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

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?

Brood, Thy Name is Ross

Most of the Ross family

So, Saturday, August 26th, after many hours of labor, my wife, Tomoko gave birth to our second child, and my third. Her name is Mena Masako Ross, a name I kinda like, even if the first one was suggested to us by a semi-retired Internet guy on yoga retreat vacation in Mexico, and if only because the middle is the same as Tomoko’s mother, who passed away many years ago.

I don’t have much to say about this experience just yet. Third time may be the charm, but I’m still reeling from the impact of having entered into this social contrat/burden/blessing yet again. She is a lovely little thing, Mena, and Ellie and JP have taken to her immediately, JP, the harsh critic, even conceding that she is cute.

I will share this: earlier today, Tomoko and I decided to take the children out for a short walk around the neighborhood (we’re on family leave–two weeks for me, four months for Tomoko, which isn’t fair, but is the way it is, and something I think mothers might keep in mind as they are debating their capacity to “have it all”). JP sprinted out in front, Ellie trundling along behind shouting for him to wait. I speed walked after, trying to beat Ellie to the corner and make sure she didn’t blunder out into traffic. Holding up the rear were Tomoko and Mena.

We got to one corner, and waited for the light, all five of us, a nice moment, first of many, to be sure. I turned to Tomoko, who had finally caught up with us, and said, “The word that comes to mind is brood, isn’t it?”

She didn’t disagree.