DOD238: A Step-Tom's Lament

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Tom: Welcome to Dear Old Dads, the podcast that's something, something step -parent. I'm Tom Curry. I'm joined as always by Thomas Smith and Eli Bosnick. Hello, gentlemen.

0:00:34 Thomas: Huh?

0:00:39 Eli: Hello, Tomifer. Podcast listener, I do need to tell you the weirdest part about that intro is that Tom did stop and pause like he was writing it or figuring out what he was going to say. And then, and then the result was something, something, step-parents.

0:00:50 Thomas: Yeah. To be fair, it might have been that he paused because the demon from hell was starting to grab at his leg, and he's like, ah, not now,

0:01:01 Eli: Ah, come on. You said you were on lunch.

0:01:02 Tom: You got to kick them away.

0:01:02 Thomas: Okay. Sorry, it is what it is!

0:01:05 Tom: Yeah, it's a kick, shuffle, ball step to get them away

0:01:07 Eli: Have you met my daughter? It's kind of bring your kid to work day.

0:01:12 Eli: Do you mind if she hurts a part of your body permanently forever?

0:01:17 Thomas: Just something small. Doesn't have to be, doesn't have to be like a main one, just...

0:01:18 Eli: Forever. Don't stop. Small. Maybe your dick. Yeah.

0:01:23 Tom: Something small. Sure, yeah, it makes sense, right? Yeah, it works, that works. Jesus Christ, are you guys, uh, well, no, because your kids are too young. It is crazy time over here, by the way, because it is, uh, register all of the kids all at once for school time. That's A fucking exciting moment. We've got to register Finn for his second semester at the community College. Donovan has, it's been a year and a half only, but he's actually run out of classes at the community college that he can take. So he's going to be transferring to his university nearby. So we've got to not just register Donovan, we've actually got to transfer him and get his credits transferred over and then register him at the same time that Aislinn has to register for her classes for high school, which wouldn't be that stressful except for she's like taking all honors and AP courses.

0:01:24 Eli: Exactly. Oh yeah, of course. Oh. Yeah.

0:01:38 Thomas: Oh, wow.

0:02:13 Tom: So that's like a whole thing. Like she's mapped out her schedule to where she'll walk out of high school with eight AP courses.

0:02:20 Thomas: Jesus.

0:02:21 Tom: Yeah. As a freshman, she's already banging at one.

0:02:20 Eli: And Her college is going to take one, maybe two of those credits, so that's

0:02:26 Tom: If she gets a four or five on the test, most of the schools out here, I think all the schools out here with a four, five on. The test will take them all. That's good. At least. I don't know if that's the case over there in New Jersey, but

0:02:34 Eli: Really? What's so funny to me because I'm a college advisor at the school that I work at is that a kid can be like, I was a full AP diploma student, I traveled to the fucking Model UN to take my AP World History exam from Mr. World History himself. I received a 97 on the, I corrected one of the incorrect questions on the exam and fucking Magula University will be like, not so sure about that. But you could have taken Chuckle Fuck History 101 at DD Community College slash prison jail. And they're like, fucking roll it on in, baby.

0:03:16 Thomas: Chuckle Fuck History, I love that one. That was one of my

0:03:17 Eli: Credit for our system, I'm 100 real about this, for our system the community college credits just transfer over. It's not even like a, oh, you do a thing and then you enter a code the way we do with AP. People just fucking type in, I took history at community college And then Our university is just like, you're good. Never darken that history doorway again.

0:03:35 Tom: Right

0:03:34 Thomas: Favorite Which is funny because the high school AP classes are so fucking Hard, so it's like the, couldn't be more

0:03:44 Eli: Yeah.

0:03:44 Tom: Are you talking about New Jersey or New York

0:03:47 Eli: I can only speak to my university, which is the only place where I'm an advisor. I'm an adjunct everywhere else that I worked in. They don't make adjunects be advisors.

0:03:55 Tom: I will say like Haley came obviously from New York and there's like the whole system out there to seamlessly transfer credits from the community college system into the university system that does not exist in Illinois. In Illinois, Illinois, it is a fucking hodgepodge, helter-skelter, non-system system like a lot of things here where every college and every university decides what and whether or not they will accept which classes at which community college. So it's a fucking transfer mess. It's an absolute disaster. And when you go to talk to the advisors, they're like, yeah, I got a job advising students, so I don't really have any advice for you.

0:04:34 Tom: And you're like, what is that? Yeah, I can take some classes and maybe it'll transfer over, maybe they won't, I don't know. Register and we'll see. Yeah.

0:04:34 Thomas: Opposite my Advice is you should get this job. It's great. I don't do anything. I I don't know anything or help anyone.

0:04:46 Eli: Yeah,

0:04:45 Tom: It's Been a goddamn train wreck disaster, like it, and I'll just say the names because fuck them at Lewis University, and I want to fucking shame them at Lewis University. The first woman that we spoke to, who's like pretty high up there on their food chain, she gave us a list of classes for Donovan, and then the next person we talked to, who is one level higher because we got frustrated with the other lady for being non-specific, so I moved that up a notch, and she's like, oh yeah, here's a list of class, and some of the classes Donovan took just don't do anything.

They're just like, yeah, that was nothing, you just wasted that was money and time just spent doing nothing. So it's just the, the transfer experience has been a fucking mess, an absolute fucking mess, and I did not expect this because 25 or 30 years ago when I went to school it was super easy. I was just like, I have some classes, and they're like, neat. That satisfies all of our requirements. Welcome. And I was like, cool, that worked. And now it's, it's a fucking train wreck. It's an absolute train wreck

0:05:43 Eli: No, it's a nightmare. I took all the online courses because I didn't want to be that advisor. And so I have discovered the curse of competency. The other side, here's a little peek behind the curtain from the advisor side, which is you have the students who did all the work. And when you can finally type in those codes, oh, these students who have been trying for three years to get their codes transferred, and I can just be like, oh, here, look, I pushed a button and it's done. I, I mean, truly, truly, I've never been anyone's hero more.

But you also get the other side, which is the psychotic student who says a lie so openly that your brain goes, well, you can't be lying, you Must be telling the truth. And so you panic and you're like, oh my god, I'm not serving this kid, let me call, because we have a hotline in our university. We call the hotline and some woman, like, wakes up out of a asleep, like an EMT, and, like, let me see if I can transfer the credits. And the three times that has happened this semester, it's just been a kid straight up having no fucking idea what he's talking

0:06:21 Tom: God.

0:06:44 Tom: I wish we had a hotline.

0:06:44 Eli: About, just being like, no, but I get to take that class for 12 credits. And I'm like, oh okay, let me check. And they're like, no, he doesn't get to do that. And I'm like, hey, they said you don't get to do that. And he's like, dang. And I'm like, what do you mean, fucking dang?

0:06:55 Thomas: Oh, wow.

0:06:57 Tom: I hope we're doing this show when your kids are going to college. I really do, because this is an experience I'm having now where

0:07:05 Eli: I hope you catch on.

0:07:08 Tom: Where, like, what I've learned is, well, I'm so fucking old, I guess, is what I have learned. Because I graduated from college in 2000. It's been 25 fucking years since I've been in college. And it's been 29 years since I started college. First of all, none of my experiences are relevant at all. Like, we didn't even have online.

0:07:12 Thomas: Rough.

0:07:31 Tom: Like, online wasn't even a thing.

0:07:32 Eli: Fire. Yeah, no. Mm.

0:07:32 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:32 Tom: So, and also I've discovered I don't fucking remember anything. All The little, like, minutiae. And Haley went to school much more recently than I did, so she's like, oh, like, you got to tell Finn, for example, to change his major, and I'm like, I didn't have a major when I was in community college, and she looked at me like I was crazy. Like she's like, of course you did. And I'm like, I don' think I did.

0:07:37 Eli: -hmm I think so.

0:07:54 Tom: I don think I d. But then also I don remember, because if it wasn't important, if it was just a box I checked on a form one time in 1996, it's like, I like, I've got this experience, I'm like, I don't know if these things in my own life happened because they happened so long ago. I've effectively lived an entire other life since then. Like, it's just, you Know, it's, it's like, did you fill out that box 30 years ago? I'm like, I don' t, maybe.

0:08:15 Eli: Yeah. Yeah, between how long you've been alive and how much trauma has driven out of Thomas's brain, I would say, like, one out of 11 conversations I'll be like, am I right, fellas? The peanut butter, and you're both like, who are you? Remember

0:08:31 Thomas: Yeah. It's just like nothing going on in our brains. No.

0:08:35 Eli: When you read the Bible

0:08:37 Thomas: No, I don's. I don don't. Was that for Tom or was that for me? Tom, did you read the Bible? Fucking loser. Boring. Gross.

0:08:40 Eli: It was for all of us.

0:08:44 Tom: It's so Bad. Oh lord, no, I would never even interview somebody that read the

0:08:51 Eli: I

0:08:52 Thomas: Gross. It is pretty nuts when someone will be like, oh, just listened through Thomas and the Bible, and be like, that is embarrassing for them, but also for me, because, like, imagine if in any other context, if someone was like, just randomly, forget podcaster, if someone's like, hey, I just listened to a bunch of recordings of you from 15 years ago, wouldn't that be the creepiest, weirdest thing? Be like, like, that's

0:09:15 Eli: Feel bad for when people have listened to the backlog, because I was so full of hope, and so I imagine that they are now comparing in their head this husk of a gentleman, and they're like, hey, I just finished listening to you to the Bible, and you're like

0:09:19 Thomas: Weird. Yeah, yeah.

0:09:30 Tom: Bible. Yeah, Cecil and I will get emails sometimes because we've been doing this for so long, where someone will find the show and then they'll be like, I'm gonna listen to the whole back catalog, and they're like, it's so interesting to listen and, like, watch you guys die a little inside in real time, and You're like, you guys were so stupid and naive. No.

0:09:30 Thomas: Yep.

0:09:44 Thomas: Dropbox.

0:09:45 Eli: Hello, podcast listeners, you want a fucking trip? Go back, back and listen to my favorite episode of Everyone's a Critic, the Godfather episode, which is just a 82, it's on Dropbox.

0:09:52 Tom: Oh God. You can't even find that episode, we're

0:09:58 Eli: You can find it on Dropbox. It is an 82-minute-long fight between four- and five-year-old Cecil and Tom about whether or not Godfather is a good movie. It's the fucking best.

0:10:05 Thomas: Oh man.

0:10:07 Tom: So young, I loved

0:10:12 Thomas: Okay, well, it's obviously a good movie. What are you talking about? Like, why would that even be a fucking anyway, yeah, funny.

0:10:15 Eli: It's a great movie.

0:10:18 Tom: Doing that show because I just don't like movies, so I got to always be the contrarian, like, yeah, it wasn't any good, I didn't enjoy that at

0:10:25 Thomas: Thing is I hate fucking mobster movies, but that is the good movie, you know what I mean? Like, come on, crazy, no.

0:10:30 Eli: Me, that's A good movie, that's a good one. I think it's a great, but gentlemen, do you know the only thing worse than people who don't enjoy Goodfellas?

0:10:37 Thomas: The Godfather. I don't like good films.

0:10:37 Eli: Why Godfather? That's right, why? It's the auto ads. Yes, the auto ads interrupting your podcasting experience, much like time has done to our fragile minds and souls, but you can make it all go away over at patreon.com forward slash Dear Old Dads, where for as little as a dollar you'll get a commercial-free version of every single show, plus bonus episodes, monthly bonus episodes, we do AMAs, behind the scenes stuff, we did a quiz at the very start of the show, we've done a movie review, all sorts of stuff there, but you can only get it at patreon.com forward slash Dear Old Dad's. Rip into it, keeping the tension.

0:11:16 Tom: All, all right.

0:11:19 Thomas: Confusing. Good job.

0:11:25 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:11:27 Tom: So I, I had some thoughts I wanted to share with you guys and see where you guys are at.

0:11:31 Thomas: About the film The Godfather. It insists upon itself.

0:11:33 Eli: Alive, it's

0:11:34 Tom: I bet that movie is so good. Tell you what, I watched it 20 years ago. I should probably put it back in and see if it's any good now.

0:11:40 Thomas: Put it back in.

0:11:41 Tom: But look, it's been... Dipped it in once. I didn't... It was fine.

0:11:46 Thomas: Pop it in the old VCR.

0:11:48 Tom: As I mentioned before, it was registration time. I filled out the FAFSA form, the Federal Student Aid form for Donovan. And it really got me to thinking a lot about how insane it is to be in the position of being a step-parent and being a step-parents fucking insane for like an enormous number of reasons. It's just a bizarre position sometimes to find yourself in structurally. But when you fill out a FAFSA form for a kid, I have to put in all of my income. So I have to upload or give permission for them to go fetch my income tax returns. And as I was doing it, I did. I was like, yeah, of course, no problem. Like, here you go. Here's my income tax information or whatever. And I hit the little fucking fucking authorized button. But then I got to thinking about it because when you're a step parent, you have no rights like legally, unless you adopt your kids, which like in my case, I can't adopt them. So unless you adapt your kids as a step parent, you have No rights to your step kids, like none at all.

0:12:46 Tom: You have no right whatsoever to your step kids. But you have this huge amount of responsibility to those kids, even like financial financial responsibility. So in the case of the FAFSA, I send all of my stuff in, and then if we take out student loans, it will be because, like, they're going to evaluate my income as the stepdad, and I will have, right? It's fucking crazy, right? This is a kid that the law says isn't mine. According to the law, that's not my kid. But the law also says, yeah, but if there's a student loan, like, you're kind on the hook for it too. And whether he qualifies for that loan or not is based on your income as the step-parent, right? It gets even crazier. My step-kids are under my medical insurance. So I insure my step-kids.

So then when I take a kid to the doctor, I'm the financially responsible party because it's my insurance. If you get an insurance, like a doctor's bill, it doesn't go to your minor child, right.

It goes to you because you're the policy holder, which means you have the financial responsibility. So you have this like enormous weight of responsibility, like structural responsibility, right? Like legal, financial responsibility. But like, if Hayley died tomorrow, their dad could say, cool, they're never seeing you again. They live with me now, and I'm moving back to New York now. I don't think that would happen. And the kids, like Donovan is old enough, like, now where he's an adult.

So like he could make decisions and Aislinn is technically 14. So she like could go to court and her voice would be heard. It may not be what happens. So there's like some caveats there, but they're not my caveats. They're not My rights at all, because legally I have literally no rights to these kids. All I have though, is a crazy amount of responsibility with

0:12:46 Thomas: What the fuck?

0:13:25 Thomas: That's nuts.

0:14:37 Eli: Bad

0:14:37 Tom: None of the rights. And I just think that's such an insane position when you're a step parent. And I think I think it's also like kind of indicative also of that tension, that weird tension that exists when you are a stepparent where you have these kind of like competing forces around like kind of what your role is and like how that responsibility works and where that responsibility and like that autonomy lies. Eyes. It's just a strange position to be in where you have to sort of balance out, hey, you know, am I in charge of this? Am I taking your lead on this? Is it like our thing together? Like, what if there's a problem? And it's a strange, strange position. I know you guys have never had step-parents, right? You guys have ever been, you've never had a step-parent or step-parent figure in your lives, right? Yeah.

0:15:26 Eli: Right. And I also imagine that trying to have that negotiation could not be more fraught, to go to your spouse's ex as a family and go, "So I think we can all agree that the parenting is transferred to me here. Do you agree with that?" I hope so, that we can sign some I-quit paperwork. But more importantly, Tom, have you done that that hard work to figure out just how much Haley's ex is asking for in Monster Energy drink cans in order to let you. I assume, I don't know if he's giving you an exchange rate or if he is going to let you open with an offer.

0:15:45 Tom: Right. Yeah.

0:15:58 Tom: You know, it's funny because, like, on an individual basis, I actually don't think that, like, let's say Hayley died tomorrow, this is a terrible conversation, but like, if something happened to Hayley tomorrow, yeah, God, all I know, that answer is bad luck Eli, I, like, I don't know the specifics, but fucking bad luck. Yeah, hers isn't so good either these days.

0:16:16 Eli: How'd she die, Tom? To be fair, it's your bad luck. Shouldn't have come to take your kid to work day. Now there were two sets of demons. Yeah. It's on her.

0:16:30 Tom: Yeah, right. God damn it. I think he would not take the kids away. I think you would. I genuinely think you could recognize, like, okay, in the kids' best interest, they have a bond with me, they live here full time, I've been caretaking them full time now for almost a decade, so I doubt that he would be like, peace, I'm out, you know. And he's built a life here too. But he could, and that's the weird space, right? It's

0:16:53 Eli: Yeah, not only could Could he, the default is that he could. And if you kept them, it's kidnapping, right? It's not, it'S not just like, well, he could apply to the court and he'd have a strong case. He could show up with a U -Haul truck, toss your kids inside like Wile E.

0:17:00 Tom: Like, yes. Right.

0:17:11 Eli: Coyote, and then drive away. And the cops would be like, sounds like the law to me.

0:17:08 Tom: Yeah, right. Well And here's something else that's fucking bonkers, right? Like with my kids, Finn and Amen, after all these years I finally have custody of those kids and they are finally in a position where I think they're in a fucking a thousand percent better environment day to day, right? It's not even, I just, I don't even think it's close at every level. And if tomorrow I died, to your pointy life, tomorrow I lied, Hayley can't continue raising them here They would just, by order of fucking operation, like, at least Amen, Finn can do what he wants because he's 19, so Finn would stay here. But like, by order of operation, Amen would just be like, well, fucking, I guess I, I go live over here again

0:17:24 Thomas: But

0:17:46 Eli: Right? Yeah.

0:17:59 Tom: Now, and that's insane. We just, we just got custody, like we just moved him over here. But like, God forbid anything ever happens to me and I get struck by fucking a lightning bus or whatever is gonna finally take me out one

0:18:12 Eli: Lightning bus. It's pretty heavy on the betting pool at this point, Tom, just so you know. We've, there's a lot of money on lightning, but I just, I want you to know that me and Thomas don't have to podcast for a while if Lightning bus is the one that happens. Yeah. No

0:18:23 Tom: Day. Lightning bus is

0:18:24 Thomas: Not the lightning bus that you just use to wake up. Like a worse one. I guess you're saying we do

0:18:28 Tom: It. Right, yeah, different

0:18:28 Eli: No, no, no, no, malfunctioning shock watch. That's obviously the favorite. Um, strangely, Heath has the most money on that one. He really, um

0:18:31 Tom: I feel Unsurprised. I actually feel unsubprised by that.

0:18:38 Thomas: Need to start a Tom death pool, which thing's going to get them. I don't know. I think it's gonna be something totally out of left field.

0:18:40 Eli: Yes, right. Right. I think it would make this show cheerier too, right? Because it'd be like a, it'd been like a Dear Old Dad slash fantasy football podcast, right? And you know, right, every

0:18:51 Thomas: Finally.

0:18:54 Tom: Yeah, what finally does him in? Oh, somehow his neck electrocuted him. That's interesting. We didn't think that that would have enough

0:19:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:19:03 Eli: Time they hear me in the intro, they're like, oh, is this the week? Is this the weak

0:19:07 Thomas: Whatever finally does it will for sure say you're released.

0:19:11 Eli: You're really genie. You're free.

0:19:11 Thomas: Now you're free. You're free, free time.

0:19:14 Eli: Tom's just mopping in heaven. Don't really know what to do up here. Stupid continual consciousness is a bad concept. Bad concept. I still fall asleep when I try to read up here, and

0:19:24 Thomas: He's like, yeah, he's like fingers crossed. No afterlife fingers crossed, no afterlife fingers crossed. No after all afterlife. Fuck. God damn it.

0:19:30 Tom: Charge, go, go, God, shit, it's not even better, it's

0:19:33 Eli: It's one of the complicated ones, like the Buddha one where there's hot floors. What do you mean everyone stands around me in a circle and gives me soup? This is fucking weird.

0:19:43 Thomas: Wait,

0:19:49 Tom: Just actually sounds kind of nice. What kind of soup is that? Sounds great. Like, yeah.

0:19:50 Eli: That's true. That's the Islamic hell. That's Islamical, is the hot soup.

0:19:54 Tom: Wait, what?

0:19:55 Thomas: What?

0:19:55 Eli: Circle. Yeah, it's in the Korean

0:19:57 Thomas: Hot soup circle.

0:19:58 Tom: You just get hot soup?

0:19:58 Eli: Hot soup cycle, hot soup circuit. It's very hot soup. It's an unimpleasantly, I assume it's too hot, but it is doesn't say. That's my plan if I go to the majority religion's hell Or just saltine it, right? You crunch up the saltines in the bag and then you put the, oh yeah, but then you get burned by the spoon.

0:20:02 Thomas: It's too, too hot. Okay.

0:20:04 Tom: Well, can you blow on it to cool it down, or just have to drink it hot? Okay, because I feel like

0:20:13 Thomas: God

0:20:13 Tom: Yeah, yeah. Well, just keep the spoon in there like a heat sink for a little while, and then it's fine. Yeah, no, you pull the spoon out, let it rest, and then put it back in. It's a heat sink. You just got to move it back and forth. That's true. That's just another waiting. Just I'm just shortening the timeline here. I'm shortening the timeline.

0:20:25 Eli: Well, now you're just waiting and getting, you just waiting, shortening that. Exactly.

0:20:37 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:20:38 Eli: So I mean, I guess my question is sort of like, what safeguards have you put in place for your family around that? Like, is that something you've had to discuss with the kids? Is that something you plan to discuss for the kids? I especially assume, given, you know, the the custody switch between you and your ex, like, that's a conversation that's kind of important to have because the the step -parent thing, right? You can be like, oh, think about how many Imagine Dragon concerts you'll miss, and he'll be like, no, you're right. Like, like there's there's something to that, but like the default of your ex, is that something that your family has had a conversation about

0:21:05 Tom: No, because the other crazy part is like, I'm not, like if I, if I fucking got hit by the lightning bus tomorrow, yeah, bring me the lightning boss.

0:21:18 Thomas: Willing.

0:21:19 Eli: Okay, so now Twitter is saying that you're kind of waiting the odds on lightning bus and they're shutting down the betting exchange, I hope.

0:21:25 Thomas: Yeah. Tom's manipulating the betting market.

0:21:28 Eli: You're happy. Sure, would love to go for a walk on, on the frozen lake. Come on, come on.

0:21:32 Thomas: Get honest. Yeah.

0:21:34 Tom: You know, Haley's not health-wise in a position to raise Amon without my being there. And also, like, my ex, I think, would be very obstructionist to the idea of like building a contingency plan that was reasonable on that. So I don't even think that's a conversation that I, it's not even meaningfully a conversation that, even if Haley were in perfect health, it's a, it's not a conversation I could meaningfully have.

0:21:45 Eli: Sure.

0:21:59 Eli: You had a hard enough time getting a tangency plan, let alone a contingency plan.

0:22:02 Tom: Yeah, right. Yeah, which is part of the weirdness about being a step parent. If you try to secure a reasonable plan or what you think are like, like, hey, I'd like to have some, some rights or I'd like to have something here, whether or not you can formalize that is based entirely on the good graces of somebody that you as a family may not have the same. You may not have a good relationship with, you may not be aligned at all. You might be like on total opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. There might be bad blood there, like there's like a lot of like weirdness, and you're just like, hey, I know I've spent like a decade building this like meaningful relationship with, you know, these children, and I'd sure like to not have that disappear overnight. Can we please? I just, all I have is just your goodwill, that's what I have is your goodwill and good intentions, which you might not have for me. Maybe the other party doesn't have goodwill and good intensions for me, which is fucking nuts.

0:22:51 Eli: Yeah. Yeah, well, and almost definitionally it feels like you're going to predispose people to that situation, right? Because look, there are certainly some divorced couples who just sort of realize, like, ah, we shouldn't be married, but like, let's work this out. And I know a few of those and it's great. We have a one of our like friends of kids' friends' friends is a very, very sweet, very on the same page, divorced couple. Now it did help that they turned gay. I think simultaneously, I

0:23:24 Thomas: That's cheating. That's not fair. Yeah.

0:23:25 Tom: That is just stacking the

0:23:30 Eli: Think, and I'm going to use their current pronouns. So forgive me. Cause this is going to sound like I'm creating a puzzle box. I Think she shot a baby into her and they were like, ah, nah, this isn't for us, but it was too late. Damn it. It was too light.

0:23:41 Thomas: Yeah.

0:23:42 Tom: Deck. To give credit where it's due, I do think that Haley's ex would not begrudge me time, and like, I think that potentially Aislinn would still live here. I think that's a real possibility, but what's so weird is that it's just a possibility and at the same time I'm filling out this form and it's like, let's see if Donovan gets any, you know, fucking student aid, and the government's like, well, you're pretty much his dad so, uh, let's look at your income.

0:23:58 Eli: Right.

0:24:08 Eli: You're his dad.

0:24:07 Thomas: I don't get that part. Like, let's say you, you do that, you got all these loans, and then whatever happens, bio dad takes him, like, are you on the fucking hook for that?

0:24:17 Tom: They're my loans. Yeah.

0:24:19 Eli: Yeah.

0:24:19 Thomas: Just like, oh yeah, well, naturally you wanted to pay for tuition for someone.

0:24:19 Tom: I signed for him. Yeah. Right.

0:24:25 Thomas: So that makes sense.

0:24:25 Tom: It's fucking wild.

0:24:25 Eli: Let me know if you lose a scholarship or something, kiddo.

0:24:28 Thomas: What do you, you should at least get another degree. You know, you should get something. I don't know.

0:24:32 Eli: Yeah. Oh, there's a movie, right? A comedy where a guy's kid dies, but the loans are already paid for, so he pretends to be his

0:24:39 Thomas: So he goes to college.

0:24:40 Tom: Man,

0:24:40 Eli: Son and goes to college.

0:24:42 Tom: And like to the medical stuff, like, because we all know the medical system in this country is so severely broken, right? So every, it's what, oh

0:24:48 Eli: It's always worked out for me. Yeah, it seems weird. Have you tried blaming yourself?

0:24:48 Thomas: It's been fine. Yeah. I think it's, I have no complaints. And

0:24:54 Tom: Yeah, so like you can have, like, we have, there's an agreement, like in our case, but every case is different, so like there's an agreement in our case that like the kid's bio dad will pay a certain percentage of their medical bills, right? But they're still my medical bills, so if they don't go paid, they go to collections and hurt my, you know, like, they're my collections notices, right?

0:25:17 Tom: Like they're my medical bill, so you're sort of like, well, you should do the thing, and like, he's done it, so like, I'm not shitting on him, but it's again, it's that tenuousness, right? Where everything is based on sort of like, well, everybody should just behave in these reasonable ways. And it's, if you don't, guess who eats shit is the step parent.

0:24:56 Eli: Yeah. Yeah,

0:25:33 Thomas: It's so weird. Cause almost never does that happen. You're kind of in the exception. Like nobody's ever reasonable in these situations often. Right. I mean, it's like very contentious.

0:25:42 Eli: Of course. Absolutely.

0:25:43 Tom: I don't know what those percentages are. I, you know, if he didn't pay, for example, my agreement when, when I had non full -time custody is I had to pay 50 % of the medical bills, right? If I didn't do that, then my ex could take me to court and I'd have to pay them. Plus I'd Have to pay fees and penalties and all this stuff, But we should have to go to court and it'd be like a whole fucking thing. A mechanism. That's what. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right, right. Yeah.

0:26:03 Thomas: Yeah, but that's super easy to do. You can just go right into court, Or waltz right in.

0:26:06 Eli: It's great. Yeah, no, he's just doing a thing. Your voice sounds the same after you've done it. Your memory is intact. Act, it's totally fine. This is a chill cash money thing. You remember reading the Bible and on

0:26:16 Thomas: Normal stuff.

0:26:14 Tom: Right? Right. That it's exactly it. Like because like that's the thing that people are like, oh, well, it's in our settlement agreement. It's like, yeah, but your settlement agreement doesn't self -enforce whatever your marital settle agreement says and whatever your custodial arrangements say. It doesn't zelf enforce you. If there's a discrepancy, it has to get adjudicated at the court level. Right. And then that costs everybody thousands of dollars to do.

0:26:43 Eli: Top of that, if it's something that's not monetary, there's very rarely, unless it involves abuse, there's sehr rarely like a consequence for the misbehaving party, right? So like, right, you know, wag their finger at you. But like, I, so a great example of this is we have a listener who I know very well who has custody of her son and her ex is supposed to come do these like visitations and whatever and do these things they plan them and he's a piece of shit so he just doesn't do them, right? He

0:26:53 Tom: Well, they sometimes will shake their finger at you. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

0:27:11 Eli: Fucking, like, fucking Will Smith doing a big monologue at the end of the show, just doesn't show up for him or bails early on stuff, drops the kid off without warning early, all this fucking horrible shit right, and she has taken him to court over this multiple times and pretty much the only thing the court can do is be like, well, we're gonna take away your ability to do that, and he's like, no duh, and they're like, okay, that's fucking it. Like it's fucking bizarre. So much of that court stuff is so bizarre and inhumane, and look, I do empathize, because I think trying to systemize the process of divorce is a losing proposition right, it's like, hey, uh, Craig, we were just looking looking at the law books, how do you think we should handle it when two people stop loving each other? And let me finish, at the state level, how do you think that should be handled at the state level?

0:27:12 Tom: Right, right. Yeah, yes. Yeah

0:27:22 Thomas: Jeez. Yeah. Yeah.

0:28:02 Tom: Well, yeah, like, like without going into the specifics, there was an event that took place where I called my attorney when I didn't have full time custody of the kids. I called my attorney. I'm like, hey, this thing happened. And he is like, look, I could get you in front of a judge tomorrow for an emergency hearing.

0:28:18 Eli: Reggie?

0:28:19 Tom: But what is likely to happen is the judge is going to say, stop doing that. That's it. And then everything is going to be bad times. And that will cost a ton of money. Now, things that are contentious will be more contentious. Right. And I'm like, but this is bad and we should stop. He's like, yep. So that's what I mean by this. Like, your marital settlement agreement doesn't self-reinforce. So somebody just doesn't pay a bill. You've got to look at it and say, "Well, they owe me $300, but it's gonna cost me a thousand dollars to get an attorney to take him to court, and then, like, are we still squeezing blood from stones?"

And so that's why so many people find themselves in a position with, like, "Ah, my fucking X owes me, you know, XYZ money," and, like, it's like, "Yeah, well, because, fucking, you're not a collection agency, you're a person." So there's really not, like, a an easy ability to squeeze that out of people. So with the step-parent thing, it's like, even if I had an arrangement, if that arrangement were violated, I'd have to enforce it myself at my own expense to try to get, like, something done.

And then whether or not it got, you know, reinforced or not is, is up to the fucking whims of the family court on the day that you happen to show up. And again, at the same time, I am the responsible party. I pick Aislinn up from school and take, you know, I sign, sign her out when I take her to school, and I drive her to the orthodontist, and I sign her in, and I pay the orthodox bill, and I talk to the fucking orthodonist about, you know, "Put your goddamn rubber bands in." Like, I'm, I do all of the things with all of those responsibilities, and at the same time, you're like, "But I have literally no

0:28:25 Thomas: Cool. Yeah.

0:28:31 Eli: Right, exactly. Oh, totally, yeah. Mm -hmm. Yep. Mm -mm.

0:29:54 Tom: Rights." And that's a crazy position to be in. It's just an absolutely wild position to be in, and I can't believe that I'm filling out, I fill out this FAFSA form, and they're like, "Yeah, we're gonna look at your income," and it's like, "Why?" And a part of me was like, how fucking dare you consider my, for real, like, how fucking dare you consider my income for kids to say, like, "Yeah, you make too much money, so we're not gonna give your kid a fucking grant or a loan or whatever it is," or you're not gonna qualify for anything needs-based because, like, you make X amount of money. And it's like, "Yeah, I sure do, but you guys have said that's not my kid." So like, if, if you want to fuck me on the money side, can I have some rights that would be

0:29:55 Eli: Mm -hm. Mm -huh.

0:30:14 Thomas: Can

0:30:34 Eli: Mm -hum.

0:30:40 Thomas: You disown your kid for tax purposes or something?

0:30:40 Eli: Yeah.

0:30:42 Tom: Awesome?

0:30:42 Thomas: You know, like, as far as the IRS is concerned, he's a little shit.

0:30:42 Eli: Mm -hu -hu. Mm -ha -ha.

0:30:45 Thomas: I don't know. Nothing to do with them.

0:30:53 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:30:54 Tom: If Hayley and I hadn't gotten married, if we were just cohabitating, it wouldn't be the case, but it's because we got married that, and we filed jointly, and because we filed jointly, our income is essentially smushed together for the purposes of this, and it's like, well, that's some bullshit.

0:31:09 Eli: I believe that's the legal term.

0:31:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:11 Tom: Smush together. I don't know what else to say about it, except for that it's just like being a stepparent already involves so much sort of like conscious decision making and compromising. You're always in this position where you're trying, especially in the beginning when you sort of join a family, you're try to decide what your role is going to be. Fuck, fuck you. Try to navigate like how are you going to build your family, because You're not doing it organically in the same way, so you're doing it in this really intentional way where there's already established relationships and we're not building everything from the ground up. You're already trying to build all of these connections with people that are not necessarily babies brand new and then manage other relationships with these other competing interests with the other parents.

So you're trying to navigate all of that stuff and like, how involved do you want to be? How involved will they let you be? What happens when there's a decision that has to be made and you know the biological parent and the step parent disagree on how something should go forward? Does the biological parent just automatically have more weight in that decision?

0:31:31 Eli: Who the sexiest kid is.

0:31:59 Eli: Of

0:32:24 Tom: There's a lot of complicated stuff that takes place there, and then you throw in there, and it's like, ok, we gotta wrestle with all that, and actually these are not legally your kids, but they're definitely your bills.

0:32:24 Eli: Course.

0:32:34 Eli: Right. And that's been the interesting thing to sort of, uh, you know, peek behind the curtain slightly, I feel like I've used that already on this show, but like one of the really interesting and, I would say, wonderful things to watch over the time that we've known each other, the decade or so that we have known each, is like, I was there when you and Hayley were first dating. I was there when you guys were like just starting to. I got them together in my live show. Yes, that's important. Thank you for pointing that out. It's important.

I'm the reason that they have anything, and I am the source of their love, which is the very center of their worlds. But like, I remember you combining your lives and figuring that out, and like, what a slow and careful and thoughtful process that's been, and what a wonderful process that's ben, like we've even gotten to sort of demarcate a little bit of that here. You're on just on dads where we've talked about like you becoming a bigger and bigger part of your kids' lives and us witnessing these milestones. And none of that is reflected legally. Right.

0:32:59 Thomas: Famously, you got them together at your live show. Uh -huh. Yeah.

0:33:34 Tom: Yes.

0:33:34 Eli: You're still you're still kind of just the boyfriend in Chicago, legally speaking.

0:33:39 Tom: Right, right, it's fucking insane. And I thought, when I was thinking about this too, I thought back to my stepdad. So when I lived with my mom, I had a stepfather, and I had, uh, two stepbrothers and two stepsisters, and when I wasn't first grade, I know I told this story before a long long time ago, but like when I was in first grade, I came home from school one day and my mom had a suitcase for me by the front door. And she said, you're going to live with your dad. You're going to Chicago today and you're going to live with your dad and it was not a great day. It was a very shocking day for me as a, as a first grader. It was a lot.

0:34:14 Eli: Inconvenient. That's what his voice turned that way. By the way, he had a, he had an enormous. He was like, hey, mom, what's going on? She was like, you can go live with your dad. And you were like, oh, OK, if you insist. No.

0:34:27 Thomas: No.

0:34:32 Tom: So, and so that, that That afternoon, I got on an airplane from Tampa, Florida, and I flew into Chicago and I never saw any of my step siblings or my stepfather. I saw my step father one other time, but like I never saw any of myself siblings again. I don't ever know. Like I didn't find out what happened to them until maybe five or six years ago, like how their lives turned out. Not good, by the way.

0:34:55 Eli: Way.

0:34:55 Tom: Well, I know. Shocking, shocking.

0:34:56 Thomas: Weird. Huh.

0:34:57 Eli: With your mom at the wheel, nurture.

0:34:59 Tom: That's the thing is like now we were all set about that whole family didn't exist anymore. So I had this family where I woke up.

0:35:05 Thomas: Oh, she sold it for scraps. She kind of like

0:35:07 Eli: Yeah, that's the monkey's name. Monkey's name is Scraps.

0:35:11 Thomas: Steve Mnookin with

0:35:12 Tom: I should have been more clear. My mom and my stepfather didn't have any kids together. So he had some kids from prior relationships. Yeah. He had four kids from prior marriages or relationships or whatever. I don't really know much about his history, so I don't really know exactly how those connections were, but he had four kids and then my mom had two, my brother and I. So they didn't, didn't have any kids together, but like, I had brothers and sisters, right, that lived in my house, and that I went, I had a dad, my stepdad Gino. Like, I woke up with and I loved him, and I gave him hugs, and I waited for him to come home from work at night and ran downstairs and said, I'm so glad you're home. I gave my hug, and then literally one day I didn't, and I never had them again. I never saw them again, because that's how step works. Like, if the parents get weird, if the adults in that situation get weird, you just overnight don't have any of that family anymore, if

0:35:12 Eli: Yeah. He found, yeah.

0:35:12 Thomas: Sears. Yeah.

0:36:02 Tom: People get shitty. That's fucking crazy.

0:36:06 Eli: Because Here's the thing, right? With very rare exception, the chances that your significant other's ex rules, very low. Right, because if they, if they were a great co-parent and a great partner, they probably wouldn't be your partner's ex, unless you both change genders or something like that, right? Unless there's something that happened. Yeah.

0:36:27 Thomas: Or your current partner is the one who actually sucks real bad.

0:36:30 Eli: Your current partner is the one who saw. I think about that all the time, which is that like there is a significant percentage of my exes that I know for a fact, and I would, and I want to say this very clearly from my heart, should side with. So there's, I just have, you think about, I don't know if that's true of you guys, but for me, like, if my wife ever runs into any of my exes, they're gonna be like, what a piece of shit, and she's gonna be like, yeah, he got him. You're not wrong. That's right, that's why Tom can't see his exes. All right, gentlemen, before we go, I just found out that Albert Einstein was a real person. I always thought he was a theoretical physicist.

0:36:15 Tom: Right yeah Oh

0:37:00 Thomas: We did a whole episode on this. That's when Tom famously can't see his exes. That's what we found then.

0:37:08 Clip: DEAR OLD DAD

0:37:28 Tom: My

0:37:29 Thomas: I'm going to keep in the times you messed it up. So that mess up mess up a bad pun Like 14 times You're like okay now I laugh That's so great

0:37:31 Eli: Jesus fucking Christ. You piece of shit. We hate it.

0:37:45 Eli: How dare you.

0:37:46 Thomas: Tell another one Make it a make up for it Let's do it. Sorry

0:37:49 Eli: No, I fucking savage these. I'm using fucking cards from a board game a friend brought me. Like I'm running out of supplies.

0:37:57 Tom: God

0:38:45 Thomas: It is what it is

0:38:48 Tom: And I'll just say the names because fuck them

0:38:51 Eli: That's the Islamic hell is the hot soup circle.

0:38:54 Thomas: As far as the IRS is concerned he's a little shit

0:38:57 Eli: Sure would love to go for a walk on the frozen lake.