The Gun on Hampshire Street

1. This summer, we moved back to San Francisco's Mission district after a year-long sojourn in suburban Palo Alto. Three weeks ago we were putting my son to bed. He was finally drifting off, and so was I. The heavy curtains were pulled shut and it was very dark in the room. I heard sounds outside but they were phantasmagoric nighttime city sounds, spectral sirens and echoing shouts and groaning buses.

2. Then I heard a string of words, blurry but filled with fear. My eyes flew open and I was awake. The next words were absolutely clear. "He has a gun! He has a gun!"

3. We've met most of our neighbors on Hampshire Street. There's the Mexican family of six above us, who share their three small rooms with another family of three, a mother and two children who are not supposed to be there, according to the lease, who slip in and out of the apartment like ninjas. Next to them, there are the five (or six, or seven, or four?) almost-certainly undocumented Mexican men, who also live as invisibly as possible, running shadowy errands at all hours of the night. There's the nice, professional, Euro-American lesbian couple in the apartment next to ours. There's the childless, biracial, heterosexual couple next door, one an architect (I think), the other a composer (I think) who listens to Satie and Debussy in their bamboo backyard garden. On the corner, there's the self-appointed Chairman of the imaginary Hampshire Street Sidewalk Gardening Society, a gray-bearded gay man who always dresses in black from head to toe and spends his weekends trimming the leaves and watering the soil of the potted plants that line our street. There's the elderly Chinese woman who butchers and plucks chickens on her stoop, streaking the sidewalk with wine-dark blood and bone-white feathers. Then there is the house directly across from ours, the one whose picture window is covered by the proud pirate banner of the Oakland Raiders. I don't know how many people live there. I see and know the two matriarchs, one Latina, the other white. There are two very young kids, one toddler and one baby. There are two (?) pre-teen girls. There are many teenage boys, boxer shorts always visible above the low line of their jeans. Only once have have I seen a grown man enter the house.

4. Liko was awake and I was awake and my wife was awake. I crossed my arm over them and told them to lie still, and we waited. I waited for one minute, my eyes on the clock. I didn't hear anything else. No shots. There were noises of misery, but they were subdued. I asked Liko and my wife to stay where they were and I went to the window. I parted the curtains. I found our street carpeted with police cars from one end of the block to the other, their lights silently flashing. I could see a line of civilian cars beyond them, stalled and waiting. I was disoriented. How could I have not heard the police arrive? Why were they there? I watched. Two of the young men who lived across the street were on their stomachs, their hands cuffed behind their backs. One of the boys, the older of the two, had an officer sitting on him, knee in the small of his back. I looked for guns. The police had drawn theirs, shadows in their hands. There were no other weapons that I could see. Now I was aware of one of the mothers who lived there, whom I'll call Maria. Maria was hysterical, standing over the police and her sons, now crying. It was her voice that I had heard, shouting about the gun. "Daddy?" said my son. He had gotten off the bed and was standing next to me, his face next to mine against the window, taking in the cars, the police, the guns. I put my arm around him but I didn't tell him to go back to bed. Part of me wanted for him to witness what was happening, so that he would know these things happened. "Did the police get the bad guys?" he asked.

5. I went outside. The stepfather of the girls who live upstairs was already there on the sidewalk. He doesn't speak much English and I don't speak much Spanish, but in a roundabout sign-language and Spanglish way we shared what we knew, which was practically nothing. We watched as the boys across the street were hauled to their feet and pushed into the backs of police cars. We watched as the mother fled up her stoop and ran screaming into her house, wrapped in the arms of a man I had never seen before. One by one the police cars pulled away and the backed-up traffic trickled slowly down our street, the drivers' eyes wide, wondering if they had taken a wrong turn into the wrong neighborhood. Then everything was still and quiet and dark, and we, the other father and I, slipped inside, returned to our families, not knowing what had happened in front of our building.

6. That morning I was angry at the families across the street. I assumed many things. I assumed the gun in question belonged to one of the boys and that they had been engaged in some kind of criminal activity that brought the police down on them. This hadn't been my first encounter with the neighborhood's simmering violence, and I was angry with myself for having moved there and exposed my son to these things and other things, from the trash on the street to the stink of urine that we walked through on our way to school. I pledged to move back to Palo Alto as quickly as possible.

7. The following weekend one of the girls upstairs had a birthday party. They grilled and shared their steak and corn with us, and I brought up a six-pack of beer. My wife and son played a board game with the birthday girl. Then we strung up a homemade Spongebob piñata on the sidewalk and the kids took turns pounding on it with a baseball bat, enraged one minute and laughing the next. I stood there with beer in my hand. I stopped watching the kids. Instead I was looking across the street. The matriarchs were on their stoop with the youngest kids. They waved at me and I waved back. Then I crossed the street.

8. I asked what had happened the other night. I wanted to know and felt I had a right to know what happens on my street. I was polite but underneath that, I was angry with them, and at myself, for exposing my son to violence. I expected to hear, I guess, that their sons had been the targets of a stealthy drug bust, which would explain why the police cars arrived silently on our street. I expected to hear that one of their sons had pulled a gun on the police. I suppose that some part of me wanted an apology. Not just for that, but for everything. All the shit we had to deal with in the Mission. I was so fucking sick of the filth and the stench and the criminality and the weapons. The night before, a father of two had been shot and killed in back of the restaurant where he worked, five blocks away from our building. He had been sitting in the alley taking a smoke break. The newspaper said he had been killed by two gang members; it seems he had been wearing the wrong colors. I wanted an apology for that. I wanted someone to be sorry. I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind I was remembering how I had almost been killed on my birthday, three weeks before my book was released, by three young men from the Mission. They had beaten me over the head with a tire iron and pointed a gun in my face. I wanted an apology for that, too. Someone had to be responsible. Why not the mothers of these dangerous children? If they're not responsible, who is?

9. Maria told me that her two teenage sons, the ones who had been arrested, had been in trouble with the police many times. The other mother, whom I'll call Nancy, sat with us. As Maria and I talked Nancy wove in stories of her own life on Hampshire Street. Nancy's seventeen-year-old son had been shot and killed in front of our building, I discovered. He had not been in a gang, she said. He hadn't done anything wrong, his mother claimed. He just got into a fight with the wrong guy. It was after Nancy's son had been killed that things seemed to go wrong with Maria's boys. They got angry. They were kicked out of school. They were arrested for stupid things related to fighting and vandalism. The older one became intensively, obsessively protective of his brother. I stood on their stoop, the beer can warm and tight in my hand. I held my head still and I listened, and the awareness grew in the back of my mind that I was a privileged idiot, a judgmental prick, a tourist, a gentrifier.

10. The night they were arrested, the two boys had been sitting on the stoop talking, just as I was with their mother as she told me this story. A police car glided down the street, slowed, and stopped. Out jumped a police officer. The cop knew the boys. He had arrested them before. He walked up the steps, his hand resting on his gun, and demanded to know what they were doing. The cop didn't know it was their home. He didn't know about Nancy's son, probably. He didn't know anything about them, except that they were known to him. Maria's oldest went off. He yelled at the police officer, told the cop to get the fuck away from his brother and away from his house. Yes, that was not a smart thing to do. Young men often do dumb things. The cop's partner called for backup. As cars arrived, the confrontation escalated. It got physical. Maria saw the flashing lights of the police cars through her curtains--like me, she hadn't heard sirens or heard the argument outside--and she raced out of the house and saw both her boys being thrown to the sidewalk. She didn't know why. She had been talking to them not 30 minutes before, and all had been peaceful. She saw her younger son struggling as he was pushed to the cement, and as she came out of the house she saw a cop pull his gun. That's when she screamed. That's when she shouted, "He has a gun! He has a gun!"

11. I don't know how much of this account to believe; my gut feeling is that Maria was telling as much of the truth as she knew. This much is certain: neither boy was armed. It was the police who had the guns on Hampshire Street, not the boys. It was police who drew weapons outside of my sleeping son's window. The brothers were booked that night, the younger for disorderly conduct, the older for resisting arrest. The older brother was taken to the hospital for minor injuries. When the boy, eighteen years old, emerged from the ER, he didn't see any police waiting for him. He asked the nurse where they cops had gone. "They left," she said, not looking at him. "Can I go?" he asked. "I guess so," said the nurse. The boy had to walk home from the hospital. He didn't have any money or a cell phone. He couldn't call his mother. His mother didn't know where he was. As Maria told me this story, I remembered my son's question. He asked me: "Did the police get the bad guys?" The bad guys.

12. Palo Alto is a funny place; maybe it's just typical. A friend of mine once said, "Nothing can ever go wrong in Palo Alto." The streets are clean and they smell great. The schools are excellent and safe. There are no homeless, there's no visible misery. You can't buy a home for under a million and a half dollars. Everyone works for Google or Facebook or Stanford or one of a hundred start-ups. Everyone's angling for their IPO. Disaster is something that happens to people you don't know. It's other people's children who are shot on sidewalks, other people's fathers who are shot in back alleys. And you know what? Disasters will happen, but I don't want them to happen to my son. I don't want him anywhere near disaster. I don't want to ever see him bleeding on a sidewalk. We're going to leave the Mission, or at least this street in the Mission. We're not staying. You can judge me for that if you want. You can call it "white flight." You can call it anything you want. But we're ultimately leaving. (I say "we" but I should make it clear this is what I want; my wife, for the record, has a different take on things, seems willing to put up with the things I won't.) That's our personal solution. For some, there are always personal solutions. Some of us have options. We can, for example, run away.

13. We're not going to leave because of Maria or Nancy or their sons. We're not leaving because of the families or the men upstairs, our friends and neighbors. We're leaving because of the police, or what they represent. We're fleeing the front line of a war that our society is waging against poor people. The Republicans have accused President Obama of "class warfare" for suggesting that maybe possibly we could ask America's richest people for a few pennies to help finance infrastructure, education, health care--and yes, the two wars and occupations we put on a global credit card, not to mention the militarization of the border with Mexico (where tens of thousands have died in a drug war that reaches into neighborhoods like the Mission). The rich are refusing. Places like Palo Alto are refusing. Let someone else pay, they say. They're explicit: Why, there are Americans who are supposedly too poor to pay any taxes at all! Parasites! That's not fair! Or--some, not just Democrats, whisper--let's just raise the debt ceiling. Let's put it on credit. We'll pay it off later, after our IPO, after the next election. After, later, someday. Let the children pay.

14. This morning I saw the rivulets of blood flowing across the sidewalk. There on the stoop squatted the old Chinese woman, a coffee-colored Americana headless at her feet. I said hello and she did not answer. Instead she turned her face and hunched her shoulders, as though ashamed of what she was doing. I walked more quickly and plunged my hands into my pockets, my footprints bloody on the cement behind me. I felt ashamed as well. Ashamed and angry.

For a less personal, more political take on the same issues, see Sally Kohn's op-ed in Friday's Washington Post, "President Obama shouldn’t be afraid of a little class warfare."

Feeding Mei Mei, or, Drinking with a Russian

Author's Introduction:

Feeding my daughter, our second child, is an experience classifiable as something between a torture session, a séance, a joint psychotic episode, the climactic scene from The Exorcist, and the nursing of an alcoholic Russian submarine officer who has lost the ability to speak. It is this last similitude that provides the title for the following theatrical interpretation, because it is my daughter’s voracious consumption of yogurt – to the point of gagging, and gorging herself such that, when subsequently laid down for a diaper change, she looks as if a dinner plate has lodged in her stomach – it is because this ravenous consumption of yogurt is repeatedly punctuated by bellows of the most profound animal satisfaction, the most contorted expressions of burning discomfort, and the most earnest mutterings for “ma-ma,” that I can think of no more perfect comparison than with a Slavic mariner. (All offended Slavic mariners please send hate-mail separately to my blogger email).

"Drinking with a Russian"

An experimental one-act play based on leaked National Security Administration transcripts of an American father’s attempt to feed his daughter as she inexplicably channels the personality of a Russian submarine officer.

Act One

(Curtain rises to the tune of Regina Spektor's "Sailor Song". Family kitchen. Baby Squeaky is in the high chair. Enter father in kitchen apron. Prepares food at the counter, approaches baby with a tub of yogurt.)

Squeaky: Vodka!

Dad: [turning around, surprised] What?

Squeaky: Vodka! Don’t make me say it again!

Dad: Slow down and start with your yogurt. Open up!

Squeaky: Get that French shit out of my face. You know what I want! Where are you hiding it? M-BAH!

(Father closes kitchen windows, quickly spoons mouthful of yogurt to baby, who makes a sour face.)

Squeaky: Ma-ma! (slams fist on tray repeatedly)

(Father quickly spoons another mouthful of yogurt to Squeaky.)

Squeaky: (bellowing) Yes! More! (coughs) M-Bah! (slams fists on tray again)

Dad: I think we should slow down a little. You may gag if we go too fast.

Squeaky: Ah, how it burns going down. (coughs, grimaces) Another tub for everyone, all around!

Dad: This is just yogurt, Squeaky, not vodka.

Squeaky: Oh, but how it kills the pain. M-Bah! More!

Dad: OK, have some more. This is peach flavor. Remember to chew, because it has chunkies.  I can’t believe your appetite.

Squeaky: My appetite? Do you know what it’s like to live inside a tub at the bottom of the Arctic Sea? When all you hear is the ice slamming the hull, week after week after week? We get hungry down there, amerikanskiĭ.

Dad: I can’t imagine.

Squeaky: (bellows, then waves away the spoon, startled. Frenziedly grabs her left arm with her right hand. Holds her left hand in front of her face, moves fingers and studies them as if in a trance) The spiders!

Dad: What spiders!

Squeaky: Get the fucking spiders off my arm! (coughs, projecting yogurt onto father’s apron and all over the high chair tray)

Dad: Jesus, Squeaky, you just spit up the last ten minutes of my work. Now we have to start all over again. And there are no spiders on your arm.

Squeaky: (makes a toothless grimace) Wipe off the fucking spiders before they get to my head you fascist prick. (calms herself)

I remember a song we used to sing, at times like this, when the tub would get snagged on the bottom of the Baltic (raises her arms and drops them onto the table in  2/2 rhythm):

In the doorway there is standing a Cossack
His beard snowy white upon his chest
He is waiting for the lovely Natasha
She costs plenty, but she is the best

Dad: We’re gonna have to wrap that one up before mom comes home, Squeaky. Hey, why is your face so red? Are you OK? (father stands up suddenly) Are you choking? Oh my god you are red as a tomato!

Squeaky: (grunts) I’m shitting my pants. This is going to take a minute. (grunts)

Dad: Why do you do it that way, on the seat of the chair? Wouldn’t it be easier to let me help you stand up? Gravity is  your friend.

Squeaky: Do you think we had room to stand up in the bathtub, my friend? (grunts) Hit your skull on the bulkhead just once and the Americans will send you a torpedo for breakfast. Besides, after all those years, it feels better this way. (issues a final grunt, raises arms in expectation of being lifted) 

Time to swab the deck, mate.

Dad: Just like in the submarine, right? (lifts Squeaky for diaper change)

Squeaky: Full fathom five, captain. (breaks into song again)

And there is singing, and there is dancing,
And the Russian vodka is all right.
Come to the Kretchma, that's where you'll ketchma,
Drinking vodka every night

Exeunt

Fin

Trophy husband, one year later

[originally posted on August 10, 2011 at daddy in a strange land]

Exactly one year ago today, The Today Show told the entire morning-news-watching nation that I, as a stay-at-home-dad married to a doctor, was an example of a new status symbol for "alpha women." I was a trophy husband.

If you watch the entire segment linked here [having trouble embedding it, sorry]—which was pegged to a Marie Claire article for which la dra. and I had been interviewed for an hour each and in which we were reduced to a family photo and one quote about (not by) me presented very much out of context—you'll see that the NBC videographer who shot and cut the piece ignored the magazine editor's "trophy husband" framing and that good ol' Matt Lauer actually went after her for it, closing with a reference to "the guy in the piece" who said "'it's not babysitting, it's parenting." [My new catchphrase. Heh. I need to make t-shirts.]

In the intervening year, the conversation in the mainstream media and in the parentblogosphere about changing roles, especially in an uncertain economic environment, and the redefinition of fatherhood has continued. Fatherhood gets talked about in the context of a larger re-envisioning of modern manhood online, dadbloggers plan their own testosterone-centric take on the momblogger conferences only a few of us dare to crash—and yet, things like SAHDs, involved fatherhood, and equally shared parenting continue to be treated as "trend stories," as anomalous and intriguing oddities that are newsworthy because they're not "normal."

Just a week ago, AngrySAHD Josh K. wrote some guidelines on "How Not to Screw Up the Conversation About the Modern Dad" on the site of The NYC Dads Group after watching another group member and dadblogger get set up in an adversarial moms-vs.-dads conversation about parenting skills on iVillage. His "list of a few things to think about when being an involved dad, and especially when discussing it, whether it's on TV or the playground":

1. Don't be the boob.


2. Be involved in everything—not just major discipline.


3. Be on top of your stuff.

"For better or worse," he writes, "part of the 'job' of being an involved dad is helping to change the incorrect impressions people have of all dads. Set an example, live that example, and correct people when they are wrong."

I was lucky with how my Today Show experience turned out. I had no control over how the finished article portrayed me and my family, and no control over how the video piece would use us as an example of a stay-at-home-dad/breadwinning-mom family with which to introduce the topic on the show. I totally lucked out in having Matt Lauer virtually have my back and fight against the usual mom-vs.-dad, stay-at-home-vs.-work-outside-the-home adversarial framing of much of the media coverage modern parenting gets.

In a comment on the NYC Dads Group post, I wrote, "[I]n terms of how not to screw up the public conversation, a lot depends on the luck of having sympathetic allies involved in the set-up and presentation of the discussion. We can't assume folks'll have our back or be on the same page, and if they aren't and we're all by ourselves, especially if we're on their media turf, it's very easy to get steamrolled no matter our intentions."

As I said earlier, this stuff still gets portrayed in the media as the funny little human interest story, "hey look, they're doing things different [read: not normal], maybe it's a trend [read: not mainstream]." But as hinted at above, we're not waiting around for the mainstream media to tell our stories or just sitting around waiting for the day that what we're doing is so non-remarkable that there is no story. We're telling our own diverse, not-always-agreeing-with-each-other stories, moms and dads, SAH and WAH and WOTH and full-time and part-time and everything in between, in every possible permutation of "parent" and "family. We're connecting with each other virtually and IRL and creating fluid, fluent communities of interest and support, on new blogs, on Twitter, in books [like the new Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood, to which I am a proud contributor], everywhere.

And so that's how we continue to shape and "not screw up" the conversation—by having it with as many different people in as many different venues as we can. I recently had a conversation with another dadblogger about his mixed feelings on being lumped into a "trend" of redefined fatherhood when all he felt he was trying to do was raise his kid and be himself. But he was a part of it, I countered, whether he liked it or not, simply by the fact that he had chosen to talk and write publicly about who he was and how he was raising that kid, as a dadblogger. Mere presence, while not enough to make real changes, is enough to start—and I think that there are enough of us out there writing and talking about what we're doing and living to be sure that this is, indeed, the start of something.

Race is Always a Parenting Issue

[originally posted at The Good Men Project]

Last week, The Good Men Project started a conversation about race by publishing 8 articles from diverse points of view over the course of the week. However, the site launched the series last Monday with four pieces, all approaching the topic from a black/white perspective and written by black and white writers. I wrote the following response in partial reaction to the disappointing but unsurprising couching of America's continuing race problem in monochromatic terms, and it was published the next day, after, as it turns out, Daddy Dialectic's own Rad Dad Tomás Moniz' "Beautiful on All Sides," reprinted from Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood (buy your copy now!).

It seems that whenever a new conversation about race in America is started, no matter the good intentions, the starting point is always the same. The American historical experience and conception of race is grounded in the opposition of blackness and whiteness, two categories socially constructed over time in ways that have served to define “the other” as “not us” and “us” as “not them” at the same time as preserving power and privilege for one “us” over the “not us.” Thus, it’s no surprise that The Good Men Project’s call for a new conversation about race, and its intersection with what it means to be “good men,” begins with four personal, deeply felt, and honest essays that nevertheless fail to acknowledge that when we talk about race in 2011, it’s no longer enough, if it ever was, to color the dialogue in only black and white.

When I am called to put a racial or ethnic label on myself, I call myself, among other things at other times, a multiracial Asian American. I am also the stay-at-home father of two multiethnic Asian American daughters. Short version of the long story, three of my four paternal great-grandparents were Austrian Jews and all my maternal great-grandparents were from Japan (yes, my family was in camp), and I’m from LA, married to a woman who came from the Philippines when she was one. What does it all mean, and what does it matter? It means that I am a father of color of children of color in a United States in which multiracial by no means equals post-racial, and it matters a hell of a lot.

When I was a newbie SAHD in a new town, I started blogging. But before I was a dad, I was a college activist on race and diversity issues, an ethnic studies major, and a social studies teacher at a diverse, urban LA-area public high school not unlike the one I had attended myself. Issues of race and social justice were intimately intertwined with my journey as a new father—how could they not be? And so, besides writing about the archetypal SAHD-out-of-water experiences and the daily routine of diapers and naps, I co-founded a group blog for Asian American dads and joined a nascent blog whose blunt name needed no explanation, Anti-Racist Parent, which has since been renamed Love Isn’t Enough.

Countless times, I’d encounter commenters asking, “I thought this was a parenting blog! Why are you always talking about this race stuff?” For a parent of color, navigating race and racism is a parenting issue. Already, as one of the few Asian Americans at her school, my six-year-old has come home asking me why classmates insist she’s Chinese or ask her where she’s really from. And I know that it will be far too easy for my smart, personable girl who also happens to be really shy in large groups and with authority figures to get lost in the stereotype of the quiet Asian girl, and that it’s my job to monitor, teach, and intervene.

Race may be a social construction, but it continues to have real consequences upon people’s lived experiences. I know that my experiences as a biracial Asian American boy growing up in the Los Angeles of the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s (I graduated from high school just a few scant months after the National Guard used our blacktop as a staging area) will be very different from my daughters’ experiences as multiethnic Asian American girls growing up in a more conservative, more homogeneous Central Valley in the early 21st century. But I know that having a biracial black man in the White House and mixed folks a Hollywood trend doesn’t equal the end of racism, and that colorblindness leaves us unable to see, and that sometimes it isn’t enough to just love our children and hope for the best but that we must equip them with the lessons of our past, the tools with which they can shape their world, and our guidance with which they can learn to do so.

This conversation isn’t a new one, and it’s not one with an end in sight. And that’s okay. Because we don’t have this conversation for our own sakes. But as we move forward, we need to make sure that more and different voices telling more and different stories are heard, because in those different stories we will find the common experiences that bind us and learn what we don’t know we don’t know. Only then can the conversation include everyone, and move forward.

Blogging, Privacy, Porn, and the Monetization of Intimacy

Today, the Good Men Project published an essay of mine about the lines of privacy in marriage, in which I argue that spouses have both the right to secrets and the obligation to be as honest with each other as possible, using porn as a case study. That sounds like a paradox to some, I’m sure, and here I want to offer up another paradox: That in the age of transparency, we as daddy bloggers have the obligation to speak out and tell our stories—but we also have the right to privacy.

That’s probably not a controversial point with most readers (striking the balance is what we call a public persona), but I have been challenged many times to “tell the whole truth” about my life—or, in my journalism, to dig beneath the surface of what moms and dads tell me about their family lives, to get at “the real truth.” This often has a lascivious undercurrent, as when people want to know how many stay-at-home dads and moms have had affairs. There is a certain, growing strain of thinking in our culture that worries that anything we reveal in public must be a lie of some kind, that surely we’re hiding something, and of course we are. There’s tremendous pressure to reveal more, more, more. This pressure is social—but, as I’ll discuss in a moment, it’s also financial.

As I write at Good Men, this mirrors a dynamic in contemporary American marriages. Today our ideal marriage tends to be totally consuming, in that we expect total transparency and involvement from our partners. But this is a pretty new, fairly unstable (as measured by the divorce rate) social experiment we’ve got going on here in college-educated twenty-first-century America. There are other ideas of marriage that allow both partners to have extensive, separate lives outside of marriage, in friendships and community involvement—and there are ideas of marriage that allow both partners to cultivate inner lives apart from their partners. In other words, they don’t expect total transparency and disclosure. Spouses are allowed to have some privacy. Many marriages are battlegrounds between these competing ideals, with spouses fighting over every intimate inch of private ground.

A battle between transparency and privacy also rages through the public sphere, online and off. As a culture, we’ve evolved into an exhibitionistic beast in which people reveal the most intimate details of their lives through memoirs, Reality TV, social media, and blogs—and in my view, it’s no accident that this exhibitionism has grown up alongside the rise of the Christian Right in American culture and politics. Moral absolutism goes hand in hand with the assault on privacy, feeding each other. From this perspective, Mark Zuckerberg and Mike Huckabee are allies. We’re at the point where people who cultivate private lives seem suspicious: “If you’re not doing anything wrong, why hide?”

In my Good Men essay, I write the following:

In marriage, disclosure and transparency are important—but we must also recognize the genuine doubts and anxieties that hold our spouses back from being completely honest with us. In fact, I’d go further and argue that to make our confessions compulsory robs them of their power. It’s the struggle to reach the point of confession that defines us, not the split-second catharsis of confession all by itself. To put it another way, truth is a road we build as we travel, not a destination. We don’t have to tell everybody everything all at once.

I’d like to suggest that the same principle applies to disclosure in public life, especially for those of us who write about marriage and family on blogs, in books and magazines, through social media. In both in marriage and in the culture at large, for individuals, honesty is important—but it should not be obligatory. In the essay I mention that I had a conversation with my wife about pornography, but I don’t feel the need to share the details of that conversation with you, dear reader, though doing so would doubtless drive traffic and catalyze outrageous comments that would feed the search machine that would drive even more traffic, and thus generate advertising dollars (if we took ads here, which we don't).

In a very real way, we now live in an economy of confession. Our intimate details can be monetized.

It’s up to each person how monetized they want to be. No one makes any money off this blog (and no one ever will). But I’m a writer and I’ve written about my life in blogs and magazines and books, and I’ve gotten paid for it. I have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and you’re welcome to friend or follow me. But I have rules and lines I’m not willing to cross, which have been set with my wife’s input. We’re selective. I defend our right to be selective. It’s our call, not yours, and people who wants to violate the boundaries we set can go fuck themselves.

So why talk about my private life, or write about other people’s private lives, at all? Why be a daddy blogger? Why write personal essays? Some people do indeed think I should just shut up—more than a few folks have implied that I do this for some combination of money or attention. These are often the same people who demand “the whole truth.” And let’s not pussyfoot around: money is nice, because we need it for food and shelter and books. Attention is important because in our economy attention, like intimacy, can be monetized. And vanity is also a factor in all writing.

However, “the real truth” is that there are better ways to make a living than to write about fatherhood and family. In fact, I suspect doing so has caused some serious damage to the rest of my career as a journalist. Many potential employers worry about hiring a guy who speaks out openly about prioritizing family. Many journalistic employers simply don’t take family issues seriously—I don’t seem “serious” to them since I write about “soft” things like male caregiving. I should be covering wars, business, technology. Man things.

So, again: Why do it? I do it because parents get a raw deal in our society and I want to do something to make it easier for us. I see my writing about fatherhood to be a form of political and cultural activism—among other things, through my work I’m campaigning for more people to recognize that today’s fathers have caregiving responsibilities that demand new public and workplace policies, stuff like paternity leave and flextime. I think a narrow, rigid definition of masculinity has caused an incredible amount of damage to our psyches, our bodies, our marriages. Redefining fatherhood and masculinity demands that we strive to be honest about our lives—to tell the truth, for example, about how we feel when we denied access to our children through divorce or workplace pressures. The more honest we can be, the more powerful our stories will be.

But that is not the same as arguing for verbal diarrhea. As Ernest Hemingway knew and practiced so well, power can also arise from what we choose not to say, from the silences that surround the words we speak. I’ve never been sold on the idea that men and women speak separate languages, but there is certainly a hardboiled male mode of communication (not shared by all men or all cultures) that seeks an artful modulation between silence and confession, secrets and disclosure, which can create a deep pressure that turns men’s inner lives into diamonds. I try to give that tradition—the one that defined our grandfathers—the respect it deserves, and I try to learn from it, build on it, use it to redefine who we are as guys.

I also believe that there are other priorities that can and should undermine public “honesty.” There’s the privacy of our spouses and children; there’s the pressure of our careers, which are the means of supporting our families. These things are important. There are also secrets, our own and others’, that we want or need to protect. That’s OK. Resisting the assault on privacy and the monetization of intimacy (of which porn is an example, incidentally) is a form of activism as well.

I’m not sure if what I’m saying will be useful to you, dear reader—this is a meditation, not a set of guidelines. And those lines, I’d like to suggest, are something that each of us much draw for ourselves, on our own.

Heads or Tails

I usually give Polly and Pip a bath three times a week – on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. While they do most of the bath stuff together, there are a couple of differential moments when some kind of choice between the two of them must be made. The first moment comes at the beginning when we have to decide whether or not to use bubble bath. The second moment arrives in the middle when I have to identify who will get their scrub-down first. The third moment arises at the end when one child must get out and be dried and clothed while the other is allowed to stay in the water and play a bit longer.

For Monday and Wednesday, these differential moments are easily handled through the taking of turns: on Monday its Pip’s turn to select the type of bath they will have, to get washed down first, and to stay in the water longer; on Wednesday its Polly’s turn to do these things. Friday, however, presents a dilemma. On Fridays I get to choose whether or not to use bubble bath (usually not, since it’s almost impossible to wash the bubble bath suds out of the kids hair), but I don’t want to have to keep track from week to week which child got to go first and stay in the bath longer. We already have too many of instances of turn taking that I have to keep straight as it is and with the time interval being relatively long, I just wind up getting confused about who did what when. So, I decided to flip a coin instead.

Now, the coin flip is a decision-making technique with which I have an ambivalent history. My parents used it occasionally to resolve competing claims between my sister and me over who got to sit in the preferred seat in the car or who got to choose what music we would listen to. I remember the coin flip being a constantly frustrating experience for me because when it was her turn to choose heads or tails, my sister would always take the latter and win. When it was my turn, I would guess one or the other and generally lose. This sense of being beaten down by the gods of chance was only sharpened by my inability to complain or appeal to anyone. Of course, it was these very qualities that made the coin flip so appealing to my parents and why I was happy to inflict this exercise upon Polly and Pip.

*****

To make the whole coin flip a bit more of a production, I developed a ritual that turns the thing into a lesson in probability. To start with I tell Pip and Polly that there are two sides to the coin, heads and tails. Then I show them what each side looks like. Next I tell them that because the coin is evenly weighted, there is an equal chance that after being tossed in the air, the coin will come up heads or tails. Then I add that, as we do this week after week, the coin will come up heads and tails approximately the same number of times, meaning that over time you each will get to stay in the bath longer about the same number of times. Finally, I ask one of them to call it in the air.

Now those of you who have some experience with probability might notice a problem with this ritual. While my description of the probability at work in the single coin flip was correct, my characterization of the long-term results was not. In order to get the long-term evenness between heads and tails that I was describing to Pip and Polly, the only thing that can be allowed to vary is the flipping of the coin. But, by letting Polly or Pip call heads or tails, I introduced a second variable. This second variable means that in any given flip there are four possible results – child selects heads, coin lands heads; child selects heads, coin lands tails; child selects tails, coin lands heads; child selects tails, coin lands tails. While within these possible results there is still an even chance between ‘wins’ and ‘losses’ for a given flip, the second variable – the child’s choice – does not possess the same evenness in probability as the flipping coin. In fact the child’s choice must be considered completely random in that there is no way to predict over a series of flips how many times the child will choose a given side of the coin. This means that the win/loss balance for this series of flips will also be completely random. The fairness that I promised to Polly and Pip was a lie.

*****

It took me about four weeks to realize my mistake. At that point I made the easy fix and permanently assigned heads to Pip and tails to Polly. These will be their assigned sides from now until I no longer have to arbitrate these choices for them.

*****

I don’t know that Polly or Pip will ultimately appreciate the amount of consideration I have given to this otherwise insignificant moment in their Friday morning routine, but it feels like a small victory to me. In my daily work with Polly and Pip I don’t often get to put aspects of my formal education to work in such recognizable ways. There was something satisfying in doing so, in taking a stab at something, sensing that there was a problem with my approach to it, and then working out from my memory what I needed to do to fix it. It was my own little internal game, one of which Polly and Pip will never be the wiser, and it made me happy that I got it right.

Switch Hitting: How Women's Soaring Economic Power is Changing Men and Fatherhood

Here's the video from a presentation I gave with my friend and collaborator Christine Larson at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Chris outlines the nature and trajectory of women's rising economic power; I come in at the end with some opinions about how men and families should respond. Please share!

In other news, next month PM Press will publish Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood, which combines the best pieces from this blog and the award-winning zine Rad Dad, two kindred publications that have tried to explore parenting as political territory. As I edited the book, I kept getting choked up, and once actually cried--these are incredibly powerful and sometimes extremely funny essays about the birth experience, the challenges of parenting on an equal basis with mothers, the tests faced by transgendered and gay fathers, and parental confrontations with war, violence, racism, and incarceration.

I'll be promoting it with coeditor Tomas Moniz at book fairs and playgrounds around the country. Here's the schedule so far:

Timberland Regional Library, Olympia, WA
Wednesday, August 03, 2011 at 7:30 PM
Special Guest: Nikki McClure, Sky Cosby and others

Richard Hugo House, Seattle, WA
Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 7:00pm
Special Guest: Corbin Lewers

Powell's City of Books on Burnside, Portland, OR
Friday, August 5th, 2011 at 7:30pm
Special Guest: Ariel Gore

Zephyr Books, Reno, NV
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 6:00 pm

The Avid Reader, Davis, CA
Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 7:30 pm

Brooklyn Bookfair, Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, September 18, 2011

Bluestockings, Manhattan, NY
Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 7:30pm
Special Guest: Ayun Halliday

Woodenshoe Anarchist Collective, Philadelphia, PA
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 7:00 pm

Baltimore Bookfair, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, September 24, 2011

Reach And Teach, San Mateo, CA
Saturday, October 1, 2011 at 3:00 pm

New Parents Expo, Manhattan, NY (tentative)
Sunday, October 16, 2011

In October, Tomas and I will organize "Out of the Bookstores and into the Playgrounds," a series of guerilla readings at playgrounds throughout the Bay Area. Want to help organize one or just bring one of us to your town to talk about the book? Contact me at jeremyadamsmith (at) mac.com.

Not that I timed it but...

...available right now from Microcosm is the latest issue of Rad Dad! Here's their review:

Hot on the heals of Rad Dad 19, we're excited to announce the release of issue 20! This issues features articles about special needs children, traditional Japanese grandparents, queer male allies, and an interview with Brian Heagney—the author, illustrator, and publisher of the kid's book, The ABCs of Anarchism. Some of this issue is learning lessons from your children—or even them teaching you lessons—and as always, Rad Dad is a forum and a source of hope that parents and children can one day be welcomed in radical spaces. This is important reading—vital stuff for parents and nonparents alike.

The Blue Balloon

No balloon is long for this world. The one Jr. picked that morning was no different, but unlike others it was also bound for glory. Sky-blue and proud of itself, it held taut the longest tether that Jr. had yet attempted to handle, rising a full length above the other three at our table. When the end-of-year preschool party was over and the moms began breaking down the decorations, Jr. saw that his chance had come. He told me what I already knew – that he wanted a balloon, the blue one – so I asked the mom if she would pass it to him as she was cutting the ribbons. She did, and it was his. Jr. was given stewardship of this young balloon, and the young balloon, that morning, consented.

There have, of course, been others before the blue balloon, and this spring the crop of inflatables has been especially rich. There was the dark blue balloon from the year’s first outdoor birthday party, which roamed the playground with the others like a pack of forest animals, until it nestled in Jr.’s lap for the ride home. There was the orange one, extracted from a forgotten goody bag and notorious for having become deranged in the car on the first day of driving with the windows down. And then there was the Mylar Elmo, the birthday balloon that gave such joy at first, then wasted away in a lingering decline, sinking lower and lower over the course of weeks and drifting piteously about the house at knee level, eventually settling into a corner like an arthritic old dog, still shiny with red fur and big white eyes, but shivering on the kinds of household drafts to which only balloons are sensitive.

We weren’t out the door before Jr. called to me and pointed above his head, where the balloon was bobbing gently against the dining hall ceiling. I brought it down to him and told him that with this balloon he had taken some real responsibility. It was young and wild and had ideas of its own. It was spring and windy and we had errands to do. We weren’t going to lock this one into the car until we docked safely in the garage and could turn it loose in the house, as we usually did. There was no fooling around this time: if he didn’t hold on tight, the blue balloon was gone. 

Having said that, I admit that it was not a good idea for me to open the car’s sunroof as soon as we hit the road. I had not sufficiently internalized our trial balloon safety program –implemented just days before -- the one that advised keeping all the windows rolled halfway up when a balloon was being transported, for the sake of the balloon, the driver, and the longevity of all passengers. For some reason this rule did not seem to apply to the sunroof of a car on a magnificent spring day. The blue balloon, prevented from escaping out any of the windows, saw the sunroof slide open and shot upward to take advantage of the oversight. The ribbon pulled tight and began humming like a sheet in a storm, the balloon flying up above the car a good four or five feet. “Yes!” I could hear it saying, “Faster! Faster!” 

“Jr., pull it back!” I cried, helping with one hand to reel it in. I closed the sunroof. 

Jr. then realized that he had to monitor all the dangerous forces that were out to get the blue balloon, including his father. He took great care, as we set out on our neighborhood errands, to wrap the last few feet of balloon ribbon around his hand and wrist before rolling up alongside me on his bicycle. Depending on our direction of travel, the balloon would trail behind us, or blow ahead of us, or swirl in crazy circles as we passed through invisible vortices.  Jr. pulled the balloon down as we ducked into doorways, and reeled it in when we crossed a windy intersection or turned a blind corner. He inspected the ribbon each time he dismounted his bike. His only failure was to forget the balloon when we stopped to visit a dog on the porch of a neighbor. 

“Jr., where’s your balloon?” I asked a few feet from the porch. Whatever expression had been on Jr.’s face the moment before fell to the ground together with his bicycle, and he ran in his preschooler way back to the porch to retrieve the balloon. It had waited for him, despite the breezes and all the temptations of spring. I wondered if Jr. had begun to win its loyalty.

The parking lot at Grandpa’s building is a treacherous place. A narrow space between two high-rises that face Lake Michigan, it is almost always windy, and on windy days, it is a permanent gale. I parked the car and began to assemble my bags and the armful of Jr.’s things that always went with him to Grandma and Grandpa’s. I unbuckled Jr. from his car seat and stepped back to let him scramble out as he saw fit. He had shown such maturity in his care of the blue balloon that I did not nag him, as I might have otherwise, to check his wrist wrappings.

They were undone. Jr. was doing something with the car seat buckles while the ribbon hung loose inside the car. Whatever loyalty the balloon had displayed on the porch was instantly overcome by the force of the wind and the attraction of the open blue sky. 

“Jr. your balloon!”

“Daddy can you…”

“No.”

It flew away faster than I could run, horizontally across the parking lot and then, as if sensing a new-found freedom and exulting in the height of the towers around it, up and up and up. I was amazed at how high it had gone so quickly.

Jr. began to cry. “Balloon!” I picked him up. Should I take him inside and avoid this spectacle? Would that make it any easier? I didn’t move. We watched it go higher and higher, up over the building next door, a sky-blue balloon almost invisible against the blue spring sky. After a minute, it disappeared, headed north, downtown, towards the glass and spires of the tallest buildings in North America.

“Balloon!”

Later that week, Jr. saw the pictures I had taken of his time with the blue balloon. Something shifted in his expression, and he ran to the sofa.

“I’m very proud of how you took care of that balloon,” I told him. And I truly was.

“Where do you think it went?”

“Up to the top of the Sears Tower,” I said. “Then maybe up to Wisconsin. Maybe it even got to Canada. Wouldn't that be something!”

It was, after all, quite a balloon.

Reflections On Time: Part I

I have never been more aware of TIME than I have as a parent.

It has become more intimate to me, like an old friend. I have seen how it can change, moment to moment. I understand its' need to march on.

There I am, on the playground, helping Maddie, now 2, navigate the play structures. She is hesitant, curious, so NEW to it all. Other children rush by, so loud and clumsy. I worry about them trampling my young daughter. They touch her, to help, to play, and I go on high alert, wary of their influence. I wonder where the parents are, appalled at their lack of supervision.

And then, I BLINK, and I am on the other side. We are at the very same park. Maddie, now 4, runs across the sand. She stops to help a toddler off the slide. The mother is there, smiling, but nervous, scanning the play area. I know she is looking for me, the unseen parent, safely ensconced on my bench, my iPhone in hand.

There I am, in our bedroom, holding my 3 month old daughter, Juliet, content and peaceful, listening to the world spin outside.

I BLINK and I am suddenly in the car, racing to pick up Maddie from preschool. Racing to the grocery store. Racing to her soccer class. Making dinner. Giving her a bath. Reading books. I do not notice when night falls anymore, but I know it will happen, and I am not surprised when I look out and see the moon instead of the sun.

I cherish the still moments of the day now, and appreciate any TIME that is given to me.

All I need is 5 minutes...to do a load of laundry, or wash the dishes, or pay some bills, or take out the trash, or read the newspaper, or mow the lawn, or hang a picture, or check email. I have learned to chip away at tasks. Maddie's playhouse is about halfway complete, built entirely in 20 minute intervals. I have been working on it for 2 years now.

Having an hour...Wow. I cannot even conceive of this notion. My mind overheats.

I think about the future a lot and I try to prepare.

I think about the past a lot, too, with a warm fondness and a deeper appreciation.

All I can do is play along and hope that TIME is kind to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GroDErHIM_0

(more stories, musings, and reverie @ www.googoodadda.com)

A Day at the Park

This essay is excerpted from the new anthology Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood:

1. I’m unsure why, but I get asked—quite often—about the hardest part of being a father. The people who ask me this are almost all younger cats who are about to become fathers or are there already. That question is a Pandora’s Box. Being a father is hard in a million different ways: Balancing fatherhood with partnership; being able to do the things that I love to do on a consistent basis (for example, writing—I’m writing this at 3am, while everyone is asleep and I have a moment to myself); the loss of money; having to send your child to childcare because both parents have to work to afford all the additional costs. Working all day, coming home at night and only seeing your child for forty-five minutes before their bedtime—in these ways and more, daddyhood is hard as hell. But none of this (yes, even the money problems) even comes close to the raging difficulty of being a father of color.

2. Being tattooed, visually Black (I’m half Jamaican and half Puerto Rican), over six feet tall and muscular, holding a little ethnically-ambiguous toddler makes many people double, triple, quadruple take—and also, for some odd reason, loosens tongues, mostly of white folks, and creates an environment of familiarity. And yet they still manage to see me wrong: In my daughter’s twenty-two months of living, I have been labeled ‘uncle,’ ‘babysitter,’ ‘guardian,’ ‘cousin,’ but never father. I can’t tell you just how crushing a blow this is. I LOVE being a father and I think that I am becoming a better one by the day, but to have one of my greatest joys discounted is painful.

3. Do we really live in a society that is still stuck in the lie that Black men cannot be fathers? Well…I must admit that I was on that same shit for a while. When my partner told me she was pregnant, I had fears that, at the moment of birth, a Greyhound ticket would appear in my hands and I’d leave my partner and new child to fend for themselves. I thought I’d become an absent father sleeper agent—the baby’s first cry would activate me and my mission would be to get as far away from mother and baby as possible. Because, throughout my whole childhood, I never once had a friend or met anyone (of color) whose father lived with them, or in some cases, even knew who their fathers were. There is a generation of brothers and sisters born after Viet Nam and before the release of Ghostbusters that are a tribe of fatherless children. My own father, I saw the bastard five times in my life.

4. People mistaking me for everything but being a father almost invariably happens at the playground. While the mothers (rarely do I see fathers at the playgrounds—but it could be where I choose to let my daughter play) are sitting in groups, either texter-bating or focusing intently on some new piece of thousand dollar baby gadget—I’m in the sand, on the structure, kicking the ball. I’m playing with my kid. Over at this park in El Cerrito, California, I was teaching my daughter how to hang from one of the monkey bars. She is a ridiculously daring kid and will try anything, as long as it is dangerous. This kindly older woman (dressed up like a fashion model to go the park) smiled at me and said, “My uncle used to do the same thing for me. He always let me do the things that my father would never let me do.” She drew out the “never” as if I was tossing my daughter over an open lion’s mouth. I told this woman that I was an only child, that my kid didn’t have any uncles, and that I was her father. She glanced between my daughter and me several times, and finally said, “Noooooo.” Wow.

5.When I think about it more, not being recognized or acknowledged as my daughter’s father, while painful, isn’t nearly as crazy as being a man-of-color at a park. When race, size, gender, and how we dress intersect, it disrupts social fabrics. Like I stated earlier, I play with my kid while at the playground. And if my daughter decides to play with other kids, I play with them too. I don’t touch them, because you just don’t do that—you don’t touch other people’s kids without permission. One day I was kicking a soccer ball with my daughter and some other little kids she was playing with. One of the kids, a blonde, vacant-eyed little girl, tripped, fell down, and scraped her cheek on the wood that bordered the play area. I helped her to her feet and asked her if she was okay. She looked over at her mother, who was starting intently at her cellular phone, and got nothing. She then looked at me, I looked at her, and she wailed as though the end of the world was nigh. The cellular mom looked up, fixed me with the most baleful stare, and ran over to us, dialing her phone. Instead of asking her daughter if she was okay, she snatched her up by the arm and thrust her behind her back. I then hear her telling her husband “this big nigger just pushed Miriam to the ground.” Unbelievable.

6. I gathered our things, and made to leave. This lady then blocked our way. “You can attack a kid, but now that my husband is coming you’re trying to leave? You’re not going anywhere.” She then put her hand on my arm and tried to stop us. All the while my daughter is getting freaked out because she is very rarely exposed to yelling or overt signs of anger. Being who I am, I figured, “Let’s see how this plays out.”

7. Three minutes later, an SUV pulls up and this really fit dude pops out of the truck and comes barreling towards us. I see that he has his fist cocked a little. I put my daughter down and send her to go and play, which she was grateful for. I could feel just how tense and anxious she became. This guy comes up and started screaming at me. Before fatherhood, I would have gone at him, but I have been trying to change that part of myself; violence is a social ingredient that I am weaning myself from. When he finally paused, I asked him did he think that yelling and threatening me was going to do any good? I then asked him why neither he nor his wife had asked Miriam what had happened. I then asked them, “If I were a white dude, would you still think that I pushed your daughter?” That stopped them. All this time that the silly adults are going at it, little Miriam is clinging to her mother’s legs, terrified. “Your daughter fell, and I helped her up.” I focused on the mother: “And if you weren’t so busy looking at your phone, if you were actually parenting, you would have seen what happened. Better yet, it might not have even happened if you were playing with us.” Then I looked at the dad: “I can appreciate your concern, but if this is how you react to situations you know nothing about, you might get hurt. If this was two years ago, I would have beat the shit out of you for yelling in my face and pretending like you were going to do something.” I then bent down and asked Miriam if she was okay. She looked at her parents, and then at me, and nodded. I took out a wipe and wiped her scraped cheek. “Does it feel better now?” She nodded. I gave her dad the dirty wipe, and went to go and play with my daughter.

8. That encounter still nags at me on a number of different levels. Miriam’s parents never answered my question: If I were white, would they still have accused me of hurting their daughter? My honor as a father and as a human being was totally disregarded. Two children had to experience the stupidity of their elders: Miriam’s parents for false accusations and racist words, and me for delivering veiled threats. I lost that day. I lost the core of the person who I am trying to become. I lost hope that my daughter would be able to live in a world where skin color wasn’t a factor. I lost faith that the rift between white and black folks could ever be repaired.

9. As we were driving home, I started to cry. It came up and spilled out so powerfully that I had to pull the car over, turn it off, and just let everything come: Not having a father of my own to ask if he had to deal with anything similar; almost dipping into self-hatred because of my skin color; cursing so many men that came before me for fucking it up for my generation; every nigger I have been and would be called; how my daughter’s hair is different than her parent’s and how people point out this difference as if my kid had won the lotto. All this was trapped in my crying. I saw my daughter through the rearview mirror and she looked so sad and scared that I had to hold her. I pulled over, got her out of her car seat, and we sat on the hood of the car, holding each other. I cried into her hair and she, feeling daddy’s energy, cried into my chest. We were there for a little while when this old woman hobbled by and smiled at us. “You have such a beautiful daughter,” this woman said. “She has your eyes.”

Editor's note: Welcome to Shawn Taylor, the newest addition to the Daddy Dialectic line-up. This essay is included in Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood, which collects some of the best pieces from this blog and the allied print zine Rad Dad. Order an advance copy now!

Breaking Down a Real Lemon

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.


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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.