All right I’m mad. So, whoever’s been steeling my stuff I want you to return it. Right now! I am not going to forgive you, but I need those manuals to survive. What manuals you may ask? The life manuals that I was supposed to receive. The ones everyone else seems to get but never come close to me. I know they have to be somewhere, because everything has a manual. My last pair of shoes came with a manual, for heavens sakes.

I can’t speak for the rest of the world but the American Government has dictated that everything has to have a manual. They also seem to be inversely sized to how important they are. My stove came with a forty-six-page manual, where-as my son’s game console came with a three-page pamphlet in four languages stating you shouldn’t immerse it in water and to plug in a cartridge. To my son that console is mana from heaven. The stove is well, not so much. You can live for years with nothing but a microwave. Believe me, I’ve done it. But I am getting off the subject. I want to know about my life manuals.

Let me explain. Men and women have been getting together and having families for thousands of years. If all fathers were like mine, refusing to speak of such things, there must have been some written manual about how to get girls and get them to… well make a family with you. I had no manual and suffered for years.

You see it all over television. A guy and girl are forced be together. After three minutes and one commercial break, they start to talk about their feelings and within fifteen minutes they’re in bed together. They must have read the manual. I, who did not, have been in the very same situation many times and never achieved these results.

You might say I should look into relationship books. Did you know there are one-thousand-two-hundred-sixty-seven such tomes which I currently own. As much as I don’t want to insult other writers, I must say they are all extremely naïve, and don’t work. They say a guy needs a sense of humor, I got that. They say you need to be in touch with your feelings, that only got me a restraining order. They all say I should be myself. Frankly, I don’t know how to be anyone else. I did all of the things, in all the books and got exactly zilch, nada, nothing.

Now I’m not blaming the post office. I mean they handle zillions of pieces of mail and at that time I was sixteen and very distracted. Either one of us could have lost my Relationship Manual. Or perhaps a practical joker who had lost his could have taken mine. Hey It happens. Lucky for me, a certain beautiful woman got hers, and I was saved. I will admit I did have to reconvince her (i.e. Beg) twice to stay with me, because she never showed me her copy, and if she would have left, I’d have been stuck again. But there are so many other manuals I should have gotten.

An example of this can be seen when I was growing up. Back then all wives knew how to keep a career and a home, and all husbands knew they had to help their wives, go to work, and fix everything. It was that simple. I mean new home-owner husbands would get together and talk on the porch about the stuff they fixed that day. Well I must have been asleep when that manual came in too. This one I’m sure someone stole. You see my wife knew how to do all her stuff, but you all know how I fix stuff. I’m like a little lost puppy in the middle of a five-lane highway. Cute only gets you so far. I know mine was taken because my wife and I live in the same house. She apparently got hers. Where’s mine? I’m calling the FBI.

That manual wasn’t even the worst problem. The one that hurt the most was the one that should have come when my first child arrived. I admit I passed out during the actual delivery, but the hospital sent my wife home withal kinds of equipment and literature. It was all packaged neatly in plastic. I’m quite sure it had to be in there somewhere. Am I to believe that I am so unlucky I got the one package that particular manual was omitted? I don’t think so. No, there is a thief among us, and as soon as I can prove it, I will have their head. I have had my wife thoroughly checked out by a private investigator, so I’m reasonably sure it’s not her. But when I find them, Oh Boy!

The reason I bring this all up is my first son is now eighteen and my second son isn’t far behind. What if I’m supposed to give them, those said manuals, when the time comes? At the very least, I’m sure they will want a heads-up with some information, before their copies arrive. So, what am I supposed to do?

Well I went with my gut and went to the library. Let me tell you, that was a mistake. I’m not a fan of doing any kind of research as it is, but I tried for my children’s sake, and it was a miserable failure. Not because I couldn’t do the studying, but because of what I found. Oh, I found lots of books on the various subjects. The thing is I found they were all written by experts, who had never experienced the thing they were supposedly expert at. I’ve already told you what I found in relationship books. I could be wrong, but their stuff never worked for me.

Then there’s the baby stuff. I can’t begin to tell you how wrong that stuff is. In a nut shell they all boil down to this phrase. “Your wife is in a bad condition and needs your support. Be nice to her.” Easier said than done. Here’s the real fact Your wife will be angry at you for no reason, then sad because she was angry, then angrier because you were trying to comfort her while she was sad and crying about the unknown anger. This goes on for two years.

My advice is to lay low. Find yourself a small apartment, like the doghouse. You’re going to be spending all your time in it anyway, so you may as well make it comfortable. Don’t go in the house. She will text you if she needs anything. You deliver it ASAP along with your check for the week. If she has a sister or trusted friend all the better. Have the woman come to live with her. That will balance it out. You might even get to see your child once in a while.

You know, I should write a book. Sadly, I just wrote the whole thing in that last paragraph, and I don’t think I could extend that to two-hundred-thirty-pages.