DADWAGON + THE ATLANTIC, VOLUME 3: WHEN DID WE BECOME GROWNUPS?

Originally posted at The Atlantic

I just got back a couple days ago from a reporting trip to the Western Cape of South Africa, which included some time with farmworkers mourning the death of Michael Daniels, a young father shot dead by police during a wage protest. There was a visitation of the body, a politically charged funeral, a graveside sermon and afterwards, a traditional meal—the after tears, it’s called—back at the deceased’s house. For the adults, it was grilled chicken and rice, and for the children, it was an African version of Irish stew, which means a runny plate of boiled potatoes, carrots and peas.

“Only the adults get meat,” one of Daniels’s friends told me. “Children won’t get chicken until they’re 11 or 12.”

In the poor farmlands of the Western Cape, then, this is at least one definition of adulthood: you get chicken.Back in the States, there are few such bright lines. Children eat chicken, adults eat popsicles and drink fizzy drinks, and as Christopher Noxon pointed out in his highly entertaining book Rejuvenile, Disney World is the world’s top vacation spot for adults (that means, without kids in tow).

All this self-infantilizing, of course, has everything to do with the main difference between us Rejuveniles and, say, African farmworkers: We are wealthy and idle enough to delay adulthood, or even, god forbid, write posts on the Internet about the onset of adulthood.

Further contributors to the confusion: We have this wealth but lack any unifying customs. We don’t have something like a toga virilis, the chalk-white robe Romans wore to mark manhood after it was time to offer their childhood amulets up to household gods. A suit and tie is a close approximation, I suppose, whether you’re the managing director of Bain Capital or a shift manager at Applebee’s. But still, for those of us who eschew Jewish or Wiccan or Catholic rites of passage, and who don’t have to get dressed to work, it’s up to us to define what manhood is and when it happens.

And on that score, I have no answers. I wake, I eat, I try not to lose my temper at my lovely children, and then I travel for work to places where I’m absolutely sandblasted by the miseries and occasional joys of others. Life is full and enervating and confusing enough without trying to wedge a definition of manhood into it. Case in point: on the nearly 16-hour flight back to New York from South Africa, I spent some time going through my notes, and even more time playing a boxing game on my iPhone. Does that make me a child? A man-child? A rejuvenile? I don’t know. But when the dinner cart finally made it to the back of the plane where I sat, I ordered the chicken, whether or not I deserved it.

–Nathan

One recent Monday morning, I was telling a co-worker about my weekend: There had been a playdate with my daughter, Sasha, and one of her friends, and I’d been having some trouble with my apartment’s hot-water heater, and I’d gone shopping at the farmers’ market for vegetables for the week. All in all, nothing special. Just a typical Brooklyn weekend.

But for my co-worker, this was amazing. “You’re a real grown-up!” she said.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say. I’m still relatively new to the working world. After freelancing for the last eight years, I’ve only just taken a full-time job—and it’s one where I’m at least a decade older than almost everyone on my team. At the age of 38, married, with kids, a mortgage, a beard, and a receding hairline, I suppose I must really seem like an adult to them.

If only I seemed like that to myself! Though I never wanted to be one of those much-derided man-children loafing around Brooklyn coffee shops—“grups,” New York magazine dubbed them—I was never all that eager to embrace the traditional outward markers of adulthood: suit and tie, office job, lightless dead eyes. And in truth, I’d always felt like a child. The sense of smallness and powerlessness that are a child’s everyday experience had never fully left me. When I’d look at my own father, a tenured history professor, I could never imagine becoming like him. And when I looked at kids, I felt nothing but sympathy—I know what you’re going through—and imagined they were looking at me and thinking, Dude, you look older, but I see through you; you’re just like me.

Still, degree by degree, things shifted. Six years ago, I grew a beard, mostly because, clean-shaven, I looked like I was still 17 years old. I invested in some good shirts and stylish blazers—not office-drone garb, but clothes I felt comfortable in. And, of course, I got married and had kids and bought an apartment. Inside, I felt no different from before—small, nervous, new to everything—but apparently I was. Or, quite possibly, the world was different, not in its essence but in how it viewed me. My own children, for example, will never see me as anything but a grown-up, and as they age, the kids of her generation will see me that way, too. One day, my daughters may look at me as I looked at my own father, and think: How am I ever going to become that?

The secret (which is only a secret to those still too young to have experienced it) is that adulthood is not something we consciously embrace, a set of rules we one day agree to follow. It’s a set of perceptions and assumptions that everyone has about us, though we may still feel like children inside. How the hell did I become an adult? It’s because the young people at my office decided I was. And one day, 10 or 15 years from now, it’ll happen to them, too. We all grow up, whether we want to or not.

–Matt

Life with my second wife began not with a cinematic meet-cute but a brisk phone call, during which I explained that ours would be a part-time dalliance. I was divorced, or nearly so, at any rate, and had a child who lived with me half of every week. (Joint physical and legal custody—a phrase only a divorced father could love! My son was young enough to fall under the so-called Tender Years Doctrine, which presumes that fit mothers are entitled to full custody of children under five, a judicial bias that supposedly no longer exists, but that my attorney assured me most certainly does, and which my ex, to her credit, never attempted to exploit.) Because I didn’t introduce casual dates to my son, Tomoko would have to be comfortable with an amorous schedule governed by the my night/her night dichotomy under which I lived.

These terms, I added, were non-negotiable, and it was up to her to accept them or not. Question her sanity, if you must, but she consented, and so we strolled in the park when I had time, explored the city when I was free, caught movies on the nights I wasn’t needed as a father.

Eventually, Tomoko invited me to meet her friends, a group of childless, 30-something singletons with whom she shared a summer home on Fire Island. They came each Sunday for an early dinner, and Tomoko warmly and maternally fed them, sat for their tales of dating woe, and provided a focal point for their lives.

It was a tricky occasion. I would be offering myself up for inspection by a clique of protective and well-meaning independents, all of whom, I imagined, would expect copies of a recent resume and credit report, a list of references, my genetic particulars, plus a non-refundable application fee, before deeming me a suitable match. I decided that I wouldn’t have it. A grown man, with a child, ex-wife, mortgage, dog, car, and an attorney vacationing lavishly on his $50,000 in legal fees, need ask for no one’s approval.

The night went well. The friends proved fine people, funny and harried and acerbic in the way of New Yorkers, and not nearly as scrutinizing as I had feared. And it was true: I didn’t need their approval—they needed mine. Tomoko and I shared that sense of mutual possession that comes with falling in love. She was with me, we were alone together among people, and I was entitled to resolve their value rather than the other way round.

What does any of this have to be with being an adult? Well, that night after dinner I entered into a lengthy discussion with one of Tomoko’s friends about his efforts to purchase a couch. He was a finance guy of some sort, successful enough, with money to waste on a couple of sports cars and an apartment in Manhattan. It turned out that he’d been at this for months. He just couldn’t decide—what style, what fabric, which size, never mind color—the whole thing, he said, was bedeviling him no end. This commitment, this furniture, represented a stark and binary choice (sectional or no?) that would irrevocably alter the course of his life. He could not, in good conscience, take it lightly.

The conversation spun me from the room. I nodded with sympathy, but my mind was with my son who was spending yet another night without me. As Tomoko’s friend wrestled with the vexatious dilemma of a two-pillow or three-pillow existence, I obsessed over babysitters and pediatricians and the punitive costs of daycare. I wanted to grab him by throat and shout, Grow up! It’s just a couch!

Which it was, and I didn’t. Wouldn’t be the adult thing to do. Instead, I sipped my wine, slipped an arm around Tomoko, and with self-congratulatory condescension, surveyed him from the remove of what I will allow myself to call the real world.

It wasn’t long after that I introduced Tomoko to my son. Soon, we moved in together, commingling our lives in ways that made irrelevant whether it was “my night.”

–Theodore

Sandy Hook, A View From the Fringe

The ‘Fringe’ heroes.

Over the last few years, I’ve become a fairly devoted fan of the TV show Fringe, now in its fifth and final season on Fox. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched it—I get the sense its ratings aren’t too hot, which is why it’s ending—but it’s surprisingly good, particularly considering it comes from the J.J. Abrams wonder factory, better known for creating mysteries than solving them.

Anyway, Fringe revolves around the lives of three people: Olivia Dunham, a tough FBI agent with a photographic memory; Peter Bishop, a rebellious young scientist; and Walter Bishop, Peter’s father, an aging scientist who’s spent the last couple of decades in an insane asylum. Together they investigate “Fringe events,” bizarre crimes with a far-out scientific angle—people who suddenly transform into monster hedgehogs, killers who can liquefy your brain, shape-shifters, and so on. Of course, there’s an overarching mythology-conspiracy tying everything together, slowly revealed over the course of many episodes (spoiler: it involves multiple universes and an ominous post-human race called the Observers).

Quite satisfyingly, the mythology pretty much holds together: This ain’t lost. But what makes the show fun to watch are those main characters—particularly Walter Bishop, an acid-dropping, milkshake-concocting, bathrobe-wearing genius (played by the wonderfully crinkly-faced John Noble)—and the consistency of the themes that emerge from their interactions. The first seasons are about Olivia coming to terms with her childhood traumas, and about Walter’s attempts to rebuild his relationship with his distrustful son Peter, who didn’t really appreciate Dad’s going crazy when he was a teen. The tension builds across the seasons as we learn that Walter, the genius scientist, had done terrible things in his earlier years—experiments that, while seemingly high-minded, were truly unethical, destroyed the relationships everyone is now trying to mend, and may have led to many of the bizarre fringe events the team is now trying to solve.

Again and again through the show, parents like Walter (and, later, Olivia and Peter) use all their formidable powers to try to create a better world for the future—for their children—and yet hubris reigns: The world they create turns out to be more dangerous, threatening not only their own children’s lives but everyone’s. They are geniuses, highly professional law-enforcement agents, and devoted whiskey drinkers, and yet, no matter how many battles they win, against other rogue scientists, against hedgehog men, against the disintegrating fabric of the universe, THERE IS NOTHING THEY CAN DO. All will lose the people they love—their children, their parents, everything they love.

As I watched the show last night, this theme was perhaps more in my mind than usual. The massacre at Sandy Hook, which only slowly filtered into my attention through the course of the day, had left me horrified, uncomfortable, but also weirdly numb. I can’t imagine being one of those parents, learning their children had been killed in an utterly senseless slaughter—or rather, I can all too easily imagine it. These things happen, more and more often it seems—just that morning, some guy killed 22 kids at a school in China with a knife—and it feels like it’s only a matter of time before it happens to us. What were once “fringe events” are now daily reality.

And so I ask myself (as many other parents are probably asking): What can I do about it? And I answer myself: not much. Unless I want to quit my job, home-school my daughters, and never leave them alone for a single second, they are going to be out there in the world—at day care, in kindergarten, hanging out with their friends at libraries, malls, movie theaters, boarding airplanes for far-off lands, or just walking down the wrong street on the wrong day. I can teach Sasha and Sandy (not the most popular name now, I guess) to be ready for calamity—and indeed, Sasha’s school did so yesterday, having the kids practice hiding under a shelf and telling them, according to Sasha, that they did a “fabulous” job.

But readiness only goes so far, and hiding under a shelf is no guarantee that some 20-year-old with Asperger’s won’t slaughter my child for reasons no one will ever really understand. There are matters beyond my control—beyond all our control.

Or are they? Clamping down on guns would help. Improving access to mental-heath care would help. I guess. Insert whatever practical-sounding, reasonable approaches you like here—I’d vote for them, maybe even fight for them. Those things would help.

Or not. Maybe those things would just help preserve our illusion of control. Maybe, as with Walter Bishop, our best intentions will bring unintended consequences. Maybe we’ve fucked this world up so deeply in the past 50 years that there’s nothing we can do but cross our fingers we’ll somehow make it out the other end, live good, long lives, and watch our children grow into adults and start their own families. That’s what I hope for at least, but then I’m seized with a final fear: that the day after my own death, some unspeakable calamity will befall the loved ones I’ve left behind, that despite all I’ve done to keep them safe, their universe will be torn asunder, and that it will never be fully repaired, not even five seasons later.

I don’t mean this to be as utterly depressing as it sounds. In fact, it’s somewhat liberating. Knowing you can’t control the universe, knowing that you will die, that your children will die, that these are the most certain of certainties in our world means that we shouldn’t worry about them, that we should care instead about the moments we have together, however short and uncertain they may be. My daughters could be killed at school next week—or they might not. As likely as the calamities may seem, the lack of calamity is probably just as likely, maybe even more likely. We could all just go on and on, living happy, boring lives, and dying slightly less happy, but equally boring deaths, for generation after generation. So go, eat, drink, be merry, listen to the Flaming Lips, and as President Obama said yesterday, “Hug your children tighter tonight.” And every night.

Fuck Fuck Fuck

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WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

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DadWagon + The Atlantic, Volume 2: Outearned but still a man

Originally published over there at The Atlantic

Hey, guys,

My professional life has been, by most measures, an exercise in small-bore self-indulgence: modest in scope and ambition, of arguable intellectual merit, meagerly compensated. The carcasses of two novels and a collection of awful short stories rot, as they should, in a closet in my mother’s house. As the inspiration for my first book, she is understandably loathe to cast aside any potential hints of my early genius, so I can hope only that the ink will fade or the paper crumble before any of my children stumbles onto them. Sex Tourist, a satirical novel-in-stories set among the whoremongers loitering in Southeast Asia’s backpacker districts, is a literary experiment about which I prefer they remain unaware.

There were the obligatory Los Angeles years and the doomed foray into screenwriting, which mercifully concluded with my application, at age 30, to law school. (I was rejected.) My resumé would not be complete without a quixotic career divertissement, mine being a journey to the fringes of reality television. The fiscal highlight of this venture was $500, for the sale of a bank-heist game show called Mastermind, which was no such thing. It was optioned and then forgotten by the same company that had elevated this nation’s cultural conversation with American Gladiator.

When that fizzled, I vowed to give up creative pursuits and accepted a $25,000-a-year job as a secretary for an international non-profit. But who was I to keep a vow when an unpaid internship for a monthly magazine of fading literary glory was on offer? The magazine hired me as an editor not long after the internship, whence I embarked on a meteoric march to the middle of the masthead which halted when I was laid off while earning $45,000, the highest salary—by far—of my life to that point.

My book, of which I am proud, seems likely to prove an aberration. I found a reputable agent, who sold it to a good publishing house for far more than it was worth. Shortly after publication, I topped Amazon’s “Hot New Releases: Jewish biographies” for a day or so, and even now I occasionally zoom past the 400,000 barrier on the website’s rankings with a certain insouciant flair.

Did I mention that I have a master’s degree in something called “professional writing”?

Never fear that I have confronted this catalog of unrivaled success alone. Women do in fact exist willing (even eager, at times) to immerse themselves wholly in the financial quagmire known as Theodore Ross, potbelly, balding pate, and paucity of retirement assets be damned! Yes—pick up your jaw, please—I have been married on two occasions, to well-educated, high-functioning, practical, hardworking, successful women who have never—not for a month or a moment—failed to make more money than me. Some might reckon divorce as evidence of interpersonal shortcomings, but not in this context. Consider that two, living, breathing, actual women consented to a relationship with me; perhaps I should end the current one just to prove I could again do so successfully.

Last year, I happened by chance into an editorial job at a national magazine that pays well by the standards to which I’ve educated my women to become accustomed. That, combined with a tidy little book payment or two, has swollen the balance of my semi-hidden-checking-account-for-which-my-wife-lacks-the-password to levels she had never dared dream, even when we were dating and I wanted her to think I earned a living. And yet she still outdid me, without breaking a sweat, if one’s cold, hard cash could be said to sweat.

Which, leads, finally, to the subject I would like to address with my DadWagon colleagues. I understand, and am grateful for, my great connubial good fortune. To be blessed, as I am, with the affection of a woman who surfs and cooks, finds Jewish men attractive, and who will always make more money than I do and has yet to show signs of resenting that fact, would seem to preclude the possibility of complaining.

And yet.

The gentle kiss of undeserved providence has not relieved me of a fair amount of, say, irritation, at my wife’s enhanced procurative powers. I find it a little annoying that her bottom line is bigger than my bottom line (or whatever).

Before anyone overreacts, my spouse among them, let me be clear: I love my wife and I don’t begrudge her the success she has achieved, particularly in those moments when I am without regret spending her loot. She’s worked for everything she has, and she can hardly be faulted for having chosen a career—advertising executive—more pleasingly remunerative than mine. Likewise, she has never indicated any unease about my paltry earnings—although when my current job became available she didn’t talk me out of giving up my plan to write full-time.

These character traits are superb, hard to find, and not easily replaced. Yet, still, I continue to wish I made more money than she did, even if only once, and merely so that I could brag of it, in public, perhaps at a cocktail party, child’s birthday party, or some other peer-group social gathering.

I have only my uncorroborated word that I am not an inordinately competitive man, not blindingly macho, or sexist, or a misogynist. Yet these feelings persist. I suspect it has less to do with my relationship to my wife than with my chosen profession. For me, the writing life has been one of failure alternating with frustration mixed with dashed hopes combined, at long last, with a measure of success that I’ve never truly accepted as here to stay.

People who know me generally don’t rate me a monster. I am as good to my wife as I know how to be. Like her, I have worked hard, provided for our children and our household as best I am able, and struggled for whatever success I’ve been able to enjoy. But it’s never felt nearly enough. The question is why?

I am reminded of the concluding sentences of Ann Beattie’s famous 1979 short story, “The Burning House,” in which the husband, Frank, explains to his wife, Amy, why he will leave her:

“All men…I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.” He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

I have no super-heroic delusions of grandeur, and unlike Frank, I intend to stay with my wife for as long as she will have me. But I feel a form of grim and guilt-ridden satisfaction when she worries, as all modern-day Americans must, about losing her job. I reassure her, tell her that we will be fine whatever comes. We can, I say, betraying no irony, get by on what I make.

–Theodore

In the early evening of November 1, I rode my bicycle south from Times Square, dodging first the remaining tourists wandering in a post-Sandy haze, then slaloming through the lightless intersections, and finally powering past the legions of dilettante cyclists on the Manhattan Bridge. By the time I got home, the autumn sun was starting to set, and I climbed the stairs to my fourth-floor two-bedroom co-op with the glow of physical exertion in my chest.

At the top of the stairs, I opened the door, and my nearly 4-year-old daughter, Sasha, looked up, yelled “Daddy!” and sprinted into my arms. This was, of course, a heartwarming moment, but mixed in with my fatherly pride was a new and unusual feeling, one I didn’t quite recognize at first: not just happiness but satisfaction. And the source of that satisfaction? Readers, I had gotten a job.

In fact, I had been in Times Square nearly every day for the past two weeks, serving as the new editor for the website of a fairly large food magazine—the first full-time job I’ve had since 2004. And not just a full-time job but a job I liked, a job I was good at, a job that was earning me twice as much as I’d ever made before in my working life. This, I thought to myself as I hugged little Sasha, was what it feels like to be a man.

Now, it’s not as if I hadn’t worked in the intervening eight years between full-time gigs. For most of that time I was a travel writer, jetting around the world in the service of large, dying publications. It was glamorous, certainly. Also, extremely poorly paying. If it wasn’t for my wife, Jean, and her substantial salary, I never would have been able to indulge in that high-status, low-wage endeavor I loved. What’s more, I never resented Jean’s earning ability. I’d never needed to be a breadwinner, and I knew that my other talents—for cooking, for organization, for childcare—would make up for what I lacked in my bank account. I wouldn’t have minded being rich(er), but unlike my colleague Theodore (who I can aver is highly competitive and occasionally a monster), our internal income disparity didn’t bother me, and I wasn’t about to do anything that might begin to elevate my earning potential.

But then, a few months ago, my world shifted. At just about the same time Jean was preparing to give birth to our second daughter, I was growing frustrated with my inability to earn a living. After hundreds of articles and loads of appreciation from my peers, I was making less than I ever had. I was tired of it—tired of working as hard as ever, and writing as well as ever. With the new kid on the way, I would be neither able nor willing to travel like I had been, and full-time daycare would stretch our budget precariously thin. And so I made that momentous decision. I would get a job, any job. Who knew that I would not only find one in this economy but would actually like it, too?

Of course, I’m still nowhere close to making what Jean does (not that either of us particularly cares), but I am enjoying the satisfaction and freedom this new gig brings. Soon I’ll be able to cover my (modest) credit card bills without having to ask Jean for a loan against a coming freelance payment, and I’ll still get home in time to whip up dinner. (Tomorrow: seared Moulard duck breast.) One of these months, I might even pay the mortgage—just for kicks, you know. I wouldn’t want Jean to think she’d married a rich man.

–Matt

What does it mean to be outearned by your wife? I had better figure that out, because after some back-and-forth over the last 18 years—times when we were both broke, or living off of her student loans, or off my lousy salary—we have now reached what is likely a permanent income imbalance. As my colleagues here have pointed out, wordsmithing doesn’t pay what it used to. And my wife now has an advanced degree and an actual profession.

We are part of the vanguard, I suppose: as Liz Mundy recently pointed out in The Atlantic , nearly 40 percent of wives outearn their husbands, and that number is growing.

So, does income disparity flip some kind of gender switch? Do I take over that section of home life that my wife used to inhabit (among her duties: sewing, light cooking, choosing Pandora channels, putting the kids to bed, giving a shit about the PTA)?

With us, so far, the answer is no.

Yes, I take the kids to school in the morning because she goes to work at first light. And sometimes I’ll have to cover things solo if she’s running late at the end of the day because her work schedule can be non-negotiable in ways that mine isn’t.

But when Mundy wrote in her same post that wives outearning husbands “can powerfully affect relationship dynamics,”,I don’t see it. My wife and I still maintain the same mix of unpredictable gender assignments. I still do the majority of the cooking, but that’s because I enjoy it and the men in my family have always been the cooks. My wife still puts the kids to bed, no matter her outside workload, both because she wants to, and because I usually have some sports that need watching.

A useful parallel for me is driving. My wife is a better driver than I. She’s from LA; she’s got smog and road rage in her DNA. I’m from Key West, a small island where traffic still stops for conversations between drivers and on the weekends many of us are too drunk to even ride bicycles. But when my wife and I are together, in big cities and small, I like to drive, and she likes to have me drive. Men have been driving their wives around since long before Apollonia Corleone got blown up, and that’s exactly what my wife and I do.

Gender is not a house of cards that collapses when you take away one element. I am still hotheaded, broad-shouldered, sports-addicted, and foolishly optimistic about home improvement projects. Those things and the other dozen typically male characteristics I have won’t change just because my wife makes more than I.

You know how some people like to talk about a post-racial society but it’s complete bullshit because no matter who is president, race still matters in this country? Well, it’s equally fallacious to think that changing income structure alone will change the power balance of the sexes, in the home or outside the home. We are not post-gender, no matter what the economic trends are. Women who earn more than their husbands still earn less than their colleagues. They still have their basic reproductive rights threatened constantly. They still are underrepresented in every level of leadership.

And on a more personal level, they still have to solve one of the oldest and most intractable problems of all: how to share their daily lives with men. That’s because, no matter what my wife says, I am still the man of the house, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.

–Nathan