Imagine the following scenario:
A father and his five-year-old daughter head out to a basketball court at the local playground. He carries his regulation ball on his hip. She rolls her kid-sized version in front of her, occasionally kicking it to keep it moving. When they reach the court, the father shoots a couple of shots while his daughter proceeds to dribble her ball around the court with two hands. After a few minutes, the daughter says,
“Look Daddy.”
When he looks her direction she begins awkwardly batting at her ball with just her right hand, managing to dribble it four times before it gets away from her. After corralling the ball, she looks up proudly at her father. He smiles quietly back at her. Then he leans forward slightly and dribbles his own ball effortlessly back and forth between his legs.
“Neat,” says the little girl.
A few minutes later, the little girl runs over to the basket and stands directly underneath the net. Imitating the players she has seen playing on television, she starts jumping up towards the hoop, stretching her arms high above her head.
“Look Daddy, I can almost touch it,” she says.
Her father with the same bemused smile as before walks over to where she is standing. Then taking a large hop from just behind her gives the net a hard swat.
“Whoa,” says the little girl with a touch of awe.
Another few minutes pass, and now the little girl is standing at the free throw line. She bounces the ball a couple of times and takes a long look at the rim. Then with a hand on each side of the ball, she lowers it slowly down between her knees and sweeps it up into the air. Somehow the ball makes it up on top of the rim where it bounces twice and slips down through the mesh of the net.
“Yes!” shouts the little girl. “Look Daddy, I made one.”
Once again the father flashes that smile. Then he walks over to the top of the key, bounces his ball a couple of times, and nonchalantly puts up a jumpshot. The ball travels a perfect arc and drops down through the net without touching the rim.
“Wow, I wish I could do that,” says the little girl
*****
Now, what do you think about this father? He seems like a bit of an asshole, doesn’t he? I mean, every time his daughter shows him something, he proceeds to do the same thing only higher, farther, or with more complexity. While he doesn’t go about this in a taunting way, these actions serve no real purpose but to diminish the achievements that his daughter has so proudly shown him. It’s not very supportive nor a particularly good example for how to build healthy relationships.
So, why is it that so many people love a children's book in which a parent is celebrated for acting in exactly the same way as our imaginary father on the basketball court?
The book I’m referring to is Sam McBratney’s Guess How Much I Love You. In it, two rabbits – an adult and a child – engage in a game of one-upmanship in their quest to say how much they love each other. The game begins with the little rabbit telling the big rabbit “Guess how much I love you.” The little rabbit then stretches his arms out wide and says “This much.” The big rabbit smiles, and, doing the same thing with his arms, says “Well I love you this much.” They then proceed in back and forth fashion through raised arms, extended legs, jumps, etc. until the little rabbit begins to fall asleep. At this point, the little rabbit presents his final claim: “I love you all the way up to the moon.” The big rabbit ultimately concludes the book by replying: “I love you all the way up to the moon – and back.”
According to the publisher this book has sold over 15 million copies and is published in 37 languages. The children's book review publication Booklist gave it a starred review and said about the book, “There’s not a wrong note in this tender tale.” Internet reviewers on Google love it (see these reviews)
Am I the only one who thinks the adult rabbit, like the father in the scenario I laid out at the beginning of this post, is a bit of an asshole? Aren’t the adult rabbit’s constant moves to up the ante on the little rabbit evidence of an ego that’s out of whack? Even when channeled through professions of love, this kind of behavior doesn’t feel particularly tender to me. In fact, it seems to me that the adult rabbit’s answer to the question of how much love it has for the little rabbit should be, “Not enough to restrain myself from besting your every move.”
Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens in children's books all the time. (The young ape who throws a temper tantrum and gets what he wants in Jez Alborough’s Yes and the often blatantly antagonizing antics of Ian Falconer’s Olivia the pig are just two more examples.) The supposition of cuteness or silliness comes to excuse behavior in characters that we would find annoying, irritating, or downright intolerable in our own children or others with whom we live.
As a parent, I work very hard to model the behaviors that I want my children to emulate. This makes it incredibly frustrating to start reading a book with them and find that the very actions I am teaching them not to do are being celebrated as funny, amusing, or loving in the words and pictures of the book in my hand. It makes me wonder how many of these authors have children of their own.
*****
This is the point in the post where the polemicist, having defined his target and explained the reasons for his outrage, makes some call to action – a boycott, a letter campaign, a new series of children's books. Unfortunately, I can’t do that. You see, I still have a copy of Guess How Much I Love You on our bookshelf. My mother gave it to me while I was in college and as such I have some sentimental attachment to it. In addition, I have come to find some value in having it around. As I sit and read through it with Polly and Pip, I get to engage them in a discussion about a complex social interaction and the types of reactions it generates. I get the opportunity to talk about the adult rabbit’s constant one-upmanship and why someone might find this annoying or disagreeable. I get to present Pip and Polly with alternative choices that both the adult rabbit and the little rabbit could have made to get the same point across. I get to add some texture and depth to the examples I try to present them every day.
As such, while I would never be inclined to give “Guess How Much I Love You” as a gift to anyone and I frequently wonder what kids learn as they read it, I am glad to have it on my bookshelf. Sometimes it takes seeing some of the wrong ways of doing something to make the right ways make sense.
****************************************************************
Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?
Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/.
There's a new post every Thursday.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
A Playdate with Ernest Hemingway
In the morning Jack arrived for the playdate with his three kids. Jack made a lot of money, but this didn’t impress me. You shouldn't think it impressed him, either, but his job got him lots of free booze and so he was happy about that. He gave some to me as he came in the door with his boys. It was in a crisp, new carton like the kind I usually saw behind locked glass cases. “Our best stuff,” he said as I took off my kitchen apron. He pointed out some spelling errors in the warning label on the back of the bottle. “According to the Sugeon General, this beverage may be harmfil to pregant women.” A common problem when you’re French and have to write copy for an American liquor distributor, I thought.
Jack sold liquor to support his family. Americans think this is uncouth and unseemly. That is because Americans don’t know how to drink like the Europeans. Jack bought all his booze in France where they know how to drink like civilized people, on café terraces in the spring on Boulevard des Capucines next to old men in berets and fascist litterateurs and expat Princeton boxing champions who don’t want you to know they are Jewish. The French learned how to make wine from monks. The monks made this wine and it was all they had to cope with the fall of the Roman Empire. It was also good for coping with playdates. Later, the European Union was built by a cognac salesman. That was something I planned to tell my kid, as soon as he got old enough to ask me what it was that I drank for breakfast every morning.
Jack and I punched each other in the face a few times the way we had on the Italian front and then turned the kids loose. Junior was shy that morning. He was unsure what to do because most of his friends were girls. They were all quirky little blondes and all very cute, and they liked him because he didn’t smash things or run around like a blinded toro the way the other boys did. That’s the way he was. The little girls let him play with their hair and let him pull their hoodies down over their eyes and taught him how to scream with a nerve-cracking high pitch like they did, and I hated that. But this morning he stood back and held my leg. This is why I wanted to teach him how to box, but he was still too young for the punching bags. Jack’s kids spread out like a special ops force equipped with toy-detecting night goggles. They found every toy box Junior had and opened them and spread the toys in bits and pieces all over the area rug so that soon they were all mixed together and I would have a tough time not sucking them all up into the vacuum cleaner later that afternoon. Junior looked up at me and said, “Daddy, this is boring.”
“Get back in there, kid,” I said. Junior was good with girls but if you gave him half an hour he could fit in with the boys too. After a while, when Jack and his three boys were gone and I was straightening the art on the walls and pulling the colored pencils from the ceiling, he would tell me he really liked having lots of cousins, which is how he said that liked playing with boys. Most of his cousins were boys, which is why he said it that way.
It got quiet after a little while and I went upstairs to see what was going on. Junior was on his parents’ bed with all the boys, and they were sitting quietly flipping the pages of books or stacking cards or pushing a small ball up the front of a pillow and waiting for it to roll back and hit them in the face and make them laugh. They had made some art and had glued little wooden colored sticks to the pages and Scotch Taped them to the door, which was closed. This meant that Junior’s parents’ bedroom was now the 'Boys Club' and you could only enter after knocking.
“Knock knock,” I said.
“Who’s there?” Junior asked from behind the door.
“Cargo,” I answered.
“Cargo who?” Junior asked again.
“Car go honk honk, “ I answered again. They tried to muffle their laughter but I could hear them. I knew I had said the right code, and if you didn't open the door after someone gave you the right code, things could get really bad.
Then the door opened, the way it does when you know the password to get into one of the speakeasies on Clark street. Little Solomon was in the middle of the bed holding the ball he had been rolling up the pillow. His forehead was red and I could tell that this was where the rubber ball had hit him when it rolled down from the pillow. But the rest of face was flushed too. He gurgled something I didn’t quite make out so I asked him to repeat it. He gurgled again more clearly and then I understood. I shouted down the staircase to Jack.
“Hey Jack, Solomon says he needs to go potty!”
Jack bounded up the stairs three at a time the way he used to when we had dodged the fascist bombs in the mountains of Andalusia. He took Solomon into the adjoining bathroom and sat him down on Junior's plastic potty. He lifted little Solomon like a bag of flour with one strong arm and pulled Solomon's shorts off with the other, lowering him slowly onto the plastic throne to make sure the boy was positioned properly. It was a warm spring day but I hadn't opened the windows yet and so soon Jack started to sweat through his plaid shirt. Little Solomon did his job and a few seconds later the whole third floor smelled like a stockyard.
Something about the smell made me want to run away the way I always wanted to run away from the stockyards but I knew this was weak so I stayed with Jack. The smells made you want to escape but you had to stay put otherwise you would never be able to look anyone in the face again. I remembered the times fishing with Jack in the Upper Peninsula, when Jack had pulled up a big northern and had it thrashing on the line out in the middle of the lake and I'd reach into the back of the canoe for the net, the two of us working in silent understanding without saying a word and doing what needed to be done in perfect balance so the boat wouldn't swamp. I handed Jack the wipies.
"Do you just throw the dirty ones into the trash can?"
"Yeah, that's fine," I said.
"The bowl is kind of a mess. I wiped it up with the wipies. Do you do anything else to clean it?" he asked.
"Don't worry, I just swirl a few drops of bleach with some warm water and use a brush to clean the bowl. You can just wash Solomon's hands and I'll take care of the bowl."
"Thanks," said Jack.
"No problem," I said.
We went downstairs when we were done with little Solomon. The boys were ready to go outside now so we found some soccer balls and put all the boys into their windbreakers. For the first time that year the air blew warm and even though the grass was still brown and the trees were still bare you could already see the first buds and knew that soon spring would come. We came to the square in the high sun of mid morning and I rolled the soccer balls down onto the grass. I watched the boys run away from me, kicking up the dust leftover from last winter, chasing after the soccer balls like a herd of bounding antelope racing trains across Nebraska.
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Immanuel Kant on the Golden Gate Man-Ban, or, a Philosopher's View
Immanuel Kant would have had no reason to apply for membership with the Golden Gate Mothers Group, being a "small, frail bachelor" without children.
He certainly would not have been interested in strollercising, although his form-fitting 18th century breeches might have gotten him through a few spin classes before falling apart. He most certainly would not have made a pass or leered at any of the moms, being far too North German Protestant for that sort of behavior, but also believing as he did that sex should be confined to marriage and engaged in strictly for the purposes of reproduction. And he had some very fine and feminist things to say about the evils of objectifying the female body.
Yet even if these credentials were enough to get him into the Golden Gate Mothers Group, the solitary and humorless Immanuel Kant would probably have freaked out enough moms to get the group's man-ban reinstated.
But these are all hypotheticals. The point is that Kant would have had no personal interest in joining this group, though he would disapproved of its ban on men, and this on purely ethical grounds. That is basically my position, too.
What are these purely ethical grounds? Fortunately, I don't have to lay them out, because another dad blogger (Backpacking Dad) with far greater knowledge of the philosophical tradition already has. It's worth a read for its concision and comprehensiveness.
The idea is basically this: looked at from any of three contending frameworks for ethical evaluation -- the Kantian, the Utilitarian, and the classical (Aristotelian) framework of moral virtue -- the GGMG man-ban does not really pass the test. BD writes:
Who cares? Well, Backpacking Dad, being a philosopher, and apparently one versed in ethical philosophy in particular, cares about whether the rules we live by can be rationally grounded. Since most of the rules we live by require consensus in order to be adopted, it's not a bad idea to be able to make arguments for them based on an explicit system of reasoning. That's what he tries to do.
Backpacking Dad's first critique is from the Kantian perspective, or an analysis based on the application of Kant's philosophical version of the Biblical 'Golden Rule,' what Kant called the categorical imperative. Can one apply this rule in all cases in a purely disinterested way? Not really, because to do so would mean that, if it were moral for every group "promoting the comfort and security of new mothers [to exclude] men from their groups," no men could form such groups, because they would have to exclude themselves.
(Another way of testing the ban from a Kantian perspective would be to ask, "would I will it that all groups, in order to promote the safety and security of their members, be able to exclude at least one type of individual of their choosing?" I'd like to hear BD's appraisal of this formulation, which I think is the defense most likely to be employed by the GGMG. It seems that it would run into all sorts of headaches in terms of how, if universally applied, it would be possible to guarantee that every "type" is guaranteed its own group and access to the same numbers of groups, when it may be likely that some groups find themselves the objects of multiple exclusions.)
BD walks through two more evaluations, one from a utilitarian and another from a classical moral virtue perspective, more or less failing it on both counts. I'll skip the moral virtue evaluation, since I don't think it will make sense to most people, my own Kantian self included. From the utilitarian, or 'greatest good for the greatest number' perspective, the man-ban runs into quantitative difficulty in that the overall good it is intended to advance -- the security and comfort of women -- is likely countervailed by the harm it does to men who are rejected, children who are denied enrichment, women who would like to join but who disapprove of the ban, and the skewing of social capital and resources away from these and other individuals.
Not being of Utilitarian persuasion, I think this sort of cost-benefit analysis is itself morally troubling, although this is how most public policy actually gets developed. But granting that within the Utilitarian framework, a case could be made that past injustice and discrimination against women could be cited to justify the present exclusion of men, BD argues that the man ban would still be problematic because it is such a blunt instrument:
What's this? So here we have what strikes me as the core of a reasonable and constructive proposal that forces the GGMG to answer for the harms of its exclusionary policy, while offering a way out through a series of more refined admissions tests. Instead of declaring men to be just beastly and banned from the outset, the GGMG is asked to put out some rules and a process that define what is acceptable behavior and what will get people (men) kicked out if these rules are violated.
That, it seems to me, is far more seemly than a justification for exclusion that is made on the grounds of "your children will be excluded because we feel uncomfortable bitching about our husbands not helping with childcare when you are next to us helping out with childcare."
Then, at least, organizations like the GGMG may benefit from the advantages of enrolling non-beastly dads and their children, which is one of the best ways to ensure that the friends and children of non-beastly dads are themselves even less beastly going forward into the next generation.
He certainly would not have been interested in strollercising, although his form-fitting 18th century breeches might have gotten him through a few spin classes before falling apart. He most certainly would not have made a pass or leered at any of the moms, being far too North German Protestant for that sort of behavior, but also believing as he did that sex should be confined to marriage and engaged in strictly for the purposes of reproduction. And he had some very fine and feminist things to say about the evils of objectifying the female body.
Yet even if these credentials were enough to get him into the Golden Gate Mothers Group, the solitary and humorless Immanuel Kant would probably have freaked out enough moms to get the group's man-ban reinstated.
But these are all hypotheticals. The point is that Kant would have had no personal interest in joining this group, though he would disapproved of its ban on men, and this on purely ethical grounds. That is basically my position, too.
What are these purely ethical grounds? Fortunately, I don't have to lay them out, because another dad blogger (Backpacking Dad) with far greater knowledge of the philosophical tradition already has. It's worth a read for its concision and comprehensiveness.
The idea is basically this: looked at from any of three contending frameworks for ethical evaluation -- the Kantian, the Utilitarian, and the classical (Aristotelian) framework of moral virtue -- the GGMG man-ban does not really pass the test. BD writes:
I think the policy banning men from joining the Golden Gate Mothers Group is philosophically weak. It doesn’t seem defensible on any of the classic moral grounds, and it would be very difficult for someone to adopt a consistent moral perspective on the world that included this ban as a specific element.
Who cares? Well, Backpacking Dad, being a philosopher, and apparently one versed in ethical philosophy in particular, cares about whether the rules we live by can be rationally grounded. Since most of the rules we live by require consensus in order to be adopted, it's not a bad idea to be able to make arguments for them based on an explicit system of reasoning. That's what he tries to do.
Backpacking Dad's first critique is from the Kantian perspective, or an analysis based on the application of Kant's philosophical version of the Biblical 'Golden Rule,' what Kant called the categorical imperative. Can one apply this rule in all cases in a purely disinterested way? Not really, because to do so would mean that, if it were moral for every group "promoting the comfort and security of new mothers [to exclude] men from their groups," no men could form such groups, because they would have to exclude themselves.
(Another way of testing the ban from a Kantian perspective would be to ask, "would I will it that all groups, in order to promote the safety and security of their members, be able to exclude at least one type of individual of their choosing?" I'd like to hear BD's appraisal of this formulation, which I think is the defense most likely to be employed by the GGMG. It seems that it would run into all sorts of headaches in terms of how, if universally applied, it would be possible to guarantee that every "type" is guaranteed its own group and access to the same numbers of groups, when it may be likely that some groups find themselves the objects of multiple exclusions.)
BD walks through two more evaluations, one from a utilitarian and another from a classical moral virtue perspective, more or less failing it on both counts. I'll skip the moral virtue evaluation, since I don't think it will make sense to most people, my own Kantian self included. From the utilitarian, or 'greatest good for the greatest number' perspective, the man-ban runs into quantitative difficulty in that the overall good it is intended to advance -- the security and comfort of women -- is likely countervailed by the harm it does to men who are rejected, children who are denied enrichment, women who would like to join but who disapprove of the ban, and the skewing of social capital and resources away from these and other individuals.
Not being of Utilitarian persuasion, I think this sort of cost-benefit analysis is itself morally troubling, although this is how most public policy actually gets developed. But granting that within the Utilitarian framework, a case could be made that past injustice and discrimination against women could be cited to justify the present exclusion of men, BD argues that the man ban would still be problematic because it is such a blunt instrument:
[W]hat is the rule that is really being forwarded by this specific ban? Is it really to reduce male oppression? Then why not let unoppressing males in? Is it because it’s too hard to tell who they are? Why not have a probationary period? The blanket ban, at the least, seems like a nuclear solution to what might be a severe problem, but not one that cannot be addressed through less discriminatory policies.
What's this? So here we have what strikes me as the core of a reasonable and constructive proposal that forces the GGMG to answer for the harms of its exclusionary policy, while offering a way out through a series of more refined admissions tests. Instead of declaring men to be just beastly and banned from the outset, the GGMG is asked to put out some rules and a process that define what is acceptable behavior and what will get people (men) kicked out if these rules are violated.
That, it seems to me, is far more seemly than a justification for exclusion that is made on the grounds of "your children will be excluded because we feel uncomfortable bitching about our husbands not helping with childcare when you are next to us helping out with childcare."
Then, at least, organizations like the GGMG may benefit from the advantages of enrolling non-beastly dads and their children, which is one of the best ways to ensure that the friends and children of non-beastly dads are themselves even less beastly going forward into the next generation.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Parent with a Penis? Can't Join the Golden Gate Mothers Group
I saw this in the New York Times today, and it struck me as, er, outrageous. And worthy of note, especially since Jeremy investigated just this kind of discrimination not too long ago. Here we have a mothers group that is 4,000 members strong, collects more than $300,000 in revenue annually, and formally discriminates against men. Surely the fine readers at Daddy Dialectic will have something to say about this organization -- competing for parenting space, as it does, in the very heartland of dialectical daddyhood.
The story profiles a married gay father of one. But it's not this fellow's sexual orientation that impedes his best efforts at parenting. It's the plain fact that he's a man.
I simply don't buy the premise that first-time mothers have such special needs that they need an organization that makes it a point to keep men -- the fathers of their children -- out. For the first five years of their childrens' lives. In fact, I think it's weird. Resonant of the convent in Cyrano de Bergerac. How many kids will grow up thinking it's normal for their moms to have all this stuff going on for them, without their fathers around? Admittedly there are a fair number of male barbarians in circulation, but I don't think this is the sort of affinity group they would be pressing to crash en masse.
But even if they were, it would probably be good for them. And everybody else, even the moms. Unless living in a heterosexual arrangement as a parent is something analogous to a the schizoid world of a certain Victorian anthropologist, famously amenable to his crew of south sea islanders by day, and disparaging of them in his diary by night. In fact, I'd think more male-female mixture is exactly what we need. Because everything about this group -- and there are smaller versions of it all over the place -- reinforces the idea that 'men just don't get it', that 'men are scary' or that they somehow mess up the vibe of parenting, especially in its early stages. When in reality, all it's really based on is that -- men usually just aren't around.
If men really do cramp your style, Golden Gate Mothers Group, if we all really still live in a world of separate spheres, then I suppose all that earlier bother about letting women into the evening club, or letting Tiger Woods onto the golf course, or gay couples into the courthouse, was really just a waste of time.
The story profiles a married gay father of one. But it's not this fellow's sexual orientation that impedes his best efforts at parenting. It's the plain fact that he's a man.
This young banker, who didn’t want his name used because his employer has a strict no-news-media policy, would hardly seem the sketchy type that a well-meaning private club would bar.
But he and his husband are men. As such, they and their little boy are personae non gratae at the Golden Gate Mothers Group, which since its founding in 1996 has grown to an organization of 4,000. Members must live in San Francisco, have children younger than kindergarten age and be mothers — of the strict-constructionist female variety.
The group, which takes in revenue north of $300,000 annually, mostly from dues, is by far the dominant parenting organization in town. (The latest census data show only about 40,000 young children in the city.) G.G.M.G. offers three core benefits to members. It acts as an information exchange, where pediatrician recommendations, hiring of nannies and admission tips to private preschools are particularly popular topics. It negotiates discounts for members at local retailers and service providers.
So shortly after taking home his new son in February, the banker sought to join the group. “Everyone who knows about it talks about how great it is,” he said in an interview.
He was rebuffed. An e-mail signed by the G.G.M.G. Membership Committee informed him that “to be a member, you must be a woman.”What's most sad about this, is that this man's son -- not the most disadvantaged little boy, it is true -- nonetheless is the one who will miss out on the the benefits of getting to drool and slobber around thousands of other infants and toddlers. His primary caretaker is a guy, so he won't get to hang with these kids. Which demonstrates that this organization is not about kids, it's about their mothers. Exclusively. And that is a problem.
I simply don't buy the premise that first-time mothers have such special needs that they need an organization that makes it a point to keep men -- the fathers of their children -- out. For the first five years of their childrens' lives. In fact, I think it's weird. Resonant of the convent in Cyrano de Bergerac. How many kids will grow up thinking it's normal for their moms to have all this stuff going on for them, without their fathers around? Admittedly there are a fair number of male barbarians in circulation, but I don't think this is the sort of affinity group they would be pressing to crash en masse.
But even if they were, it would probably be good for them. And everybody else, even the moms. Unless living in a heterosexual arrangement as a parent is something analogous to a the schizoid world of a certain Victorian anthropologist, famously amenable to his crew of south sea islanders by day, and disparaging of them in his diary by night. In fact, I'd think more male-female mixture is exactly what we need. Because everything about this group -- and there are smaller versions of it all over the place -- reinforces the idea that 'men just don't get it', that 'men are scary' or that they somehow mess up the vibe of parenting, especially in its early stages. When in reality, all it's really based on is that -- men usually just aren't around.
If men really do cramp your style, Golden Gate Mothers Group, if we all really still live in a world of separate spheres, then I suppose all that earlier bother about letting women into the evening club, or letting Tiger Woods onto the golf course, or gay couples into the courthouse, was really just a waste of time.
Friday, April 01, 2011
I'm Bored
This post is about boredom. Because of the subject matter, it may also be boring to read, so if that's a problem for you, go back to Facebook or the activities of your otherwise exciting life. For those fellow bored parents who remain, let me state the problem: I'm bored.
Boredom is a taboo topic of modern parenting. I'm bored right now, and I've been seriously bored quite a lot lately. This seems like the kind of thing which, if said too loudly among prospective parents, might lower the rate of human reproduction and adversely affect the future of the species. No one wants a boring job, and parenting is certainly a job that is often boring. But there's a kind of general rule that you just don't go there. Instead, you suck it up and go release on Facebook. Maybe you post some vapid pictures of your kid, get some ":-)" and some "♥♥♥" feedback, and take that buzz to bed with you instead of another shot from the bottle of Bacardi that you're about to run out of anyway. To confess to boredom, or to whine about it, is to give hostages to all sorts of enemies who would be happy to devalue parenting for all sorts of reasons, most of them not in the best interests of children. For me to mutter, "How f*cking boring," or "God I'm bored watching this crap on TV" or "I can't wait for Mama to get home and relieve me of this utterly boring sh*t Junior is making me do," suggests that I don't love my kid, that I'm not infatuated with everything he does and says and thinks and eats. Parenting is not for anyone with a brain, anyone who has seen the world, parenting is for nannies, etc. All bunk, of course. But knowing that doesn't help me with the fact that, as I said a moment ago, I'm bored.
The thing about boredom is that, because you're bored, you're afraid that anything you write about boredom will by definition be boring, revealing that you are in fact a boring person, and deserving of your fate. So I've held off. Until now. Because I don't care anymore. Partly this is because I'm over 40, partly it's because I'm really bored. Perhaps I can take satisfaction in knowing that, in about nine years, it will be my son's turn to be bored out of his mind by everything that has to do with his father, family, and the home we provide him. At that time, rather than be personally hurt, I will instead savor the payback for what I am enduring right now. But nine years is a long time to wait.
So I'm trying to figure out what's going on: why the sense of boredom has become acute at my fourth year into the parenting stint? Am I tired of my job? Has it lost its novelty? Am I just played out as a parent? Is it really just over? Or is this just a phase, a plateau that has my son and I cruising across the family version of rural Indiana? Despite all my past bloggery in which I waxed lyrical about jungle gyms and long walks and soccer class and preschool moms and diaper genies and everything else, the one thing I haven't touched on is how very often, how defining and foundational, is the experience of utter boredom.
I say this all while knowing, by virtue of hard-earned wisdom, that the one constant thing about both parenting and life is that all things change. Was the infancy thing hard? Immensely. But it was over in a heartbeat. My son will spend far longer with gray hair pushing me in a wheelchair than we ever spent changing his diaper. So maybe we are driving through Indiana now -- or, God forbid, Kansas, or West Texas -- but eventually if you drive far enough, you hit the Rockies, or West Virginia, and things get interesting again. But right now, to pursue the analogy further, we are driving through rural Indiana, and there's not much to listen to on the radio.
So why am I bored now, while I wasn't when Spot was six months old? At six months, he was an all-consuming project, and nothing else mattered. My individuality was like a well-charged car battery that could run all the auxiliary features for a good long while before going dead and needed a jump. And frankly, the novelty was sharp. It truly was a new world, and I enjoyed entering into it.
But here's the crux: this was all before Spot could talk, before he could express his own view of things, or act with any degree of independence. That has all changed, and Spot, now become Junior, is a semi-automaton, capable of thinking and talking and doing quite a lot, though a lot of it not quite all the way. This, I have determined, is the source of my boredom. Imagine walking a dog. Not for half an hour three times a day, but all day. You've got an animal on a leash, you want to let them sniff around, entertain themselves, read the book of the world in the litter of the sidewalk, you pick up their poop and intervene when they start trash-talking the dog next door -- all this for about 13 hours. It would be nice to instead open the back door at around 7 o'clock in the morning and then check back at lunchtime, but that's not how it works right now. The leash has me hooked to the dog as much as the dog is hooked to me. So I am, more than at any point previously, in his world most of the time.
And after a while, as fascinating as it has all been, that gets boring. Junior can't find something in his toy box? He calls me from upstairs while I'm on the computer. Junior gets hungry? He lets me know from upstairs, once I've gotten back to the computer. Once Junior is well fed, he now feels a bowel movement coming on. Again, he lets me know from upstairs, and I ascend to help facilitate. In all these cases, Junior is able to handle a part or most of the process of finding a lost toy, feeding himself, or taking a dump and wiping his ass, but not all. And so I live la vida interrumpida, a life of fragments. In fact, right now, as I write this, I am leaving Junior upstairs to his TV and Lego's, feeling moderately guilty that the Nickelodian Moose is subbing for me as primary caregiver so I can share this all with you. Four times now, Junior has called down to me, "Daddy, are you done working?" and four times I have replied "Hell no, leave me alone! Can't you entertain yourself for an hour?"
When he was an infant, I could strap Junior into my Baby Bjorn and head off on my rounds. Some feeding, some attention to matters of hygiene, and all was well. Now, he is so burgeoning with thoughts, with the most astounding and surreal and hilarious musings on language and reality, endless questions that must each be answered (a point of principle for me), so full of commentary that must be processed, that a much larger portion of my brain is now used to deal with him than before. Subtract the much-missed naptime break, and add the ability to verbalize his needs without the ability to fulfill them, and you have the roots of my predicament.
So I thank you, gentle reader, for providing me with an excuse for diverting myself for a little while. But I can tell, from the nervous, rhythmic hopping I hear on the floor above, that Junior feels the need to visit the potty, and so my prosody must be cut short. Until, that is, the next installment, when we meet together as writer and reader again, perhaps when Junior and I are at least on the border of Indiana and Ohio, somewhat closer to West Virginia.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Adventures in Public Space
There is a difference between public space and private space. This difference has nothing to do with physical arrangements or locations or whether one is inside or outside a home. Instead, it has everything to do with how we distribute our activities and regulate our behaviors across different places.
I find myself very conscious of these differential spaces when I am out with my children. When we step outside our home I am aware that people are watching. The expectations I assume they have lead me to subtly alter what I let the children do. While Polly and Pip don’t fully comprehend the reasons for this, they certainly are aware that some difference exists. They know that outside our home they cannot do exactly the same things that they do in our living room.
During our family’s recent trip to Florida, this dynamic became the key element in creating one of those incredible, unscripted moments that make having children so much fun.
*****
Last fall, I checked out a CD of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf from our public library and brought it home for Pip and Polly. In looking for things to do as the days were getting colder and shorter, I thought this might capture their attention. The music, as I remembered it, was lively and interesting without being too complicated, and, as a bonus, it provided a brief introduction to the instruments of the orchestra. I hoped that on a morning when we could not get outside, we might be able to sit down and pass a good half-an-hour listening to it.
As it turned out, Pip loved it. The first time I popped the CD in the stereo he sat still and listened to the entire thing. Then, immediately after it finished, he asked to listen to it again. The next day I showed him pictures of the instruments as we listened and he quickly became able to identify both the instrument being played and the character that instrument represented (a flute for the bird, violins for Peter, french horns for the wolf, a clarinet for the cat, an oboe for the duck, a bassoon for grandfather, etc). Soon Polly began to pick up on these associations as well. Over the next several months Ava and I checked out the CD a few more times and with each iteration Polly and Pip added something new to the way they interacted with the music. First, they pretended to play the various instruments, turning appropriately shaped toys into a flute, a clarinet, a bassoon, a french horn, and a violin. Next, they took to rearranging the furniture in our living room to create the setting of the story. They put Peter’s meadow with its pond and tree in the middle of the room, built a stone wall out of the couch, designated the dining room as the forest, and placed the garden gate by the front door. When all this was set, they then proceeded to act out the characters’ various movements – Peter dancing through the meadow, the duck swimming in the pond, the wolf circling the tree where the bird and the cat had taken refuge, Peter lassoing the wolf’s tail from the tree.
Most recently, Polly and Pip have begun to sing the different character themes even when the music is not playing. They do this mostly when they are bored or want to add some noise to a quiet moment. Pip has a good handle on the basic rhythms and tone changes involved in the themes for Peter, the wolf, and grandfather. He also knows snippets from the action scenes like when Peter and the bird work together to lasso the wolf. Polly knows the wolf fairly well and can follow Pip’s lead on the other bits.
Pip’s favorite segment is what he calls the “Triumphant Peter.” In this segment, Peter’s theme is played loudly and happily by the entire orchestra as Peter and the rest of the characters escort the captured wolf to the village zoo. Pip likes to belt this out at the top of his lungs while marching and waving his arms in the air. After watching him do this a couple of times, Polly now joins in with him whenever Pip gets the Triumphant Peter going.
*****
During the first full day of a week-long Florida vacation, while we were all both exhausted from the long drive and excited by the sunshine and warm temperatures, we went out to lunch with Ava’s parents. They took us to a foodie version of the Old Country Buffet called Sweet Tomatoes which combined a twenty-yard long salad bar, a foccacia pizza station, a variety of freshly made soups, and an ice cream bar with cafeteria-style trays and service. It was housed in a space that was reminiscent of what loft apartments used to look like – concrete floors, walls of painted cinderblocks, an open ceiling where steel girders were snaked with electrical conduit and HVAC ductwork. It was the kind of room that echoes, and the full lunchtime crowd created a constant, though not unpleasant, din.
After filling our plates for the first time, we found a table in one corner of the sitting area. Then Ava and I took turns eating and shuttling small plates of food to the kids while Grandma and Grandpa entertained themselves by watching Pip alternately nibble on raisins and engulf slices of cheesy foccacia bread and Polly hammer a plate of macaroni and cheese. We all found it particularly funny when Polly finally eschewed utensils altogether and started grabbing little fistfuls of noodles and cramming them into her mouth.
Once he got some food in him, Pip’s attention drifted towards his grandparents, and he began telling them about all the things he had done that morning. I don’t know the exact sequence of the conversation, but at some point he started singing some bits from Peter and the Wolf for them. This singing was relatively quiet at first as Pip gave them quick renditions of the themes for Peter and grandfather. Polly then followed with her version of the wolf theme. The bemused smiles on their grandparents’ faces encouraged them to continue, and Pip launched into a three-quarter volume version of Triumphant Peter.
As he got going, his eyes turned to watch my reaction. When I didn’t move to stop him, he started ramping up the volume and raising his arms above his head. Polly followed right along with him and by the time they made their second pass through the Triumphant Peter theme, they were singing so loud that Ava could easily hear them from her spot in the buffet line and the people to our left were openly gawking at us with a mixture of amusement and incredulity.
I’m not sure why I didn’t stop them. Normally this kind of spectacle is something I work to avoid because it makes me look like I don’t know how to control my kids. That potential for being judged harshly by others is a perpetual quality of public space, and as a full-time father, I feel it acutely even in moments when that role is not obvious to others. This awareness has me constantly trying to rein in my kids’ public displays of silliness with the hope that they will be perceived as the most polite, most intelligent children ever to walk the earth.
This time, though, Pip and Polly caught me off guard. Maybe it was the idea of being on vacation or perhaps I had subconsciously handed them off to their grandparents for a few minutes. Whatever it was, by the time I fully realized where they were headed it was too late to reel them in. They were going full-bore and their singing was so vibrant, so free, so purely happy that the only thing to do was to let that corner of Sweet Tomatoes become our living room for a little while.
*****
When they were done, there was no clapping or cheering. Everyone around us just chuckled a little and turned back to their food. The background noise of the restaurant, which Pip and Polly had muted with their singing, quickly returned in a clamor of overlapping conversations, utensils clinking against plates, and serving trays sliding along the buffet lines. Nevertheless, Polly and Pip were thrilled by their moment of ecstatic transgression. They knew they had done something out of the ordinary, and they were excited by the attention it had brought them. The satisfaction of commanding that corner of the restaurant for a few minutes shone in their eyes.
There were plenty of memorable moments during our Florida vacation. We saw fireworks. We played in the sand. We rode in boats. We watched birds. But all of these activities were things that we planned to do, and because of that I imagine most of them will fade into photo-memories relatively quickly.
However, that moment in Sweet Tomatoes with its unscripted, exuberant, and slightly discomfiting quality will remain with me far longer. For a short while, the kids turned my world upside down. They took control while the adults stood by and watched. They brought some of our home’s idiosyncrasies into a public place. They basked in the attention that came their way. And, in the process, they conjured up one of those rare moments of pure freedom when the divisions of space, time, and social expectations vanish into thin air.
It makes me think I should let them loose a bit more often.
****************************************************************
Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?
Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/.
There's a new post every Thursday.
I find myself very conscious of these differential spaces when I am out with my children. When we step outside our home I am aware that people are watching. The expectations I assume they have lead me to subtly alter what I let the children do. While Polly and Pip don’t fully comprehend the reasons for this, they certainly are aware that some difference exists. They know that outside our home they cannot do exactly the same things that they do in our living room.
During our family’s recent trip to Florida, this dynamic became the key element in creating one of those incredible, unscripted moments that make having children so much fun.
*****
Last fall, I checked out a CD of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf from our public library and brought it home for Pip and Polly. In looking for things to do as the days were getting colder and shorter, I thought this might capture their attention. The music, as I remembered it, was lively and interesting without being too complicated, and, as a bonus, it provided a brief introduction to the instruments of the orchestra. I hoped that on a morning when we could not get outside, we might be able to sit down and pass a good half-an-hour listening to it.
As it turned out, Pip loved it. The first time I popped the CD in the stereo he sat still and listened to the entire thing. Then, immediately after it finished, he asked to listen to it again. The next day I showed him pictures of the instruments as we listened and he quickly became able to identify both the instrument being played and the character that instrument represented (a flute for the bird, violins for Peter, french horns for the wolf, a clarinet for the cat, an oboe for the duck, a bassoon for grandfather, etc). Soon Polly began to pick up on these associations as well. Over the next several months Ava and I checked out the CD a few more times and with each iteration Polly and Pip added something new to the way they interacted with the music. First, they pretended to play the various instruments, turning appropriately shaped toys into a flute, a clarinet, a bassoon, a french horn, and a violin. Next, they took to rearranging the furniture in our living room to create the setting of the story. They put Peter’s meadow with its pond and tree in the middle of the room, built a stone wall out of the couch, designated the dining room as the forest, and placed the garden gate by the front door. When all this was set, they then proceeded to act out the characters’ various movements – Peter dancing through the meadow, the duck swimming in the pond, the wolf circling the tree where the bird and the cat had taken refuge, Peter lassoing the wolf’s tail from the tree.
Most recently, Polly and Pip have begun to sing the different character themes even when the music is not playing. They do this mostly when they are bored or want to add some noise to a quiet moment. Pip has a good handle on the basic rhythms and tone changes involved in the themes for Peter, the wolf, and grandfather. He also knows snippets from the action scenes like when Peter and the bird work together to lasso the wolf. Polly knows the wolf fairly well and can follow Pip’s lead on the other bits.
Pip’s favorite segment is what he calls the “Triumphant Peter.” In this segment, Peter’s theme is played loudly and happily by the entire orchestra as Peter and the rest of the characters escort the captured wolf to the village zoo. Pip likes to belt this out at the top of his lungs while marching and waving his arms in the air. After watching him do this a couple of times, Polly now joins in with him whenever Pip gets the Triumphant Peter going.
*****
During the first full day of a week-long Florida vacation, while we were all both exhausted from the long drive and excited by the sunshine and warm temperatures, we went out to lunch with Ava’s parents. They took us to a foodie version of the Old Country Buffet called Sweet Tomatoes which combined a twenty-yard long salad bar, a foccacia pizza station, a variety of freshly made soups, and an ice cream bar with cafeteria-style trays and service. It was housed in a space that was reminiscent of what loft apartments used to look like – concrete floors, walls of painted cinderblocks, an open ceiling where steel girders were snaked with electrical conduit and HVAC ductwork. It was the kind of room that echoes, and the full lunchtime crowd created a constant, though not unpleasant, din.
After filling our plates for the first time, we found a table in one corner of the sitting area. Then Ava and I took turns eating and shuttling small plates of food to the kids while Grandma and Grandpa entertained themselves by watching Pip alternately nibble on raisins and engulf slices of cheesy foccacia bread and Polly hammer a plate of macaroni and cheese. We all found it particularly funny when Polly finally eschewed utensils altogether and started grabbing little fistfuls of noodles and cramming them into her mouth.
Once he got some food in him, Pip’s attention drifted towards his grandparents, and he began telling them about all the things he had done that morning. I don’t know the exact sequence of the conversation, but at some point he started singing some bits from Peter and the Wolf for them. This singing was relatively quiet at first as Pip gave them quick renditions of the themes for Peter and grandfather. Polly then followed with her version of the wolf theme. The bemused smiles on their grandparents’ faces encouraged them to continue, and Pip launched into a three-quarter volume version of Triumphant Peter.
As he got going, his eyes turned to watch my reaction. When I didn’t move to stop him, he started ramping up the volume and raising his arms above his head. Polly followed right along with him and by the time they made their second pass through the Triumphant Peter theme, they were singing so loud that Ava could easily hear them from her spot in the buffet line and the people to our left were openly gawking at us with a mixture of amusement and incredulity.
I’m not sure why I didn’t stop them. Normally this kind of spectacle is something I work to avoid because it makes me look like I don’t know how to control my kids. That potential for being judged harshly by others is a perpetual quality of public space, and as a full-time father, I feel it acutely even in moments when that role is not obvious to others. This awareness has me constantly trying to rein in my kids’ public displays of silliness with the hope that they will be perceived as the most polite, most intelligent children ever to walk the earth.
This time, though, Pip and Polly caught me off guard. Maybe it was the idea of being on vacation or perhaps I had subconsciously handed them off to their grandparents for a few minutes. Whatever it was, by the time I fully realized where they were headed it was too late to reel them in. They were going full-bore and their singing was so vibrant, so free, so purely happy that the only thing to do was to let that corner of Sweet Tomatoes become our living room for a little while.
*****
When they were done, there was no clapping or cheering. Everyone around us just chuckled a little and turned back to their food. The background noise of the restaurant, which Pip and Polly had muted with their singing, quickly returned in a clamor of overlapping conversations, utensils clinking against plates, and serving trays sliding along the buffet lines. Nevertheless, Polly and Pip were thrilled by their moment of ecstatic transgression. They knew they had done something out of the ordinary, and they were excited by the attention it had brought them. The satisfaction of commanding that corner of the restaurant for a few minutes shone in their eyes.
There were plenty of memorable moments during our Florida vacation. We saw fireworks. We played in the sand. We rode in boats. We watched birds. But all of these activities were things that we planned to do, and because of that I imagine most of them will fade into photo-memories relatively quickly.
However, that moment in Sweet Tomatoes with its unscripted, exuberant, and slightly discomfiting quality will remain with me far longer. For a short while, the kids turned my world upside down. They took control while the adults stood by and watched. They brought some of our home’s idiosyncrasies into a public place. They basked in the attention that came their way. And, in the process, they conjured up one of those rare moments of pure freedom when the divisions of space, time, and social expectations vanish into thin air.
It makes me think I should let them loose a bit more often.
****************************************************************
Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?
Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/.
There's a new post every Thursday.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Doing the Wrong Thing is Better Than Doing Nothing -- Rad Dad 19
Note: we will have a Rad Dad Release Party on March 26th at 7pm at Actual Cafe in Oakland. Please come say hello and pick up some copies of Rad Dad (and other zines - there will be a zine table), listen to two bands with papas in them (Team Nisto and Nomi), and hear a few radical parents read!
Parenting has taught me a lot about dealing with things I’d rather not deal with. I’ve been forced to breathe deeply and make the call to the doctor at three in the morning: um, my daughter won’t stop crying, and when the doctor asks why she’s crying, I’ve had to confess, well I kinda dropped her on her head today.
That never feels good to admit to.
Or I’ve had to clench my mouth shut tightly and just let my daughter have her feelings, be disappointed, resist the urge to placate her, to try to “make” her feel better by saying something inane like, well your little ten year old friend who won’t share with you is a jerk.
Definitely, not good parental role modeling.
I’ve also learned to deal with larger, seemingly inhuman bureaucratic systems such as the institutionalized schooling with all its rules and policies that seem to believe learning only takes place in a classroom. No, I don’t think it’s fair that my seventh grader gets an F in classes because I took her on a trip to see a sick relative. I’ve learned to face a police and justice system that views children and particularly teenaged men as criminals first and foremost.
Parenting, however, has also demonstrated that there are the choices we need to make between letting some things slide while focusing on others.
My daughter, arriving home ten minutes later than she said she would, might be ok now and then. I can raise an eyebrow and shrug off her, what, the bus was late, exasperated remark when I ask why she’s not on time. Because when she’s out at night and forgets to call when I explicitly explained that I expected her to, that ain’t something you can let slide. It’s something you have to address, and it’s difficult to hold her to the agreed upon consequences. It’s painful to hear her anger, her frustration, to be the target of her unmitigated teenage rage. And that shit’s scary.
So parenting has taught me how to stand firm face difficult situations and also that some things are negotiable, that there’s a balance between holding your child or your community accountable and creating transparency in your agreements. However, this is not an essay about my children.
Let me stop stalling.
A friend of mine was arrested for domestic violence. There’s a story there. There are reasons for his anger and even empathy around the whole situation: towards him, towards his partner. The whole affair is sad. In the end, perhaps it will all be for the best for both of them and their kids.
But there is no excuse for violence in a relationship.
None.
Ever.
The crisis is over. She’s moved out of their home. They have a routine set up. Things are almost back to normal. People in my circle of friends are even joking about it.
And that is what bothers me, what makes me uncomfortable.
I started to ask around: what is my role in all this now? How do I address this with my daughters and son? How to be a true friend?
I don’t want to be the one to constantly bring it up every time I see him, but I also don’t want a ‘business as usual’ type friendship, a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ relationship because that is so much easier: pretend it never happened.
I remember when the Chris Brown and Rhianna incident occurred. I immediately talked to my kids about it, especially my youngest daughter who was very into both of them. I asked how they felt about hearing the news. I didn’t want to let this opportunity slip: a chance to address the unacceptability of domestic violence, to establish a clear ‘zero-tolerance’ policy.
Some things can slide; physical and emotional abuse can’t.
But what to do with my friend? Why did this feel so much more difficult?
Soon after all this happened, I spoke with another friend of mine, a woman, a person who had been in an abusive relationship in the past, and she gave me some advice I hold dearly now. She said when she was going through it, that she wished people would have done something, anything. She looked at me and stated: sometimes doing the wrong thing is better than doing nothing.
I understood immediately that that was why I was so uncomfortable. I could see how easy doing nothing could have been. Denial is powerful. But as parenting has taught me some things can’t slide and so sometimes you just gotta grin and bear it. You have to face it.
I knew I needed to talk to him before he moved off the block, so one night when he came over to borrow something, I did.
We stood out on my stoop, and we talked. First I expressed my anger and disappointment. I told him I knew it would be work, but that I wanted to be the kind of friend who is wiling to both stand up for someone and to hold them accountable. I expressed my concerns about how he was taking responsibility for his actions.
I did however acknowledge that I had no answers, only questions. But I told him I’m willing to struggle to find those answers with him, together.
We hugged, and he left.
A few days later, I raised the subject again with my daughters and my twenty-year-old son who was visiting. He heard all about it from his mom and his sisters. Everyone was arguing over it. Gossiping about it. In fact, my youngest daughter and I saw the cop cars in front of their house when it happened and I said to her almost in jest, I hope that’s not what I think it is. I cringe thinking about how uncritical a statement that is in regards to domestic abuse.
So we were all sitting around the table, my two daughters and my son eating dinner. I confessed, I am angry that I don’t know what to do or say. I feel like a hypocrite ridiculing Chris Brown, and yet when it happens on my street I’m at a loss as to what I should do. Just because I’m a friend with someone doesn’t mean they’re not accountable, you know.
My youngest daughter shook her head and said finally, you know it’s not your fault dad, as if I was acting foolish.
Getting chastised by your kids is another thing you learn how to deal with from parenting.
I know, I said, I just don’t want to sweep this under the rug.
It was then that I realized I was looking at my son was sitting across from me. He was looking at me.
I realized I haven’t had a conversation like this with him ever. As a man. As a person who might disagree with me, who might not see it the way I do. I was terrified.
My son breathed in deeply.
I know dad, he said I know, and he looked me in the eye, that shit is totally fucked up.
Not the most eloquent response, but it was clear that he meant it.
It was one of the most reassuring moments in my life. It’s strange to love this young person so much, and for years feeling like I could control or at least strongly influence his actions. Now he stands taller than me, muscular, lean, a man, and I have no control over anything anymore in his life (well, except for kicking in money for his rent), and yet I still have such expectations of him. And he may let me down in the future, may make mistakes in relationships. But one thing I think he knows is that domestic abuse is a line you don’t cross.
Hearing him say that with such conviction, without equivocation in front of his sisters was a profound moment for me.
As the weeks pass, I still bring it up with my daughters now and then. In fact, now, my middle child has a boyfriend. I see how quickly I will have little control in her life as well. It’s hard to let go. But I’m gonna do it. With love and with encouragement and with trust.
They taught me that.
I will not let things slide anymore and this is a lesson I dedicate to all those who are victims of violence: from the batons or gun barrels of the police, because of the words and intimidation of bullies, or even at the hands of their own family.
I promise you I will never look the other way.
I promise you I will do something whether it’s the right thing or not at the time.
I promise. I will.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Cold Weather Parenting; or, For the Love of Snow
People don't complain about the fact that they will eventually die. The same is not true of taxes or the weather. Though immortality remains a dream, the earthly draw of the next best thing -- a sunny locale, tax-free and with yearly lows around 65°F -- remains powerful for those who feel that more spiritual satisfactions are unattainable. Thus the popularity of such strange places as Arizona and Florida -- a desert and a barren swamp -- not just for retirees, but for those who seek to trade the certainty of death for the hope of a painless earthly transit; to trade a snow shovel and jumper cables for the tax-deferred serotonin boost of high-volume sunshine. The post-orgasmic lull of uniform, indistinct seasons stands as a questionable rebuttal to the wisdom of Job, or a defensive denial of what Melville knew as the cosmic significance of anything powerful, vast, and white -- like a really big whale, or a howling blizzard.
We do not trade in sunshine futures, Junior and I. We attend to the fundamentals of making a life, the way factories used to make things, where it makes most sense to do so. We take what comes with, and let it infuse us with the energy and beauty and dynamism of all the changes that accompany a planet's traverse around the sun.
We are adventurers of the polar season that visits our city once a year. This is our story.
********
My son was born on a particularly cold and clear day in January. One of the first instructions I was given as a father came from a nurse of the maternity ward, concerned that my child might freeze to death because I had chosen to sit close to a window while holding Junior against my chest. "Of course a man would sit next to a window with a newborn baby!" she said, only half jokingly.
Since then, I have learned that the kinds of drafts one does indeed encounter near windows in winter are the subject of a global folk mythology that, at the extreme, equates cool breaths of air with demons and malevolent agents of the Evil Eye. A cool breeze to the neck can trigger mononucleosis; chilly droughts on the chest, bronchitis; an improperly swaddled infant, vitamin B-12 deficiency and improper brain formation.
But the nurse in the maternity ward had a point. Ferociously cold January weather with below-zero wind chills is an inhospitable environment from which a newborn must be sheltered. My goal as a new father, moving about snow-bound and often glacially cold neighborhoods, was to provide a cocoon of warmth and protection, an environment so stable and secure that only the changing shade of light inside Junior's stroller, or the muffled sound of Daddy's profanations from deep within the hood of his snorkel jacket, might indicate that we had passed into and out of a rampaging storm of sleet.
Junior's Cocoon and Gear
(Begin Excursus)
I should state here that the only excuse for "being cold" is "being stupid." Survival, and even enjoyment and triumph in winter weather is fundamentally a question not of the weather itself, but of the gear used to render the weather irrelevant. In the early 21st century, even the cheapest winter clothing is very warm, and at the higher end, quite stylish. Providing the cocoon necessary to keep baby warm is a technique of winter parenting that extends to the parent as well. Yet, while Junior is toasty and warm and romping on the snowdrift above the buried and abandoned Yellow Cab, yon 20-something office drone goes hat-less for fear of matting his gelled hair -- though he may be wearing one of these, the bikini of men's winter head ware:
Male Ear Bikini
As I say, said office drone may be clenching his red and bared fists as he leans into the wind making its way from the Arctic Circle and down the middle of LaSalle Street. In his free time, this same fellow and his friends can be seen hailing the same Yellow Cabs on Clark Street, wearing little more than imported Polish Fonzi jackets and blue jeans that have the property of transforming from soft denim to chafing sheet metal at around 32 degrees. These hardy fools -- and I know, because I was one -- lack the most basic wisdom of any cartoon character from South Park: that you must insulate every inch of your body in appropriate gear, and get used to spending most of your time that way.
(End Excursus)
As much as I enjoy the seasons, I will not deny the grueling exertion demanded by the wet, sloppy snowstorms of late February and early March. The snow dropped in these gales, unlike the powder that falls at colder temperatures, blows horizontally into your car and soaks everything it touches. Pushing a stroller through the pools of slushy ice (the scientific term: "frazil ice") that fill all the inconspicuous depressions in streets and sidewalks, sometimes even entire intersections, across which the cocoon must be not pushed but lifted, can be exhausting and wet enough to compromise the most weatherproof boots. Junior, in his cocoon, is oblivious to these dramas, and once home the parent wisely chooses to remain there. Junior is still napping heartily at this early stage, meaning that, as he snores through the winter blast, it is possible to read much great literature.
As Junior enters the toddler stage and becomes correspondingly more mobile, I begin to entertain hopes, as all upper Midwestern fathers do, that he might come to enjoy what winter has to offer. The prospect presents twin advantages: of being able to share the animal and aesthetic pleasures of bracing air under brilliant skies, snowball fights, the transcendent beauty of snow-covered landscapes, and the mysterious silence of a snow storm in process, as well as being able to kill bad cases of cabin fever by simply getting out of the house.
It is an understandably slow and awkward process, so shortly out of the womb, his Edenic nakedness so recently covered, for Junior to encumber himelf with boots, a hat, mittens clipped to a huge poofy jacket or even bulkier snowsuit, all over at least two and probably three layers of clothing and sometimes topped off with ski goggles. Each item is resisted. And so we negotiate, as Junior's second and third winter seasons wear on, each of these items, occasionally assisted by Junior's own animal intelligence alerting him that HEY! it really is better to wear your gloves when your fingers get cold!
But alas, even at the height of winter #3, it is all still too foreign, too messy. Our first sled ride, more dad's idea than Junior's, ends with a debacle: a child spilled on the curb, snow going up the nose, and tears coming from the eyes. "I don't like snow" is the motto of this period, and Dad resigns himself to a routine of indoor activities along with all the other parents: soccer class, various bookstores, caffeinated museum trips, play-dates, and the local super-heated tot-lot in the company of all the nannies. The hearty naps continue as before, and still more great literature is read.
Junior and Fellow Snow Enthusiast
It is in the current, fourth winter that the breakthrough occurs, and Junior, to the great joy of his father, discovers his own joy of snow. In December and January, he begins to kick at the snow with his boots, to make patterns with his tracks. He watches with keener curiosity as the more adventurous child of our friend climbs a pile of snow thrown off the street by city plows and citizen shovelers, layered with last fall's matted leaves and gravel and laced with streaks of blue Slurpy-colored snow melt, and sticks his head into the snow to better dig at it with his tongue. Not long after that, he tells Daddy, "I want you to teach me how to ski," and Daddy, with a borrowed pair of Junior-sized Nordic skis, complies.
I began by completely shielding Junior from winter; now it is his playground. I feel fortunate that I have the energy to lift him to the top of the six foot snowdrift that has buried the Yellow Cab, to shove his sled over the edge; a passing woman, looking for her own car buried in a drift still further on, tells me it is Junior who is fortunate to have a father who will go play in the snow with him. She flatters me. It is no work at all. We all know that what you once loved as a child, you can never fully turn away from.
[A version of this post is also available on the Outdoor Baby Network.]
Since then, I have learned that the kinds of drafts one does indeed encounter near windows in winter are the subject of a global folk mythology that, at the extreme, equates cool breaths of air with demons and malevolent agents of the Evil Eye. A cool breeze to the neck can trigger mononucleosis; chilly droughts on the chest, bronchitis; an improperly swaddled infant, vitamin B-12 deficiency and improper brain formation.
But the nurse in the maternity ward had a point. Ferociously cold January weather with below-zero wind chills is an inhospitable environment from which a newborn must be sheltered. My goal as a new father, moving about snow-bound and often glacially cold neighborhoods, was to provide a cocoon of warmth and protection, an environment so stable and secure that only the changing shade of light inside Junior's stroller, or the muffled sound of Daddy's profanations from deep within the hood of his snorkel jacket, might indicate that we had passed into and out of a rampaging storm of sleet.
Junior's Cocoon and GearI should state here that the only excuse for "being cold" is "being stupid." Survival, and even enjoyment and triumph in winter weather is fundamentally a question not of the weather itself, but of the gear used to render the weather irrelevant. In the early 21st century, even the cheapest winter clothing is very warm, and at the higher end, quite stylish. Providing the cocoon necessary to keep baby warm is a technique of winter parenting that extends to the parent as well. Yet, while Junior is toasty and warm and romping on the snowdrift above the buried and abandoned Yellow Cab, yon 20-something office drone goes hat-less for fear of matting his gelled hair -- though he may be wearing one of these, the bikini of men's winter head ware:
Male Ear Bikini
As I say, said office drone may be clenching his red and bared fists as he leans into the wind making its way from the Arctic Circle and down the middle of LaSalle Street. In his free time, this same fellow and his friends can be seen hailing the same Yellow Cabs on Clark Street, wearing little more than imported Polish Fonzi jackets and blue jeans that have the property of transforming from soft denim to chafing sheet metal at around 32 degrees. These hardy fools -- and I know, because I was one -- lack the most basic wisdom of any cartoon character from South Park: that you must insulate every inch of your body in appropriate gear, and get used to spending most of your time that way.
(End Excursus)
As much as I enjoy the seasons, I will not deny the grueling exertion demanded by the wet, sloppy snowstorms of late February and early March. The snow dropped in these gales, unlike the powder that falls at colder temperatures, blows horizontally into your car and soaks everything it touches. Pushing a stroller through the pools of slushy ice (the scientific term: "frazil ice") that fill all the inconspicuous depressions in streets and sidewalks, sometimes even entire intersections, across which the cocoon must be not pushed but lifted, can be exhausting and wet enough to compromise the most weatherproof boots. Junior, in his cocoon, is oblivious to these dramas, and once home the parent wisely chooses to remain there. Junior is still napping heartily at this early stage, meaning that, as he snores through the winter blast, it is possible to read much great literature.
As Junior enters the toddler stage and becomes correspondingly more mobile, I begin to entertain hopes, as all upper Midwestern fathers do, that he might come to enjoy what winter has to offer. The prospect presents twin advantages: of being able to share the animal and aesthetic pleasures of bracing air under brilliant skies, snowball fights, the transcendent beauty of snow-covered landscapes, and the mysterious silence of a snow storm in process, as well as being able to kill bad cases of cabin fever by simply getting out of the house.
It is an understandably slow and awkward process, so shortly out of the womb, his Edenic nakedness so recently covered, for Junior to encumber himelf with boots, a hat, mittens clipped to a huge poofy jacket or even bulkier snowsuit, all over at least two and probably three layers of clothing and sometimes topped off with ski goggles. Each item is resisted. And so we negotiate, as Junior's second and third winter seasons wear on, each of these items, occasionally assisted by Junior's own animal intelligence alerting him that HEY! it really is better to wear your gloves when your fingers get cold!
But alas, even at the height of winter #3, it is all still too foreign, too messy. Our first sled ride, more dad's idea than Junior's, ends with a debacle: a child spilled on the curb, snow going up the nose, and tears coming from the eyes. "I don't like snow" is the motto of this period, and Dad resigns himself to a routine of indoor activities along with all the other parents: soccer class, various bookstores, caffeinated museum trips, play-dates, and the local super-heated tot-lot in the company of all the nannies. The hearty naps continue as before, and still more great literature is read.
Junior and Fellow Snow EnthusiastIt is in the current, fourth winter that the breakthrough occurs, and Junior, to the great joy of his father, discovers his own joy of snow. In December and January, he begins to kick at the snow with his boots, to make patterns with his tracks. He watches with keener curiosity as the more adventurous child of our friend climbs a pile of snow thrown off the street by city plows and citizen shovelers, layered with last fall's matted leaves and gravel and laced with streaks of blue Slurpy-colored snow melt, and sticks his head into the snow to better dig at it with his tongue. Not long after that, he tells Daddy, "I want you to teach me how to ski," and Daddy, with a borrowed pair of Junior-sized Nordic skis, complies.
I began by completely shielding Junior from winter; now it is his playground. I feel fortunate that I have the energy to lift him to the top of the six foot snowdrift that has buried the Yellow Cab, to shove his sled over the edge; a passing woman, looking for her own car buried in a drift still further on, tells me it is Junior who is fortunate to have a father who will go play in the snow with him. She flatters me. It is no work at all. We all know that what you once loved as a child, you can never fully turn away from.
[A version of this post is also available on the Outdoor Baby Network.]
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Revolutionary questions
About two weeks ago, Pip dug out from the far end of our bookshelf two children’s biographies that had belonged to me as a kid and had somehow managed to survive all my subsequent moves and book purges. One recounted the life of Thomas Jefferson. The other was about Benjamin Franklin. Re-reading these books for the first time in about two decades, while popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were toppling dictatorial governments in the background, made me very aware of the almost magical ease with which the transition from revolution to stable democratic governance occurs in America’s founding mythology. This awareness made me question whether this mythology will ultimately do my children a disservice. Will it lead them to expect at an intuitive level that any dramatic break from established patterns will resolve itself neatly and in a way that is universally good? And, as such, will this expectation lead them towards a naive embrace of revolutionary change at the expense of careful and programmatic efforts (such as happened with the Bush-Rumsfeld strategy for creating a democratic Iraq)? My own experience makes me think that this is not a totally ridiculous question.
*****
First let me explain why I use the term ‘mythology’ instead of ‘history.’ Usually the term ‘mythology’ is used to describe the stories of gods and heroes told in times or places where the explanations of science do not predominate. What is sometimes lost in the retelling of the tales of Hercules or Prometheus or Beowulf is how these stories functioned in their time to explain how the world came to be what it is and why certain practices or institutions or values were important. Myths are mechanisms for transmitting cultural knowledge across generations. The ‘truth’ of a myth lies not in the factuality of the characters and places and dates it contains but in the themes and relations that play out within it.
When mythology is understood in this way, the only difference between it and history is the historian’s claim that the events described “really happened.” At her core the historian is a story-teller. She takes details gleaned from various sources and spins a narrative thread of power, destiny, hubris or luck that pulls those details together and makes them comprehensible. It is this thread that is the critical element of the knowledge or meaning we seek to gain from history. While I am not suggesting that the facts are irrelevant, a focus on the factuality of a historian’s account can often distract our attention from the work that the account’s narrative thread performs. Mythology brings no such distraction.
The power of this narrative thread is even more significant when it comes to presenting history to children. We talk to kids about basic facts and important people in order to give them a foundational understanding of a historical event. Not only do these necessary simplifications demand a strong narrative to make them understandable (and interesting), they also blur facts that may complicate or confuse that narrative. As a result of this blurring, historical figures in children’s books are usually not real people. Instead they represent clearly defined values or ideas that support the direction of the narrative. In many respects, this makes stories told about, for example, the Founding Fathers very close in form to ones told about the gods and goddesses of Mt. Olympus.
*****
I spent some time as a child idolizing America’s Founding Fathers. This was in part because I have a genealogical relationship with one and in part because I lived in southern Virginia where, if you want to, you can feel a strong residue of the American Revolution and the early years of the United States all over the place. I certainly did. I learned early on that the state motto, “Sic Semper Tyrannis” or “thus always to tyrants,” was adopted as a direct challenge to King George III and the British Parliament. I was very proud that Virginians wrote the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson), commanded the Continental Army (George Washington), and crafted the Bill of Rights (James Madison). I enjoyed visiting places like Monticello (the home of Thomas Jefferson), Mt. Vernon (the home of George Washington), Red Hill (the home of Patrick Henry), Colonial Williamsburg, and Yorktown because they gave me the sense that the place where I lived was critically important to the very beginnings of my country’s existence.
All this exposure to America’s founding mythology made me particularly open to consuming any story that included the possibility of a democratic revolution. I have eagerly watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events of Tiananmen Square, Yeltsin’s rise in Russia, protests in Iran, independence in East Timor, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the democracy protests in Georgia and Ukraine, and the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt with an almost naïve sense that history is being made in the most positive of ways. While I know my history well enough to understand that the reality of these situations is complex and difficult, the mythological narrative of the American Revolution that I learned as a child still inclines me to believe in the idea that these events will ultimately enable people to gain their “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
*****
The power of this mythology is also such that the critical documents of America’s founding – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – sit in my mind in much the same way as they do in the National Archives: side by side. These are some of the narrative high points of America’s founding myth and their cohesion within this myth make it difficult to remember that the Declaration and the Constitution were separated by 11 years and the Bill of Rights was added another four years after that. I often forget that the Constitution was at least a second try at forming a functional government and, even after its ratification, was by no means a guaranteed success. These complications don’t fit into the narrative thread that I originally learned.
But what if they did? What would it mean if the National Archives displayed the Articles of Confederation in between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? What would it mean if we added a person like Daniel Shays – the Revolutionary War veteran and debt-ridden farmer from Massachusetts whose rebellion laid bare the impotence of the national government under the Articles of Confederation – to the pantheon of the Founding Fathers? What would it mean if those books Pip pulled from the shelf mentioned the uncertainty, turmoil, and failure of the United States in the first years after the revolution? Would he react differently than I do to stories of revolution? Would he sense a little less magical destiny and a little more struggle and trial in the core of his American identity?
I don’t know, but I want to give something like this a try. The practices that this kind of struggle demands – experimentation, negotiation, perseverance – represent qualities I want my children to embrace in both their politics and their personal lives. It will serve them much better than the aura of predestined greatness that pervades the current version of America’s founding mythology.
****************************************************************
Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?
Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/
There's a new post every Thursday.
*****
First let me explain why I use the term ‘mythology’ instead of ‘history.’ Usually the term ‘mythology’ is used to describe the stories of gods and heroes told in times or places where the explanations of science do not predominate. What is sometimes lost in the retelling of the tales of Hercules or Prometheus or Beowulf is how these stories functioned in their time to explain how the world came to be what it is and why certain practices or institutions or values were important. Myths are mechanisms for transmitting cultural knowledge across generations. The ‘truth’ of a myth lies not in the factuality of the characters and places and dates it contains but in the themes and relations that play out within it.
When mythology is understood in this way, the only difference between it and history is the historian’s claim that the events described “really happened.” At her core the historian is a story-teller. She takes details gleaned from various sources and spins a narrative thread of power, destiny, hubris or luck that pulls those details together and makes them comprehensible. It is this thread that is the critical element of the knowledge or meaning we seek to gain from history. While I am not suggesting that the facts are irrelevant, a focus on the factuality of a historian’s account can often distract our attention from the work that the account’s narrative thread performs. Mythology brings no such distraction.
The power of this narrative thread is even more significant when it comes to presenting history to children. We talk to kids about basic facts and important people in order to give them a foundational understanding of a historical event. Not only do these necessary simplifications demand a strong narrative to make them understandable (and interesting), they also blur facts that may complicate or confuse that narrative. As a result of this blurring, historical figures in children’s books are usually not real people. Instead they represent clearly defined values or ideas that support the direction of the narrative. In many respects, this makes stories told about, for example, the Founding Fathers very close in form to ones told about the gods and goddesses of Mt. Olympus.
*****
I spent some time as a child idolizing America’s Founding Fathers. This was in part because I have a genealogical relationship with one and in part because I lived in southern Virginia where, if you want to, you can feel a strong residue of the American Revolution and the early years of the United States all over the place. I certainly did. I learned early on that the state motto, “Sic Semper Tyrannis” or “thus always to tyrants,” was adopted as a direct challenge to King George III and the British Parliament. I was very proud that Virginians wrote the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson), commanded the Continental Army (George Washington), and crafted the Bill of Rights (James Madison). I enjoyed visiting places like Monticello (the home of Thomas Jefferson), Mt. Vernon (the home of George Washington), Red Hill (the home of Patrick Henry), Colonial Williamsburg, and Yorktown because they gave me the sense that the place where I lived was critically important to the very beginnings of my country’s existence.
All this exposure to America’s founding mythology made me particularly open to consuming any story that included the possibility of a democratic revolution. I have eagerly watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events of Tiananmen Square, Yeltsin’s rise in Russia, protests in Iran, independence in East Timor, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the democracy protests in Georgia and Ukraine, and the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt with an almost naïve sense that history is being made in the most positive of ways. While I know my history well enough to understand that the reality of these situations is complex and difficult, the mythological narrative of the American Revolution that I learned as a child still inclines me to believe in the idea that these events will ultimately enable people to gain their “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
*****
The power of this mythology is also such that the critical documents of America’s founding – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – sit in my mind in much the same way as they do in the National Archives: side by side. These are some of the narrative high points of America’s founding myth and their cohesion within this myth make it difficult to remember that the Declaration and the Constitution were separated by 11 years and the Bill of Rights was added another four years after that. I often forget that the Constitution was at least a second try at forming a functional government and, even after its ratification, was by no means a guaranteed success. These complications don’t fit into the narrative thread that I originally learned.
But what if they did? What would it mean if the National Archives displayed the Articles of Confederation in between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? What would it mean if we added a person like Daniel Shays – the Revolutionary War veteran and debt-ridden farmer from Massachusetts whose rebellion laid bare the impotence of the national government under the Articles of Confederation – to the pantheon of the Founding Fathers? What would it mean if those books Pip pulled from the shelf mentioned the uncertainty, turmoil, and failure of the United States in the first years after the revolution? Would he react differently than I do to stories of revolution? Would he sense a little less magical destiny and a little more struggle and trial in the core of his American identity?
I don’t know, but I want to give something like this a try. The practices that this kind of struggle demands – experimentation, negotiation, perseverance – represent qualities I want my children to embrace in both their politics and their personal lives. It will serve them much better than the aura of predestined greatness that pervades the current version of America’s founding mythology.
****************************************************************
Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?
Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/
There's a new post every Thursday.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Daddyfreak: A Q&A with Steve Almond
Courtesy Steve Almond
This hadn't occurred to me until I had two of my own. I now spend a lot of time worrying about stuff that I never used to worry about. Such as: the quality of my drinking water and food and local public schools and parks and playgrounds and roads. And thus the notion that my taxes actually pay for things required by my fragile children has managed to burrow its way through my thick American skull. Paying a small portion of my income for these collective benefits is not only a basic civic duty, in other words, but it is in my interest.Since I’m also a dad and since I also totally love taxes, it seemed obvious to me that I should meet this person Steve Almond. That actually hasn’t yet happened, but this past December I did interview him over email. Here are the results, exclusively for you Daddy Dialectic readers:
JAS: Do you have in your mind any image of an ideal father? Are there any dads in real life or popular culture or literature that you see as being someone for you to emulate?
SA: Most parents have some hallowed vision of the perfect parent—who loves unconditionally but also sets limits, who overcomes his bullshit for the sake of the kids. But these visions are mostly self-punishment. My own sense is that nobody knows what the hell they're doing, especially today, with so many roles having shifted. I know for a fact that I screw up every day, mostly out of my own emotional neediness. I try to please the kids too much. I lose my cool. I send mixed messages. And so on. The problem with parenting in the precincts of plenty is that fathers (and even more so mothers) hold themselves up to this impossible ideal.
As for the pastures of literature, it doesn't contain a lot of ideal dads. Nor does popular culture. The reality is that being a parent is an incredibly private, day-to-day business. It's a million little moments and decisions, not some calibrated Hollywood plot. The person I admire the most, and try to emulate, is my wife.
JAS: What does she do that you try to emulate?
SA: She's just a lot more patient and thoughtful, better able to control her frustration, more organized. Etc. There are exceptions, but generally speaking most dads would do really well to emulate moms. Not saying moms are perfect -- nor should they be held to some higher standard. I just think they're better equipped emotionally to deal with kids, who are basically lovable but also irrational creatures.
JAS: What pisses you off about fatherhood, if anything? I don't mean what pisses you off about being a father--I mean about the idea of fatherhood. Or to put it a different way, do you ever feel like the kind of father you're trying to be is at odds with what kind of father the rest of society wants you to be?
SA: Again, the main thing that pisses me off is my own weaknesses and failings. I'm not inclined to blame "society" for that. About the only large-scale thing that society wants people to be—at least in America— is consumers. But that applies to everyone.
JAS: Sure. So how do you raise your kids to not be little consumers without turning them into total freaks in the eyes of their peers?
SA: Yeah, my kids are small enough that peer pressure—at least to buy stuff—isn't a factor yet. So I'm not speaking as some kind of authority. But one pretty common sense thing would be to throw your TV out the window. It's not doing anyone any favors spiritually. We have computers and let the kids watch videos, but no commercials. We try to limit the over-stimulation in general. Honestly, I'm not sure what sort of kid would consider another kid "a total freak" because they don't own enough junk. That sounds kind of crazy.
JAS: Hmmm. I think you're underestimating the crazy that's coming your way; I'm especially conscious of this right now because of Christmas. Now that my son's in elementary school, I see kids routinely tease or even ostracize each other based on the stuff they don't own. "What? You don't have a wii? What a dork!" There’s shame in not owning the latest crap. And actually, I think the refusal (or inability) to consume is perceived as very challenging in both the adult and kid worlds. Lots of people think my wife and I are slightly freakish for not owning a car or a TV; they seem to see it as some sort of failure—maybe I’m being paranoid and insecure, I often think some see it specifically as my failure as the father, since the father is supposed to be the breadwinner and thus the provider of junk. Our natural response has been to surround ourselves with people who also don't own cars and TVs and other crap, though of course then you start to live in a bubble. This to me is a classic parenting dilemma, for people across the political and cultural spectrum: how do you raise a child so that they can resist the negative aspects of the culture while still being equipped to thrive in that culture?SA: Yeah, sounds like you're facing the same dilemma we are. And you're deeper into the disconnect. I can see why you feel you're living in a bubble, but to me the slavish devotion to material crapola is the ultimate bubble. It keeps people insulated from what really matters. I'm pretty sure I'm not saying anything Christ didn't say in his Sermon on the Mount. My argument would be that, as a parent, if you're troubled by the values of the dominant culture, you should seek to change that culture, in whatever humble ways you can, and to urge your children to do the same thing. I hear you on being a breadwinner. But part of my larger point is that fathers are also moral actors, both in the small but crucial world of the family, and in the larger world.
JAS: I haven’t made a systematic study of it or anything, but my perception is that your writing has taken a more political turn in recent years. Is that a wrong impression? If it's true, was the political turn influenced at all by becoming a dad?
SA: Absolutely. Look, I've got skin in the game now. Back when I was single, it just didn't matter to me as much that we had a bunch greedy, deluded maniacs holding this country's moral progress hostage. Now it does. They're fucking with my kids' future. A lot of parents—particularly prosperous, over-determined, parents like myself—get sucked inward by parenting. It's a trap, because our apathy and moral disengagement is going to cost our kids in the long run.
JAS: Ok, so, how do you escape from that trap?
SA: Again, I'm not an expert, just a concerned loudmouth. My kids are quite young. But I'm guessing, based on my limited experience, that the biggest thing is the example you set. I'm not saying we read our kids the Marx/Engel Reader at night, and ask that they recycle their poop, but we do try to send them the message that we're pretty lucky to have all the great stuff we have, that we shouldn't take it for granted, and that one of their big jobs is to learn to share. It will get more complicated as their awareness of the world grows. The idea is not to hide them from reality, or vice versa. But that's really a process, and an inconvenient one. Most parents are so exhausted by parenting that they tend to turn away from social responsibility, and toward convenience. That's just what Madison Avenue wants. Get the juice box. Get the SUV. Get the mollifying toy. I'm not suggesting that we do things perfectly. We don't. But we're trying in the ways we can.
JAS: In an op-ed you wrote for the Boston Globe back in 2009, you argue that all good parents are "de facto socialists," because they are constantly trying teach kids to share their stuff. What kind of response did you get to that column?
SA: Just what you'd expect. A few people saying, "Hey, yeah, that sounds reasonable." And a ton of folks saying, "Kill that commie!" That's American discourse at the moment.
JAS: At the end of the piece you ask—but don't really answer—"Why are Americans afraid to express their morality in the political arena in the same way they do as parents?" Why indeed? Where does that disconnect occur?
SA: In large part because our entire culture (and economy) is predicated on keeping all citizens in a state of insecurity and overstimulation and exhaustion. Also because the political system is fueled by special interest money, folks who are paid, in essence, to make sure a genuine morality doesn't intrude on the business of the government. We saw a brilliant example in the extension of the Bush tax cuts. That was about greed, pure and simple, and virtually nobody would say that. The Fourth Estate, which also runs on a for-profit model, is in the business of making money, not serving as the peoples' representative in Washington. I think most Americans see "politics" as some kind of absurd sport played on cable TV. It's become unmoored from issues of morality. And, like I say, most parents simply want to get through the day however they can. Amid the inconvenience of children, they don't want the further inconvenience of having to consider themselves moral actors.JAS: You write a lot about your (sometimes raunchy) life, and you’ve blogged for Babble about your first child’s life as a baby. Has the relationship between your life and your writing changed because of fatherhood—for example, do you feel yourself to be reluctant to write down certain experiences? As your kids get older, how are their lives going to fit into your writing, if at all?
SA: The more pressing question for me is how my writing is going to fit into their lives. And I don't entirely know the answer. Obviously, I've written a good deal about my life. But there is a realm of privacy, both for me and for my wife and kids, and that's something I take seriously. It's part of the reason I stopped blogging for Babble. And I'm sure I'll hold back on writing more and more stuff as they and their friends become readers. Nobody wants to go through adolescence with their dad taking notes and writing "humorous" columns about them. That being said, my wife and I hope we're raising the sort of kids who recognize the value of storytelling. (We had considered not teaching the children to read, but they seem to be picking it up pretty quickly.) My hunch is that they'll want nothing to do with our work. But we certainly can't hide what we do. Honesty is always the best policy. Or at least, the inevitable one.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Parenting While Male: 74 Fathers Talk about Playground Discrimination
You’ve probably heard the phrase “driving while black,” which refers to a perception that black drivers are more likely to be stopped by cops. This was whispered in the African-American community for years before it broke out into the wider cultural conversation and was gradually validated by empirical studies.
Similarly, stay-at-home dads have whispered for years about feeling unfairly targeted for "parenting while male," and recently their concerns have started to get mainstream attention. In last week's Wall Street Journal, Free-Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy explored what happens when “when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep.”
I spotted the column in a tweet from the redoubtable DadLabs. I replied: “I was once asked to leave a playground by a grandmother. I wonder how many guys have had that experience?” DadLabs tweeted back: “Most? Or faced playdate discrimination of one kind or another? #dadsnotpervs.”
This little twitter exchange echoes less-public discussion I’ve heard many times at gatherings of fathers: that they are often made to feel like outsiders at parks, playgrounds, and situations where most of the other parents are moms or grandmoms—and that their participation in playgroups or classes is sometimes rejected.
Atrocity stories circulate, but how widespread are actual "parenting while male" experiences, really? To start to get the answer, on Monday I created this survey, which as of this morning had been taken by 74 guys—60 percent of whom spend 31 or more hours a week taking care of a child. Here are the results so far:
- Three men—4.5% of the participants who answered this question—said that they had been asked to leave a playground by a caregiver.
- Twenty-four percent said that they had been refused entry to a gathering of parents and children.
- Fifty-five percent said that their parenting skills had been criticized or corrected in a public setting.
- Fifty-eight percent of participants felt that this criticism or exclusion occurred on the grounds that they are male.
- Twenty-eight percent of participants reported that they had experienced these incidents on five or more occasions.
"At first I was a little indignant. As someone who was forced into being the primary caregiver role, my confidence was already shot from losing my job, and so to have other mothers correcting me or looking at me crossways was an extra gut-punch. At some point, though, I realized being a full-time father was my role and that's what my wife and kids needed more so than a paycheck. Once I reached this mindset, what other mothers thought of me didn't matter any more. I just did the best I could, and tried to be as charming as possible. In a way, it turned the tables because most of these mothers had insecurities of their own in their role, and to come across a dad who seemed to be handling full-time parenting just fine, I think made them feel threatened.”However, a majority reported permanent changes in their day-to-day behavior and feelings as caregivers:
“In our neighborhood, people occasionally offering my wife and I unsequestered (and unwanted) advise [sic] pertaining to parenting. It generally annoys or perplexes me, but I don't believe that it has changed my behavior or attitudes, except to wonder about cultural differences to parenting and advise giving.”
“I am very reluctant to put myself out there to groups of moms with their kids. I often let my sons go and play with kids at the park and I will stand on the periphery as the other moms talk. I often feel excluded and thus am more reserved.”Some participants did not did not hear outright comments, but modified their behavior based on ambient fears about men on playgrounds:
“It certainly made me feel excluded, possibly looked-down-upon. The strange thing was that each time such criticism or behavior was couched in such a way that it excused itself. 'Of course, it's better for the children for a mother to do these things' was one comment I remember, delivered with a short, self-conscious, judgmental laugh. As though it were self-evident that I wasn't the best choice to take care of my daughters.”
“I currently tend to be more on guard, and intervene between my child and another child in a public setting. This is due to twice where an unknown parent in a public playground setting has confronted me as a parent on my child's play being unsafe or rough.”
“I avoided events/organized activities that were dominated by stay at home moms.”
“Makes me instantly defensive, so after the first incident or two, even if the comments weren't made because I was male, I probably assumed the worst and reacted as if they were.”
“I was playing t-ball with my son and a couple of other toddlers on the playground and my own wife (who arrived after I'd been there for an hour or so) pointed out that I should be careful about touching the other kids when helping them hit the ball. That surprised me, as it hadn't previously occurred to me that anybody would think it was an issue. Now I am much more self-conscious about it and try to remember to ask parents' permission in similar situations. Which is annoying.”
“I don't think I've ever been excluded from a play situation as a dad. I have had odd experiences - the mist [sic] salient here us that I've had young children who were strangers to me approach me at the playground and climb into my lab. That made me distinctly uncomfortable - I actually went and found the mom and told her about it, both to give her a heads up as to what her kid was doing with men she didn't know and also to protect myself.”It’s important to emphasize that a minority of respondents did not report any kind of overt discriminatory behavior:
“After 14 years of being a father, 11 of them as primary caregiver, I have never been asked to leave a setting nor been criticized. While I may have been ignored by the moms a few times, that is not the norm.”A few respondents felt that the discrimination had a basis in reality:
“I have never felt excluded from a playground or other public setting, nor a playgroup. All group activities related to my childrens [sic] school and peer group have been supportive of involved fathers. I have received a couple of comments about parenting choices - one was probably not without reason (I was distracting my toddler with a bottle of eyedrops and got ‘It's medicine, not a toy.’) but I found the delivery and attitude to be rude. I have never felt that the comments were made with an ‘incompetent dad’ attitude, but were specific to the action that was being criticized.”
“No change - I understand that women may not feel comfortable with a 'random guy' at the playgroup. It sucks, but I wasn't doing anything wrong so I didn't feel like changing. Plus, it's a little hard changing being a guy.”For others, discrimination provoked them to try to build a community of fathers:
“Nobody wants unattached, creepy dudes hanging around playgrounds.”
“I've never been explicitly excluded because I was a male. Criticism based on my gender only prompted me to write about being a SAHD and to make connections and build community with other like-minded parents.”
“I am very confident in the way that I parent, so I was not affected by nannies questioning my skills. Men are specifically excluded from the local mothers' group, so it wasn't personal. I did work with a friend to start a dads' group in our city.”
There was another type of response: some dads used the experience as a way to understand the experiences of others. As one guy put it, “It made me sympathetic for the bias that others feel from white men.” Nearly all of the respondents identified themselves as “white” (obviously a limitation of this survey; I plan to do something later that casts a wider net) and so I think it’s fair to say that in many cases these men were experiencing social discrimination for the first time in their lives.
I have many thoughts about the context and how to interpret these results, but first I'd like to have a discussion. Please share your reactions, thoughts, and experiences in the comments, and invite others to join the conversation through your own blogs and social media.
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