I think that it says a lot about the nature of men and women that when they split up my mom made herself as unfuckable as possible, while Jim caught Saturday night fever.

At least their breakup was quick. There were no assets, so Dad took his ass out of the house and set it at my grandparents’. Yes. When my parents split up, my dad had nowhere to crash and ended up at my mom’s parents’ place. What a pathetic cherry on that dysfunctional sundae.

I’ve got a way to make divorce more palatable. This year I had back-to-back live podcasts in Chicago at a cool venue called Park West. In our Q-and-A segment at the top of each show, we had marriage proposals. That got me thinking about the Kiss Cam that they have at Lakers games at the Staples Center and other big venues. It’s mildly amusing to see a couple give each other a smooch on the Jumbotron. But how about this for a plan? Instead of the tired old Kiss Cam, where we get to see you give your wife of twenty-seven years a forced and tepid peck, let’s create the Divorce Cam. How much more compelling would that be? The camera zooms in on a couple just as one of them drops the D bomb. Obviously, one party will have had to arrange this in advance with the ballpark. Unfortunately, the other half of the couple will be taken completely by surprise. Then the cam would pan over to the kids who are crying and confused, while the slimy divorce attorney stands behind them with papers and pen. Statistically, half the people in the stadium are going to get divorced anyway; why not use it to provide a little between-innings entertainment? I’d never miss a Dodgers home game if they did this. I bet in the long run, the Divorce Cam would help keep a few marriages intact. It would keep a lot of guys on the straight and narrow because if the wife pops out with, “Hey, the Giants are in town, you want to go to the game?” hubby would be Johnny on the spot with, “Yeah, sure, but not until after I’m done giving you a foot rub and buying you flowers, sweetie.”

As far as life lessons my parents laid out the secret to success: Do the exact opposite of what they did. Like my notoriously bad luck betting on the Super Bowl, where my friends find out who I am going for and bet on the other team, when it comes to fathering decisions I think about whatever my dad would do and go with the opposite. You know those What Would Jesus Do bracelets? WWJD? I have a WWJD bracelet, too, but for me it means What Wouldn’t Jim Do? So here are a few of my parenting techniques, thanks to watching the failure of my own mom and dad:

1. DON’T BE CHEAP WITH YOURSELF

I’ve thoroughly chronicled my family’s cheapness over the years: Saturdays spent dumpster diving, decorating a potted rubber plant for Christmas instead of a real tree, having a rolling portable dishwasher. But there’s one thing I’ve never written about that I think is completely symbolic of my family’s cheapness, and it is our relationship to Tupperware.

Let me explain. I’m not saying avoid storage containers in general. I hate waste, so I want you to be able to store leftovers. What I’m talking about is hanging on to the container, ironically, past its expiration date.

This may not resonate with the younger folk reading this. It seems like Tupperware had the market cornered from 1959 until about two years ago. During this period, it was as if no one else could figure out how to extrude plastic and make a bowl-and-lid combo out of it. Now there are hundreds of brands of disposable containers you buy at the grocery store, use once and leave behind at the party if the guacamole isn’t completely eaten. Before this, there were these things called Tupperware parties. Housewives would gather and one of the ladies who had hooked up with the Tupperware Corporation because she was bored now that the kids were off at college would sell them containers. You couldn’t get these precious gems at a store. You had to know someone who knows someone and gather under the cloak of darkness.

It’s not just Tupperware having a monopoly on snap-lid containers that boggles my mind. I’m still trying to figure out why, for eighty years, there was one and only one blimp. Above every stadium or sporting event since the 1930s has flown the Goodyear blimp. That’s all there was. But it seems like somewhere around 2004 we got inundated with new blimps. Now there’s the Met Life blimp, the Budweiser blimp, the Fujitsu blimp…

Blimp technology hasn’t changed that much. It’s not like Goodyear had a patent on dirigible technology. Why did it take nearly a century for someone to think, “Hey, you know that blimp that’s getting all the camera time? We should get one, too.” Maybe the Hindenburg got the competitors out of the market. The Goodyear higher-ups must have been thrilled. “If they just keep running this footage every year, we’ll be all set.”

It also occurs to me that a blimp is a weird thing to represent a high-performance tire. Blimps move slower than a donkey and use no tires. If everyone drove a blimp, Goodyear would be out of business. Why’d they go with that? This would be like if Jenny Craig’s mascot was a manatee.

The point is whether its blimps or Tupperware, I don’t know how they fended off the competition for that long. On January first, every year, Bob Tupperware and Roger Goodyear must have gotten up and thought, “I pulled it off. Another year and no one caught on.”

The current cornucopia of containers was not the case when I was a kid, and thus provided ample opportunity for the cheapness of my family to come shining through. My grandmother had one piece of Tupperware, which looked like it had been through three tours in Vietnam. It was so stained, cloudy and scarred that light wouldn’t pass through it. Yet it was treated like the Holy Grail. This was a big-ticket item to the Carollas. It was considered a durable good in our household — on par with an automobile or a washing machine.

This grizzled container was probably as old as me when we reached peak cheapness. I was around twenty-five, and was a struggling starving-artist — bachelor barely staying afloat doing construction. I would go over to my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner, when my Hungarian step-grandfather would make a giant kettle of goulash. There’d always be plenty left over and I’d get to take some home. On more than one occasion, he would be ladling the stew into the solitary piece of Tupperware in my grandmother’s house and I would hear, from my seat in the other room, her come into the kitchen and hit him with some stern words. “What are you doing? No! Give him the mayonnaise jar.”

My grandmother felt I could not be trusted with the sacred Tupperware. She acted as though it had come over on the Mayflower and been passed down generation to generation. I lived three blocks from them, was their flesh and blood and had no history of theft and yet my grandmother forced my grandfather to take the goulash out of the Tupperware and put it into the Best Foods mayonnaise jar with the rusty, crusty metal lid.

I don’t know what she thought would happen. Did she imagine that as soon as the Tupperware and I got out of the house I’d dive into my mini-pickup truck and head to Mexico to start a new life? I was broke as shit. I was definitely going to come back the next Sunday to refill said Tupperware with more goulash.

This is just one of a million examples of the poverty mentality that permeated my family. I’ve declared that I will never force my kids to endure these feelings. I suggest that you do the same. Because the real message you send when you act like a cheap bastard is not “take care of your stuff.” The message is “This item cost me over a dollar and it is not disposable. Our relationship, however, is.”