About Matt

Matt Gross writes about travel and food for the New York Times, Saveur, Gourmet, and Afar, where he is a Contributing Writer. When he’s not on the road, he’s with his wife, Jean, and daughter, Sasha, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

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!

How to Name Your Goddamn Kid

Three months ago, the editor of a “luxury magazine” emailed to ask if I could, very very quickly, write up an article on the challenges of naming your baby. Sure, I said, and I wrote it up that day. Today, however, I found out that, for mysterious reasons, it didn’t run. Oh well. This happens. But you know, I’ve got this blog here! So, uh, enjoy:

The second time around, pregnancy is easy. Morning sickness? That’ll be gone in a month or two. Strange cravings? A five-pound bag of Gummi Bears is $14.98 on Amazon.com. Big belly making it hard to sleep? Break out the body pillow and—why not?—a glass of wine.

But for my wife, Jean, and me, there’s one thing we simply can’t figure out: what to name our second child when she pops out in September.

This shouldn’t be a big deal. After all, it’s just a name—a few arbitrary words by which she’ll be known, presumably, for her entire life. The name may help determine her sense of self, or it may not. And we’ll probably come up with a host of nicknames that have no relation to her given name. My own mother called me Pumpkin for years. My brother was Peapod. My sister was Bean. I still don’t know why.

And yet we care—all parents care—because the name announces to the world not just who the kid is but who we, her family, are. If she’s a Rainbow, we’re hippies. If he’s a Michael or a John, you lack imagination. If she’s a Wah-Ming or an Aparna, you’re recent immigrants—or maybe third-generation arrivals looking to reconnect with your heritage. If there’s a Roman numeral at the end of the name, you’re tradition-minded. Or rich. Or pretentious. Or all of the above.

Celebrity parents have it easy. They’re not only allowed to give their kids wacky, outrageous names, they’re expected to. In my corner of Brooklyn, Gwyneth Paltrow last October showed up at the local park with her daughter, Apple, alongside Beyoncé and Jay-Z, who will probably return one day soon with their daughter, Blue Ivy. (My friend Tom, whose own daughter Ivy was born a month before Beyoncé’s, claims he inspired the pop stars.) Another neighborhood fixture, Michelle Williams, named her daughter Matilda, which by comparison sounds normal.

But could I name my daughter Matilda? To me, it sounds overwrought. The last thing I want is for anyone to consider Jean and me helicopter parents, so intent on choosing a perfect, standout, special name that we wind up with something—yeesh—precious.

“Precious?” says Jean. “That’s your word. I’m fine with that. How about Mercedes?”

She’s kidding—I hope.

Once upon a time, I imagine, the choice was easier. You picked a traditional name—something Waspy, or Biblical, or lucky. You picked a beloved relative’s name. You chose from a list of common, popular names because that’s what everyone did, and names really didn’t matter as much, since everyone lived in the same context.

Today, context is gone, obliterated. More than a third of Brooklyn is foreign-born (in Vancouver, it’s nearly 50 percent!), and everybody is having kids with everybody else. Traditions still hold some sway, but they, too, have multiplied and crossbred, and Jean and I are prime examples.

Jean was born Ching-wen Liu, in Taipei, Taiwan. Her brother was Li-wen. This was normal, to have the same syllable in siblings’ names—her cousins, for instance, were Ping-yi and Ping-jie (now known as Freesia and Jessie). The big challenge for Jean’s parents was to find characters to write the names—that is, they had to have the right number and kind of strokes to be considered lucky according to Chinese cosmology.

But that’s about it. As far as Jean’s family is concerned, it doesn’t matter what we name our kids. In fact, they’re pretty lackadaisical about the whole process. Li-wen—known to me as Louis—and his wife, Charmiko, didn’t even name their daughter or son at birth. For weeks after delivery, the babies were known simply as Mei-mei (little sister) and Di-di (little brother), until the parents came up with names they liked.

Jean and I do have one concern when it comes to her family. We want to choose names that her relatives, not all of whom speak English, can easily pronounce. Short and sweet is better, while consonant clusters are to be avoided. Lily is nice; Catherine is complicated.

I, meanwhile, am more formally known as Matthew Benjamin Gross, and was given the Hebrew name Moshe, a reference to my great-grandfather Morris Gross, born Moishe Grossmütz in late 19th-century Marijampolé, Lithuania. My Jewish family may be quite secular, but not so much that we’re willing to accept distinctly Christian names, and we still hew to certain Ashkenazi traditions, like not naming babies after living people. This has already caused us to nix Hannah and Leah, since they turned out to be the Hebrew names of my mother, Anne Leslie Gross. For a while, I liked the name Rose—my late grandmothers were Rosalie and Roslyn—but the rhythm wasn’t right, and although Rosalie Gross sounded sweet, the truth is I never really liked Grandma Rosalie. So no Rose.

For people trying not to care too much, we’ve given ourselves an awful lot of rules. But we’ve gotten this right once before. Our first daughter, born in December 2008, is Sasha Raven Gross. Sasha sounds vaguely Eastern European, Jew-ish but not Jewish, and can be rendered in Chinese as Sa-sa. And Raven: It’s artsy, and if she runs away when she’s 16, Jean and I can visit local strip clubs, ask, “Is Raven working today?,” and take our daughter back home.

Frankly, I wish there were someone wise we could consult. Baby-name books are too encyclopedic, and I’m not about to spend upwards of $400 to employ a consultant. The U.S. Social Security Administration’s annual list of top ten baby names is useful, of course, but only because it tells us which not to pick. (At one point, we remember well, Sasha’s preschool had at least two Aidens and a Hayden.) So, sorry, Sophia, Isabella, and… Abigail? Darn, I kind of liked that one.

My close friend Ted, whose wife, Tomoko, is due two weeks before Jean, came up with his new daughter’s name at a yoga retreat in Mexico. “Some hippie dropout said, ‘I’ve got the perfect name for you: Amina!’” he told me. “We went and looked it up, and it means something in Arabic and something else in Swahili, which was nice.” Even better, Tomoko’s Japanese relatives could pronounce it.

“But everybody kept making a face,” he said, “so we switched it to Mena.”

This is great news for Ted and Tomoko, but not for me and Jean. Until we heard their story, we’d been leaning toward Nina—cute, slightly but not overly unusual, and easy on Chinese ears. But Ted’s kid and mine are surely going to be friends, so they can’t have such similar names.

Or can they? Why not Mena and Nina? Maybe it really doesn’t matter to anyone but us parents what we name our children. We all came to terms with our own names—their strengths and weaknesses, their rarity or ordinariness—and few of us chose to change them, though we may at times have been tempted. (In junior high, Gross was not an asset.) And I know one person who for sure doesn’t care: Sasha. Every evening, she’ll wrap her little arms around Jean’s belly and say, “I love you, baby!”

At least that’s what I think she’s saying—she’s speaking Chinese.

‘Can You Blog About That? Like, What the Heck?!?’

Here’s a quickie: After just two days of public school, we’re discovering that all kinds of school activities are scheduled at ridiculous times, like the New Parent Orientation on Monday from 9 am to 10 am in the cafeteria. How can anyone with a job possibly expect to attend that kind of thing? I mean, we’re lucky (uh, I guess) that I have no job, but still, Jean wants me to say, this is stupid, and a problem across the country (not that we’re really surprised by any of it).

“Can you blog about that?” she asks. “Like, what the heck?!?”

Can I blog about that? Yes, I can! It’s not like I have a job or anything to distract me from blogging. And yet I skipped it anyway! Take that, system!