Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned From ‘Dr. Who’

Apparently, a new season of the BBC’s classic sci-fi series, “Dr. Who,” is about to begin here in the former colonies, which has prompted some people to reflect on how the 50-year-old show, about a time-traveling do-gooder with a funny accent and slightly funnier outfits, is an excellent source of parenting wisdom. And they’re right! So right, in fact, that I’ve compiled my own list of dadding lessons learned from watching the TARDIS whine in and out of existence:

1. You can disappear for years at a stretch, and yet your kids will still adore you. No, I’m not referring to the Doctor’s penchant for bouncing into and out of his companions’ lives at odd moments. Actually, I’m talking about the way the series barely made it to the age of 50: Beginning in the mid-80s, its existence was threatened, and it went entirely off the air for years at a time, returning occasionally for a season or three with a new Doctor before once again failing to find a broad audience and going dark. And yet Dr. Who fans STILL clamored for it, their ardor only growing with the show’s prolonged absence. And when it returned: joy beyond all reasonable measure! So that’s the approach I take to my kids. I leave when I feel like it, knowing that when—if—I return, they’ll be as desperate as ever for my love and attention.

2. Kids will believe anything. If there’s one thing Dr. Who is known for, it’s execrable dialogue and even worse special effects. Easy example: For the show’s entire run, the most evil bad guys of all were the Daleks, who trundled around on roller balls, unable to climb stairs, and were usually limited to the singularly idiotic spoken line: “Ex-ter-min-ate!” And yet I fucking loved that show, and even now, despite my overt knowledge of its shoddiness, tune in to catch new episodes. And so, once again, I’m taking this approach to child-rearing: I tell my kids whatever flits through my brain, no matter how unbelievable, knowing that the little creatures are so credulous they’ll eat it all up. Remember, I’ve just returned from months or years away, and they want my attention, so their defenses are down—I might well have been piloting my spaceship through the galaxy in the company of unicorn princesses.

3. A silly outfit makes everything okay. Of course, for these tactics to work, you have to emulate the Doctor down to his wardrobe, which can be anything from Edwardian to cricket-ready to 21st-century hipster formal. This gives the Doctor a playful, almost harmless aspect, when in fact his arrival usually signals the imminent near-destruction of the planet Earth, and the upending of his companions’ lives. But hey, he’s got a long, silly scarf! And a robot dog! And expertly tousled hair! How much chaos can he—or I—really wreak? (Answer: As much as you’ll let me!)

So there you have it: a primer on parenting based on the adventures of a guy who’s lived 900-some years without ever settling down, acquiring health insurance (what’s the deductible on regeneration?), and time-traveling all the way back to 4:35 a.m. in order to be first on line to register a kid for Universal Pre-K. Trust me, this stuff totally works—at least until the network executives (a.k.a. your wife) cancel the season and the kids all yell, “Exterminate!” After that, you might as well go live at Comic-Con.

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.

DadWagon + The Atlantic, Volume 1: We Take Care of our Kids, Dammit

Originally posted at The Atlantic

Hey, guys,

Several times a day, after my infant daughter, Sammy, finishes breastfeeding, my wife, Jean, will hand her over to me and say, “Can you burp her?” And I will duly pick Sammy up, put her over my shoulder, and lightly pound her back until she emits a belch. Done!

Now, Jean is not asking me to do the burping because she’s exhausted (although she is). No, she’s asking because, frankly, I’m better at coaxing bubbles from the baby’s belly, just as I’m better at certain of the other household tasks I’ve gravitated toward ever since our first daughter, Sasha, was born almost four years ago: planning and preparing our meals, getting Sasha up and dressed in the morning, arranging playdates, putting the kids to bed—all duties that, until not too long ago, were considered a mother’s natural province.

Today, of course, the End of Men has arrived, and we’re hip-deep in the swamp of the stay-at-home-dad trend. From enlightened-liberal metropolises to small-town U.S.A., fathers are voluntarily taking on the challenge of parenthood in ways that previous generations never could have imagined, and decrying media images of men as incompetent, bumbling, or, worse, absent from active parenting entirely. We exist! they seem to cry en masse. And more and more, that cry is being heard.

It’s now time for that cri de coeur to evolve, and for men to proclaim, gently and kindly, that we may be, in some cases, “better moms”—caregivers, that is—than moms. We are—if you believe the classical stereotypes—less emotional and more practical, approaching child-care problems with a perhaps scientific detachment not to be found in women who, having spent those long months pregnant, may take those problems personally. Whether it’s swaddling an infant, precision placement of a princess Band-Aid, or soothing hurt feelings (“Paige said she’s not my friend anymore!”), a little emotional distance, data analysis, and hardheaded strategizing can go a long way. And men are, supposedly, better at that stuff.

As provocative as I’m trying to make this argument, I’d like to think this is, in fact, a feminist stance. That is, if women can be as good or better—and better, as Hanna Rosin argues—as men at certain jobs, then why can’t we say the same for men, too? Equality of the sexes doesn’t mean we’re all actually equal. It means we all have equal potential to excel, independent of the shape of our genitalia. If that means that dads start outmothering moms, we have to look at that as progress. So when it comes time to bake cupcakes for pre-K (oh crap, that’s next week!), the other moms better watch out, because I make a mean buttercream frosting. Just don’t ask me to breastfeed.

–Matt

Some years back, in that gauzy era of irresponsibility and moral turpitude that I enjoyed before making babies, I visited a friend whose wife was pregnant. Now, one unhappy by-product of my current status as a volume kid-maker (I have three) is that I can no longer recall with clarity events that have occurred more than, say, 15 to 20 seconds ago. So I don’t remember how I let myself be drawn into a discussion about children with my friend’s wife. At some point, though, we reached the calamitous moment (for me) when she—a third-trimester, impregnated human female and former child actress with a decidedly still-dramatic temperament—declared that she would love her future child more deeply than her husband would. Indeed, she said, all mothers love their children more than fathers, largely because the twin burdens of pregnancy and childbirth cleaved them together in ways men could not match. The feeling, she further implied, was mutual: Children love their mothers more than their fathers.

Before I proceed with the remainder of this story, I’d like to point out that I’m an idiot. This is something that my fellow DadWagon colleagues will readily confirm, and I won’t belabor the page with substantial proof of this, other than to submit my response to my friend’s wife’s assertion. I laughed—one could even say I chuckled with some condescension—at a woman seven months pregnant, which means I crossed a seething cauldron of anger, resentment, back pain, urinary urgency, and ill restraint. I also let slip these words: Now, now—I don’t remember much, but I do remember that fucking “now, now”—That’s a bad way to think about parenting. Your kids, if they know you think that way, will learn to associate love with pain, and that’s not healthy.”

Do I need mention that she ordered me out of the house? Eventually, she forgave me, or at least she said she did, and now, with time and my own reproductive experiences highlighting my foolishness, I wonder if she was right. My children love me, and yes, like Matt, there are certain things I accomplish with them more easily (putting them to bed springs to mind) than their mother, but the maternal bond is powerful, something hardwired into their psyches, like the Love version of whatever goes on in the amygdala.

Here’s the thing, and I offer this question without truly knowing the answer: So what?

I am their father, I have their love, and they are tied to me in whatever way they are tied to me. If the nine-month swim in their mother’s belly, combined with the whitewater (sort of) rush out of her body and into the world, proffers some greater kinship, what possible difference can it make to me? They remain my children, nevertheless.

Let’s say my wife and I divorced. Would we line the kids up, like dogs, and call to them, vying for their loyalty, and whomever they came to got to keep them? (Efficient, yes, but think of the lawyers! They need to eat, too, no?)

Holding the upper hand in parental competence, affection, or connection strikes me as unimportant when compared to the greater task of raising them to know not to give advice to pissed off pregnant women. There are weightier issues demanding my guidance—who else will teach them dirty jokes, long division, the categorical imperative—and it does no good to get hung up on trying to outdo their mother.

So I don’t care who is good at what, who loves whom more than me, and I never, ever attempt to out-mommy Mommy. It is a game I suspect I can lose only by trying. And idiot or no, I know that however much love I receive is more, far more, than enough.

 

–Theodore

If we’re going to debate Matt’s insufferably squishy thesis that dads can out-mom moms, at least let me start with a memory from my time in construction, where gender issues are notably simplified. I was in my early 20s, installing insulation and sheetrock for $8 an hour in Florida. I had just-longer-than-shoulder-length hair (thank you, Tim Lincecum, for still trying to make that work), and a slight build. In the eyes of my foreman, this combination was downright womanly. He thought up a catchphrase for me. If I took too long on a smoke break, or was otherwise wasting time, he always growled the same thing: “Stop waiting to grow a pussy. Get to work.”

There was plenty to dislike about the guy—beyond the chauvinism and general cloddiness, he stiffed our crew out of a week’s pay and skipped town—but I hear an echo of the foreman’s, um, gender essentialism in Matt’s concept of out-momming moms. For the foreman, long hair=woman. For Matt, good parenting=mothering.

Saying that good fathers—the ones who get on the floor to play with their babies, who pack lunch for their preschoolers and help their second-graders with their homework—are just acting like mothers is demeaning to all sides. If men and women have proven anything in the last decade of bloggy introspection, it’s this chiasmus: Not all mothers are good parents and not all good parents are mothers.

In my post-construction life here in New York, I’ve got a fairly steady routine. I wake early, I pee standing up, I get the kids ready and take them to school. That is, I’m both a man and (hopefully) a decent parent.

I’ll also take issue with Theodore’s anatomical absolutism. I can’t presume to know what special bond arises from carrying, or having been carried, in utero. But there are plenty of orphans and adoptees who form full relationships with non-biological parents. And if you start defining parenting through genitalia, before long, you’re Little Hans’s father, promising your son that you won’t cut his balls off because Freud thought the boy needed to hear that.

And I don’t know of any parent who wants to go there.

–Nathan

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!