Today in the Annals of Incompetence

Not Matt's work.

Most parents get very little proper training in the art of raising children. But you know what? We learn a lot of it along the way. Diapers are changed at first tentatively, then smoothly, so that eventually you can do it at 2 a.m., in the dark, naked, without your glasses—indeed, without remembering that you even got out of bed to do it.

Psychological techniques evolve, too: the bargaining, the manipulation, the sneaky tradeoffs. (“Okay, I’ll get you an ice cream cone, but you have to promise to be good for the rest of your life, okay?”) After a year or two of parenting, you even get to the point where you can visualize the other things you’re going to have to learn along the way. It all seems like it’s beginning to make sense.

Then comes something unexpected. In my case, it’s the ponytail. Now, for most of my life, I’ve had relatively little hair. I think in maybe 8th or 9th grade, I tried to grow my hair out long in hopes of replicating the Tony Hawk over-the-eye SoCal ‘do. It didn’t work, and so I’ve spent decades closely cropped, sometimes almost to the point of skinheadedness.

Which is to say: Until recently, I had never put a person’s hair in ponytails. My little sister never asked me to, nor did any of the cute girls in high school. And my wife, Jean, has always been able to take care of that task herself.

But now Sasha is into ponytails, and in a big way. She wears them almost every day, sometimes one in back, sometimes one on each side, and it’s a pretty smart idea—if not, her hair falls messily into her face. Yuck. Often, Jean is the one wrapping her hair up in colorful, fake-gem-accented bands. But almost as often, it’s me. And I invariably fuck it up.

I mean, I understand the basic principle: push through, twist, repeat. But somewhere along the way, it gets messed up, usually toward the end when the loops get tight and my fingers fat and clumsy. No, that’s not right: It gets messed up from the very beginning, because I don’t actually know how to arrange and separate and pull up the hair into a proper proto-ponytail shape before threading it through the elastic. And so, even if I do manage to produce some semblance of a ponytail, a closer look will usually reveal that it’s horrifically flawed, the work of a half-blind mental patient with hooks for hands.

Of course, I know that with practice I’ll improve. But what really gets me about this is how it took me by surprise—I never expected to have to do ponytails!—and has me worried about the future. What other skills will I suddenly be required to master?

The Mind Does What It Will (and usually that’s worry)

Stress!

It’s been a month since I was hit by a car while riding my bike in Manhattan, and I feel strong enough by now to start telling people that I’ve moved beyond the Recovery phase and into that of Rehabilitation. This is a good thing, I feel, even if it means that I’ve become one of those irritating optimists who talk incessantly about the power of good cheer and the need to “live strong.” I can accept that—the accident helped me locate a heretofore unknown reserve of good attitude, and my body has rewarded me for those positive spirits by being less than fully destroyed and disfigured. Seems a fair trade for being a jackass.

One of the odder aspects of this whole episode is that I have no memory of the wreck. The last thing I can recall is telling my wife goodbye in the morning—and then I woke up, some twelve hours later, in a hospital bed, wanting to know what had happened.

To her great misfortune, my wife, however, was present for most of those lost hours, and she has filled me in on a few of the details (leaving out some of the gorier ones, I suspect). It seems that I was awake in the trauma center, before surgery, as the doctors stitched my various lacerations. This, I have been told, was painful, and I did a fair amount of wailing. Because of my head injury, I had no short-term memory, and I kept repeating the same questions to her and my doctors, no matter how many times those questions were answered.

It seems the pressing concern for me, other than ouch, was that if Tomoko (my wife) was with me, then who was with Ellie? And who was going to pick JP up from his mother that evening? Even hours later when I came to and had some memory, I felt extremely anxious about these two things, and it took some convincing for me to accept that the children were all right and being properly looked after.

There’s much to take from this. I already knew that I loved my kids and that they were the first priority in my life—but no harm in having it proved publicly. Another factor here, though, is the dominant—and stress-inducing—role that childcare plays in the lives of families with two working parents. Yes, I was concerned about my children because I love them (the accident, which provoked an outpouring of love for the kids, and my ever-enduring wife, also made that clear to me), but also because who will pick up the kids each night is important in our lives, the scheduling rules us, and some part of me was aware that a small matter of being struck by a moving vehicle did not exempt me from my responsibilities.

Regardless, I love you, Ellie and JP; and I love you, Tomoko, and I am sorry for the accident and all that comes from it.

I Scream (and Scream and Scream) About Ice Cream

20120404-110315.jpgThe weather in New York has been warm and gorgeous of late, and that means the beginning of a particularly NYC-ish phenomenon: screaming about the overreach of entitled parents in Brooklyn!

I’m just kidding—that’s a year-round phenomenon. But the latest case hits home with me in a surprising way. Here it is, courtesy of the New York Post:

Overprotective Park Slope parents have declared war on a treasured rite of spring: an ice cream in the park.

The icy rebuke of the time-honored tradition erupted on the Park Slope Parents online group when one mother described her son’s meltdown in Prospect Park after she put the ixnay on a acksnay.

“Along with the first truly beautiful day of the year, my son and I had our first ruined day at the playground,” the poster named Sarah somberly recounted. “Two different people came into the actual playground with ice cream/Italian ice push carts. I was able to avoid it for a little while but eventually I left with a crying 4-year-old.”

Now, while I don’t support the proposed ban on ice-cream trucks and carts that the Post only round-aboutedly mentions, I do feel for the parents. That’s because this week a Mr. Softee (sp?) truck has set up shop outside the public elementary school that lies directly between Sasha’s preschool and the subway home. It’s absolutely impossible to get from one to the other without her noticing, even if we walk on the other side of the street.

“Ice cream truck!” she’ll yell. “冰淇淋車!”

“No, Sasha,” I’ll say. “It’s ‘damn ice cream truck.’ Got it?”

“Damn ice cream truck!”

Don’t get me wrong: It’s not that I don’t like ice cream, or that Sasha’s lactose-intolerant, or that I begrudge her a sugary snack. It’s that Mr. Softee ice cream is total shit—horrible, chemical-tasting, fatty shit. Once, I gave in and bought Sasha a soft-serve cone and let her work on it a while before giving it a lick myself. Instantly my mouth was full of the flavor of artificial fat, blobby and bland and vomitous. I felt sick the rest of the evening.

What I prefer, and what we most often do, is emerge from the F train in Brooklyn and get a cone of real, good ice cream at Van Leeuwen: strawberry is Sasha’s favorite, although she’ll sometimes opt for chocolate. That stuff is good! Organic, too, if you care about that sort of thing, which Park Slope Parents apparently does:

Please be assured that we in no way object to the sale of ice cream in Prospect Park, as long as:

-The milk and cream are from organically-fed and hormone-free dairy cows raised within 50 miles of Brooklyn in barns built of reconstituted plastic bottles (in the shape and color of actual wood, so as not to frighten the cows with unfamiliar architecture). Milk should be removed from the cows in a nurturing and supportive manner.

-The eggs, if any, are from free-range chickens specifically labeled “Certified Humane.” (For please note that “cage-free” does not necessarily mean that their beaks have not been removed; note also that the best ice cream recipes do include egg.)

-Transportation of these ingredients should take place only in compost-fueled vehicles, through companies that voluntarily provide family health insurance, including birth control, to all employees including those in same-sex relationships.

–Needless to say this ice cream should not contain any dyes or additives linked to ADHD. Any other acceptable additives must be labelled either “Israeli-Friendly” or “Palestinian-Friendly” so Co-Op members are able to make an informed consumer choice..

Ice cream vendors that follow these simple guidelines are welcomed– nay, encouraged!– within Prospect Park, with the exception of a few specific areas:

Our objection is to the vendors that sell the ice cream within the borders of the playgrounds.

Our children are very often using their playground-time to prepare for their preschool entrance interviews, and thus any distractions have a direct and negative impact on their future.

At least that’s what our Nannies tell us.

Holy shit! Park Slope Parents have a sense of humor? Someone go tell the New York Post!

 

Back from the Amazon, with Useless Thoughts on Parenting

By Amazon, I mean the jungle, not the online megastore. I was in Peru last week for Roads & Kingdoms, and spent some time in the jungle near the delightfully seedy Amazon outpost of Iquitos.

There were children in the camp where I stayed for three days, preschoolers and kindergarten-aged kids of the workers who took care of the place. The camp was an hour’s walk into the jungle, so the kids lived with grandparents during the week so they could go to school.

They were, in lots of respects, like any other kids. The older boy had some colored pencils and was drawing and doing his homework, writing short sentences. But there was a lot of the stuff you might expect from indigenous people in the Amazon: these weren’t undiscovered tribes or anything of that nature, but they were kids who played with hollowed-out turtles shells and piles of ash from the fire, who helped salt the fatty meat of a giant jungle rat their father had shot in the jungle, kids who lived in a world without strollers, scooters, diapers.

Fast forward a few days, and after a sleepless redeye flight from Lima, I go straight from the airport to a previously scheduled tour of a Universal Pre-K program in the Upper West Side: we are a day away from having to rank schools that we most likely will not get into, so I am trying to make up for my chronic absenteeism with heroic acts of post-flight school visitation.

As people familiar with the process might know, Universal Pre-K tours on the Upper West Side are largely composed of some of the craziest white women on the planet. To whit:

“I don’t like this at all, so chaotic,” whispers one under her breath when we walk into a classroom that was PERFECTLY CALM and NEAT.

“What schools have you been to? I’ve seen PS 165, 163, 84, 92 and oh my god we didn’t get in anywhere last year and here’s the letter I wrote the superintendent of schools explaining why they just HAD to let us in,” upon which she produces said letter from a oversize purse in which, it turns out, she also carries around her two-year-old’s REPORT CARD.

“It’s all black kids in that school, and I didn’t want my daughter to be the only white kid in class, which is why it’s great to find you guys, let’s get together and all put our white kids in class together!” This much was said at a VERY HIGH VOLUME walking to another school tour on Adam Clayton Powell in the middle of Harlem, by a woman I had only just met, within earshot of at least a half-dozen mystified ACTUAL BLACK PEOPLE who must have felt like some new portal had opened up through which they were suddenly witnessing the founding moments of a real-life white-person cabal.

It’s natural to be irritated by all of this foolishness, especially given the lack of sleep and the absolute foolishness of that foolishness. However, my dislocation did not stop at the Pre-K tours. No, instead, I’ve been full of lessons from my (brief) time in the Amazon over the past days here, and it’s gone a bit overboard. Bike helmets? Who needs them? Kids in the Amazon don’t have ’em. Toys? Just give ’em a pile of ash and a turtle shell. It’s fine as long as the little bits of meat are scraped off. Dinner? Lots of rats in New York City, where’s my gun?

This, of course, is completely useless to people who are trying to actually raise children in the first world, people like my wife, who I think is sadly getting used to my returning from the developing world with new, inflexible ideas about how kids should be raised. Somehow I see kids surviving in desperate poverty all over the world and then my own kids suddenly have new standards they have to live up to.

I’ll say it so you don’t have to: thinking that I’ve been enlightened by two days in the Amazon and then making everyone suffer my new revelations back home is, as it turns out, just another form of white-person-mental-illness.

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