Your son is deep in love with a girl in his middle school and he’s been writing poems about her day and night.
Your wife moved out of the house last month and you don’t know what to say to get her back. You need your wife, but more importantly, your son needs his mom. He needs her way more than he needs some middle school girlfriend. The solution is simple.
Steal your son’s poems.
Change the name. The girl he likes is Sarah. Change all instances of “Sarah” to “Lauren” (your wife’s name).
Update all the references so they’re age-appropriate. Where he compares Sarah to Mila Kunis, you should compare Lauren to Cameron Diaz. And where he says being with Sarah makes perfect sense, like when one finally figures out the right sequence of moves to complete a level in Portal 2, you should say being with Lauren is like solving a Rubiks Cube or whatever bullshit you do to amuse yourself.
Cut out all the parts where he describes what he’d like to do with Sarah sexually. Your son doesn’t quite understand how sex works yet and you need to have a talk with him. He thinks the crook of the elbow is involved.
Finally, replace his references to “The Notebook” with references to “An Officer And A Gentleman.”
Mail the poem off to your wife at her mother’s. In a few weeks, you’ll receive divorce papers that include, among the many reasons for divorce, you having violated her online privacy. You have no idea what that could mean.
You’ll have to go into your son’s room and tell him about the divorce.
“I tried to get her back,” tell him. “I tried so hard, in fact, that I even enlisted your help, without you knowing.”
Explain about the stolen poems. Tell him you understand if he hates you, but you were doing it for him. For the both of you, but for him especially. He’s just better at communicating his feelings than you are.
“Actually Dad,” he’ll say. “I stole those poems from Mom.”
After she moved out, your son wanted answers, so he hacked into her email (her password is his name so it was easy).
“She was writing all these poems to some guy named Evan. They seemed to be pretty good, so I stole them and changed the references to make it sound more like they were from me to this girl Sarah.”
That’s why the poems didn’t win her back. Your wife thinks you hacked into her email and stole her poems, then rewrote them and sent them back to her.
“So I guess I’m the reason you and Mom are divorcing,” your son will say. “If I had stolen poems from someone else, they might have worked on Mom when you stole them from me.”
Tousle your son’s hair. “Don’t be ridiculous,” tell him. “The reason those poems didn’t work is because your Mom’s a lousy poet.”
You and your son will laugh together. You’ll laugh at your mother. Then you’ll read her poems out loud to each other in a high pitched dumb person’s voice. You’ve never felt closer.
Steal Your Son’s Poems Day!
