Tonight, Murders

From the NYT website: Lucia Krim

It’s late and I just finished watching a baseball game that I was pretty psyched about until a couple minutes afterwards when all my Twitters and Facebook timelines seemed to light up with this news:

2 Siblings Killed in New York City; Nanny Arrested

I didn’t know the family involved, although apparently the father was a media executive. He has a Twitter account that he fills with links to CNBC articles. I live close to them, but not that close: about 20 blocks away. We once thought about sending our daughter to the same Spanish-language school they sent their daughter Lucia to.

On the other hand, they likely had more money than me. Maybe they voted Republican or ate different ice cream flavors than I do, or perhaps there were other reasons why I might see myself as different from this family.

But I am actually not at all different from these people. Neither are you. Neither is anyone who has ever placed their children in the care of strangers: just left them with a nanny or a camp counselor or a teenaged babysitter or teacher taking a class to the park, or even an in-law or some other relative. I can’t say I’ve ever entertained the idea that you might come home and find your children murdered. But I have had a much less articulate sense, when I’m paying attention, that there is risk in all the choices we make. I choose to go for drinks with my wife and hire a babysitter while we’re out?  Risk. You make one decision, one trade-off, in a lifetime of compromises and small risks, and something like this can happen.

Do what this mother did, which was to take her middle kid swimming, and that can be that. This transcends neighborhood or income: in the Upper West Side, it’s a swimming class; in the Bronx it’s a basketball tournament (where four-year-old Lloyd Morgan was murdered earlier this summer). I’d guess that these murders will get more ink than those in the Bronx, which also sucks, but for reasons that seem best talked about another time.

Something else that is terrible: blogging. We do it here. The mother of these children did it on her blog. The link is here. I could hardly even bear to look at it at first, because the kids are in there walking around the neighborhood and I was especially transfixed by the oldest girl, who is exactly as old as my daughter, and looks just like any other kid anywhere. The thought of her murdered is just a bit overwhelming.

There is, though, another side to looking at the blog. Those kids were happy. I don’t understand the spiritual mechanics of how kids arrive on this earth, and I certainly don’t understand how they get chosen for a death like that. But I do understand happy kids. They were lucky kids, for those weeks, months, and years that their happiness lasted. They never knew bitterness or hunger. And then, mercifully quick, it was all over.

Brooklyn Celebrity Parents: The Big Question

Not all that long ago, Jean, Sasha, and I were having lunch at Bark, the actually kind of awesome hot dog place on Bergen between Fifth and Flatbush. As we were eating—or, I guess, as we cajoled and threatened Sasha into eating her hot dog—I glanced over my shoulder and noticed a woman talking with the owner/manager. She had one preschool-age kid running around her, and another, younger kid strapped to her chest. She looked awfully familiar—something about the set of her mouth, her height, the fair color of her skin.

Oh, right: Maggie Gyllenhaal.

This being Brooklyn, it was no surprise to see a celebrity parent in our midst, and I did nothing whatsoever to react to the sighting. What could I say, anyway? “I loved when James Spader jerked off on you in Secretary!”? Not cool. Maybe I could tell her how much I like her Björn, but she’d probably understand I was really talking about that scene in Secretary.

And, as I said, this is Brooklyn—and the Park Slope/Bocococococan part of Brooklyn, too. This is supposed to be the place where parenting makes you special, not which Batman films you’ve appeared in and which movie stars have pretended to masturbate upon you. Ignoring the obvious is how we all get along.

But it did make me wonder: With so many celebrities in this part of the borough, how do they interact with each other? What happens when Maggie Gyllenhaal bumps into, say, Michelle Williams over at Trader Joe’s, with all their kids in tow? What about when Adrian Grenier checks out Patrick Stewart’s groceries at the Park Slope Food Co-op? Do they acknowledge each other, assuming that their common life in the spotlight bonds them together? Or do they ignore each other entirely, since this is Brooklyn, after all? Or maybe they do as we’d do and interact in a sidelong way, by complimenting the kids’ outfits or gossiping about the Montessori kindergarten teachers?

Or do they just go home and post about it on their little-read blogs?

Cure for Princess Obsession Needed—Right Now!

Fucking hate them all.

Fuck, the morning began so well. Sasha emerged from her bedroom in her new footie pj’s placid and happy. “I had a really long sleep!” she told me, sitting down on the toilet to pee and describing in unintelligible detail the great dream she’d had (about princesses).

From there it got worse: a timeout before I’d even had a shower, and a battle to get her to wear tights on this cold morning. “But I’m not beautiful!” she whined. “I’m not a princess anymore!”

As I somehow convinced to cooperate with getting the tights on, I was getting worried. This princess shit has been going on a long, long time—too long. At first, it was cute. Sasha identified with the princesses she saw in cartoon movies: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Castle in the Sky, Dora, Princess Bubblegum, and so on. She wanted only to wear “princess dresses” whose hems flounced out—pinkly or sparkly—when she twirled. She demanded slippers she could wear outdoors. And we, her parents, gave in. It didn’t seem so bad, and we were never pressuring her on these things. In fact, we always tried to make sure she had a variety of outfits and activities, not just those that would conform to the most frustrating gender stereotypes.

But lately it’s just gotten too damn annoying. We can’t make her wear pants. We can only get her into sneakers because her teachers require them. Even when we show her beautiful, multicolored skirts and tights and sweaters and such, she turns them down because they don’t match up to her vision of princesshood. Everything is a damn battle. Tears flow. Tempers flare.

Yeah, I know: She’s almost 4. This happens. But honestly, I don’t want to wait this one out, not when every morning we fight about the exact same things.

What we need—and what I’m hoping to learn from you, dear readers—are books, stories, movies, TV shows about non-standard princesses. Princesses who wear jeans and T-shirts, who run and climb mountains, who get dirty and hate the color pink. Brave had a little bit of this—an archer princess who rides horses!—but it’s not on DVD yet, so we’re stuck there.

What is out there that’s so awesome that Sasha will start demanding Japanese selvedge denim or pre-K Patagonia shells? Please, help us—and hurry!

Cuckoo for Catholic Puffs

It was the first full morning of school—pre-K for my youngest—and we had been told to go downstairs to the cafeteria, because every morning before class, the Catholic school he’s enrolled in—let’s call it the Church of the Superholy Awesome Ascension—feeds the kids breakfast.

The cafeteria is not an inspiring place. The stairwell down to it is dark and caged off with something that looks a lot like chickenwire. Much of the school, which hasn’t been upgraded since the decades when the Upper West Side and Manhattan Valley were very stabby neighborhoods, has this security fencing inside, as if they have a plan for penning wilding teenagers in if they have to. The cafeteria itself smells like lunchlady at every hour of the day, has big flickering flourescent bulbs, and rickety cateferia benches.

But there, lined up neatly in front of the other per-kindergartners, was something that made me very glad indeed: little plastic boxes of Cocoa Puffs.

This is breakfast at Awesome Ascension. On Tuesdays. On Mondays it’s an off-label cereal called Marshmallow Mateys. I am pretty sure that last Thursday I saw a pancake and a cookie on each plate. On Fridays, I assume, they line up pixie sugar straws so the kids can snort it like blow.

So why would this make me happy?

It’s a long story, but it starts probably from the moment we first got pregnant and began to become, by virtue of demographics alone, a part of one of the most precious and unbearable communities on earth: Manhattan professionals who have children. Our cohort in this group are, to paint them broadly, neurotic and overempowered and hovering and terrified of sugar. If a Whole Foods megastore hadn’t finally come to the Upper West Side a few years ago, I do believe that the hundred thousand yoga moms who were screaming for a way to get more flax in their toddlers diets would have just gone ahead and built it with their own hands, like an old-fashioned barn raising.

These were the people who clearly designed and populated the bloodless, sugar-fearing Montessori school I sent my son to last year. I wrote a little bit about the first hints of oddity from the place here. Suffice to say that things got stranger from there. Enamored with her own sense of order, my son’s teacher rebuffed him when he hugged her, confiscated his jello (too much sugar) and generally was a nightmare of yuppie rulemaking. All at the low price of $19k a year.

So we chose Catholic school. Not because we are Catholic. We are not. My mother-in-law is, but we are unmoved. And I have a beef with any bureaucracy that would harbor child molesters while attacking gay rights inside and outside their church. But there’s another side of Catholicism, one that involves a lot of soup kitchens, righteous stands on immigration, and, generally, lots of mitzvah. Among those mitzvahs, in our neighborhood at least: they offer the only affordable pre-K.

Which brings us to the Cocoa Puffs. I know it’s bad for my kid. Marshmallow Mateys are undoubtedly even worse. My wife was similarly unamused when one of his new teachers suggested that she “pack a few bags of chips” so he would have something to snack on during the long afterschool program.

But there’s something meaningful about all that junk food being presented as breakfast and snack: it reminds me of the schools I was in growing up. I remember thinking this all throughout that long, tetchy Montessori year with my son last year (they had a no refund policy, so we were, quite simply, stuck): screw all this advanced parenting and hyperintentional educating. When I was a kid, I was taught by obese women who loved me. Same with all my friends. We got hugs and little plastic cups of some fluorescent drink they couldn’t even legally call juice. We ate chicken nuggets that probably had no chicken. And breakfast at my public school was always some processed cereal with a little carton of chocolate milk.

In my mind, a little junk food comes with a lot of love. And that, more than a ruthlessly healthy diet, is what I want for my boy.