my blue eyes and square jawline and my nose, and for the most part, he sounds fully American in his speech patterns. He was an early bloomer, so his voice is fully deep as a man’s and he’s nearly as tall as me to boot. I had to replace his casual shorts just last week, and his shoulders are testing the limits of his favorite cartoon T-shirt today too. He also confessed to being the answerer of the phone call to confirm the party they had booked with Bea’s burger bus.
“Probably not,” Charlie replies. He has Lana’s lighter hair and more delicate features, and his voice has only begun to crack. He’s more prone to Britishisms, as Lana and Eddie call them. Charlie’s wearing a hoodie, jeans, and trainers despite the summer temperatures, which disturbs me only because he’s fought against wearing a coat every winter for the past three years. The child’s internal temperatures must be inside out and upside down. “She could’ve at least left us some fish.”
“Definitely not the best then.”
“We’re the victims here.”
“Neglected.”
“Overlooked.”
“Undernourished.”
“Overdramatic,” I interject.
The boys share a smile and bump fists.
This apology will clearly go swimmingly well.
Much like me being the disciplinarian in this parenting gig.
