About Nathan

Nathan Thornburgh is a contributing writer and former senior editor at TIME Magazine who has also written for the New York Times, newyorker.com and, of course, the Phnom Penh Post. He suspects that he is messing up his kids, but just isn’t sure exactly how.

Digital Sabbath

As the least Jewish (yet still sorta Jewy!) member of DadWagon, Sabbath has never been my strength. So when I set out to write about the fourth annual National Day of Unplugging on March 1, which is a sort of Sabbath for the digital era, I realized that by writing about it March 1, I would actually be totally violating the premise (unless I was going to write it down with pencil and paper and just post it around the neighborhood).

And so, I present to you, on March 2 in the evening, a post about March 1.

There is a lot of scripture about the Sabbath and what it is and why God  commanded it and such. But one of the best has to be this:

Exodus 23:12 Six days you shall do your work, and on the seventh day thou shall rest: that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of your handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed.

I like it, of course for the unintentional way that it talks to me in the vernacular—thine ass may rest!—and because it presumes I have a handmaid, which is nice and flattering. But this, like other scripture on Sabbath, says it should be a day of rest. The problem for a digital sabbath is that these days we tend to be doing the exact same thing whether at rest or at work. That is, we are still at our computers whether it’s the weekend or the week, whether we are looking to work through a to-do list or looking for cat porn for fun (or whatever your search habits are). About when the Book of Exodus would have been written, it was pretty clear if someone was in the fields working or at home Sabbathing. Now you would have to be close enough to see the screen—angry birds or angry email to investors?—to figure out whether this was work or rest.

That’s why I like the solution from the National Day of Unplugging people. Just unplug it all. Refresh your handmaid’s son (if you’re into that kink). Rest thine ox. And, of course, rest thine ass. Offline.

Why Men Brag About Their Salaries, Part 2

Posts from our ongoing association with the wizened old gender warriors at The Atlantic. Theodore’s first salvo on salary bragging is here. Read all of our previous topics for The Atlantic here.

My six-year-old daughter has an old friend—in as much as first graders can have old friends—who is a boy who used to live in Brooklyn but moved west. He visited again recently, and after a long absence, they fell to discussing something that has suddenly become important to them: money.

“I have $75,” said the boy, a statement that his mother later verified as true.

“Oh, that’s funny. I have $68,” said my daughter, a statement that was categorically false. Even after Santa delivered that bag of real gold she asked for (ten Sacagawea dollar coins in a little satchel, as it turned out), she still doesn’t have more than $25 to her name. But the old friends just turned to each other and laughed. “We have SO much money,” they said one after the other.

The last time they saw each other, they really didn’t feel this way about money. Yes, she’s had a half-full piggy bank on her nightstand for years, but this thing of talking a lot about money, and this magical thinking (read: lying) about how much money she has is new. Watching them made me think that salary bragging might be an actual developmental step. Kids are often braggarts, which seems—if I can indulge in some armchair psychiatry—like a useful shield for them as they start to look around and see just how little they are capable of in the adult world.

The leap from piggy-bank fibbing to salary-bragging is a natural one. At an older age, it is still the defense of the braggart, particularly of men who are ever-aware that they have less and earn less and are less than others on this earth. But I’ll say this about salary bragging and six-year-olds: as with so many social and cognitive milestones, young girls are simply a little more advanced than the boys.

New Year’s, Almost

Kids can, at least, appreciate blowing shit up

I have no idea why we would be motivated to do this, but we tried to get our kids to make it to midnight. Sure, they aren’t all that different from other partygoers: like any hard-swilling hipster worth his salt, a kid might cry or wet himself during a particularly long party. But stretching a first-grader to midnight is a dubious plan, not least because of this fact:

They have very little sense of time.

I’m not just talking about 7pm versus 10pm versus midnight. Clearly the child-mind gets hazy about what clocks mean around bedtime anyhow.

But the bigger issue, New Year’s Eve as a holiday is entirely predicated on having made the developmental leap into understanding time in general, and specifically the passage of time. This makes it a challenging milestone for small kids. Christmas is easy: it’s just another birthday party. Channukah is understandable (if weird—kids who are growing up around smartphones probably can’t relate to the miracles of lamp-oil). Even death-centric Easter makes sense, at least to kids who have lost a grandparent or a pet, though one could ask rightfully what the hell a rabbit has to do with the death and also, while we’re at it, why grandma isn’t able to rise from the dead like Christ if that is really the Easter story.

But New Year’s Eve has got to be a strange thing indeed to someone who really doesn’t understand was 2012 was. So while I puzzled over how Carson Daly ever got a job working in television, my daughter chewed over the concepts of time and remembrance in her head, and ended up not really caring that much. Not yet, anyhow.

Which was for the best, in the end. Because her and her preschool son weren’t fated to make it to midnight anyway. They crashed around 10:30pm, and then slept through the fireworks and faint whoohooing from the street and the NYPD sirens and all the other things that make New York on New Year’s an assault on the senses. It was still a party—with two friends their age staying and their mother staying over with us from out of town, it was actually a monumental chocolate-eating pillow-fighting, milk-guzzling blowout. But they just didn’t trouble themselves with why they were partying, or why we didn’t care if they slept or not, or what 2013 will even be about.

I’m not often jealous of my kids, but I was last night. It’s a beautiful thing, to not be able to size up 2012 in any way or to form any anxieties about 2013. We should all be so lucky.

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.