Congratulations on Winning Your Children's Affections for the Day!

In the divorce you lost a lot: your house, your car, two-thirds of your money.  But you kept your kids on the weekends.

At first, this seemed like a boon: your kids, essentially continuations of you as a person, presented you with hope for the future, aspirations for what the world might become after you're gone from it, a topic that occupies your thoughts quite often in these bleak days.  But all of these optimistic notions rested on a single misapprehension: that your children weren't foul little beasts completely devoid of any appreciation for you or your fatherly affections.

It took them less than a month of weekends to wear out most of your patience with their absolute ingratitude and indifference to you as a father and a human being.  After about two months your weekends were terse, spite filled affairs, wherein you would ask your children about their lives away from you, then, as their ambivalence blossomed into ire, they would begin to pepper their uneventful accounts of their lives with asides about the various men their mother was now dating, with an eye towards the physical qualities of each man (race, height, relative handsomeness) as well as their mother's perceived happiness and sexual satisfaction, as measured by the abstract "glow" quality that they'll have stumbled upon early on in their endeavors as being particularly infuriating to you. 

If you were comfortable despising your own children this wouldn't be a problem, but you're one of those strange people who actually loves your children and doesn't want to hate them all the time, so you've been trying to figure out a way to break the cycle for the entire week you had away from them.  The solution came to you in a dream, one where you dwelled at length upon the ancient memory of a breakfast in your house wherein your wife and children, laughing and happy and flush with joy, sat around the table as a family and shared of themselves.  This dream, and the memory it drew upon, is a singular instance in the course of the events of your marriage of things not being tinged by bittersweet regret or repressed rage.  The French Toast Family Breakfast stands, both in your mind and in fact, as a milestone marking the only occasion upon which you and yours have ever acted together as a functional family unit.

So this morning you'll begin cooking as soon as your wife calls to inform you that she's coming over with the kids.  You'll crack some eggs, pre-mix sugar and cinnamon and other accoutrements so that when your children arrive the scent of french toast will waft through the entirety of your apartment.  When they settle in they'll immediately be put off their guard and, as such, their passive aggressive campaign against your self-esteem will be interrupted.  In its absence, your children will default back into their natural pattern of human affection, responding politely to each of your questions about their lives with candor, laughing at your jokes, occasionally punctuating their elation with questions about how long it'll be until the bacon is ready or until a fresh slice of toast is out of the pan.  They'll be your children again, and when French Toast Partial Family Breakfast is finished, they will recall the notion of loving you, at least for a few hours.  The four of you will sit down, bellies full, sink stacked with dirty dishes, to watch Die Hard as a family.  The pattern, the return of love, will last the rest of the day.  After that, things become unclear.

Congratulations on Winning Your Children's Affections for the Day!