The Tantrum: Are Older Dads OK? Should Young Men Even Be Allowed to Breed?

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one question over the course of a week. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

I feel old. That’s the long and short of it. Ever since Sasha came into my life, three and a half years ago, I’ve felt creaky and tired, increasingly inflexible in both body and mind. I am cranky and irritable. I’m curmudgeonly. I fart more. I am embarrassing. I am old.

Of course, I’m not really all that old. In two months, I’ll turn 38, which is neither particularly old nor particularly young (though I’m older than my parents were at this stage of child-having). I have friends who started earlier, and friends who started much later: One of Sasha’s preschool classmates has a dad who’s probably a dozen years my elder. And while he seems spry, I can’t quite imagine myself doing what he’s doing. As it is, I’m already looking ahead to landmarks in Sasha’s life—high-school graduation, college graduation, marriage, kids—and trying to calculate my age: 53, 57, 60-something, 70-something?!?

Mostly, it’s not a physical thing. I’m in good shape, and relatively energetic, and barring surprise injury or sickness I’ll stay that way for a couple more decades. It’s just the creeping inevitability of death that gets me. That is, I like Sasha (and presumably will also feel kindly toward her coming baby sister), and I want to be around for as much of her life as possible. Every year that I delayed having kids is a year I didn’t get to see them grow up, and that knowledge is like a knife in my guts: What will I miss? How will I be unable to help? Without me around, who will teach the kids (and grandkids) to mix cocktails?

Not that I could’ve started any earlier. From age 29 to 34, I was peripatetic to a fault, and before that unhappy and unstable (financially) enough that fatherhood would’ve been a miserable hardship. Could I have done it? Yes, probably. Although I am (I hope) a different person than I was a decade ago, I don’t think my fundamental approach to life and parenting have changed significantly. Sasha could be hitting 13 this year, and I’m reasonably sure I’d have done just as bad a job bringing her up as I’m doing right now. If there’s one thing that you take away from DadWagon, it’s this: we all suck. Also, Bill Murray was right in Meatballs:

Anyway, to get back to the fundamental issues of this Tantrum, are older dads OK? Yeah, but they won’t be around long, so be nice to them. And should younger men be allowed to breed? Sure, as long as we’re not talking about my colleague Theodore—that dude would’ve been a terrible dad if he’d started in his twenties, when he was a selfish prick. As it is, he’s graduated to being merely ridiculous, which is about the best any of us can hope for.

From Russia, with Child Experimentation

Forget my headline. I actually have a huge sense of admiration for this man, Clifford J. Levy, after reading his story of throwing his children defenseless into the icy waters of Slavic education in the upcoming NYT Magazine. Here’s him setting the stage:

My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.

I’ve never met this man, but as readers of the ‘Wagon might know, I do a modified version of what he does for a living. That is, I live in NYC, but cover Russia from time to time. Actually, it’s a little more than that. I lived in Russia, I studied Russian, the first longform articles I ever wrote were for the Moscow Times, written about the delightfully bizarre Russian diaspora in and around Seattle, where I lived. The pay was disastrous, yet was the assignment was enough of a thrill that I quit my career as a musician soon afterwards, to the joy of the many Seattleites, some of them presumably Russians, who just wanted to get drunk without having to listen to me play.

It also happens that the first job in journalism I was ever offered was at the Moscow Times, which was in the habit of trying to lure naive hatchlings like me into taking very little pay to move to one of the most expensive cities in the world. But I was even broker than they knew and might have taken the job, if it weren’t for fear of exactly the scenario that Levy approached with such vigor. I didn’t have kids, but was already well into building a life with my girlfriend. And Moscow just didn’t strike me as a place to take an American, a Californian, no less. That she is half-Asian also didn’t bode well, as Central Asians are to Moscow what Mexicans are to Sun City, Arizona: a crucial and despised workforce.

That may all still be true. Just last month I was in Moscow having the same conversation with an old friend of mine: I could never move to Moscow, out of a combination of my own faults and Moscow’s faults. It’s corrupt, I’m morally weak, it’s polluted, so am I, etc., etc.

But if life had turned differently and I felt like I could do Moscow with my family, I should hope to do it like Levy. Watch the video at least. He threw his children to the wolves. He took them out of the Green Zone of international schools and sent them right into Sadr City, an all-Russian school with almost no foreign-speakers. And the kids, despite their valid and self-possessed points like ‘everyone thinks it’s easy for kids to learn a new language, but it was hard‘ (I paraphrase), seemed better for the experience. They learned the real lessons I keep wanting to teach my kids: that there is more than one way to life a life. That an obstacle that might seem impossibly difficult at first will just melt away with time and effort. Also, they speak beautiful Russian, especially the boy. I’ve had to work hard even to be able to mangle Russian, so I’m both impressed and jealous.

There’s a lesson beyond Moscow for us, and maybe for anyone else who tilts toward the abroad. We want this kind of thing for our kids. Especially if it came in a place like Mexico, where half of my wife’s family comes from, or elsewhere on the hispanoparlante  spectrum. We want them to live an immersed life in some incredibly different and perhaps difficult place. But it’s a tricky thing. It means moving and finding new work and paying taxes here and there and not being sure if it is really just our own scheme or something that would actually benefit the kids as well.

[Worth interjecting here, of course, that the experience of being trapped in a classroom that doesn’t speak your language, with a punishing academic culture happens every day here in the States to no less worthy kids, by the millions. With the added difficulties that immigrants are usually poorer, without health care, or sometimes documentation, so that every moment of every day is like living in a hostile Babylon from which there is no ready escape].

For Levy, and for me, it’s different. What he did with his kids was a highly voluntary choice, a luxury as such. And who knows how it will turn out, how the kids will turn out. Rootless and insecure? Cosmopolitan and confident? It always depends on the kid. But Levy and his wife deserve credit for making the most important point of all: it’s possible.

The First Time I Got My Daughter Drunk (Maybe)

Yesterday was Father’s Day, and I wanted only one thing for the annual celebration of my successful attempt at procreation: to sleep late. And I did—till almost 8 a.m.! The rest of the day saw us meeting out-of-town friends for brunch, then a nap back home, and finally a trip to Carroll Park, where Sasha in her “fairy dress” refused to run in the sprinklers.

While we were at the park, I realized I did have one real Father’s Day wish: to stop in at Gowanus Yacht Club, one of my favorite bars in the city. For those of you who don’t live here, the bar’s name is, uh, kind of ironic. The Gowanus, for one, is a nearby canal that is so polluted that it became the city’s first Superfund site. For another, the Yacht Club is not a yacht club but rather a bunch of picnic tables set up in a semi-abandoned lot; decent, cheap beers and burgers and hot dogs are what you consume there. It’s seasonal, and it’s fantastic, and I never get there often enough.

But yesterday, when Sasha was done playing, we stopped in for drinks and snacks. A Narragansett lager and kielbasa for me, a plastic cup of cava for Jean, and a couple of sauerkraut-laden hot dogs for Sasha. A classic babies-in-bar scenario. Thing is, Sasha often sees our drinks and demands to taste them, which, well, we’re mostly against. But not entirely against. So, with a couple of quick glances to make sure no police were watching, we gave Sasha a sip of Jean’s cava. She loved it, demanded more, we said no, Sasha threatened to escalate, and then the hot dogs arrived to distract her.

Soon, however, Sasha got chatty, and silly, and affectionate. She high-fived our neighbors, she tried to cram half-a-dozen pickle slices in her mouth. By the time we left, she was acting strange—holding the back of my shirt as we walked down the street, and swinging her head around when I carried her, and babbling, and singing, and talking about one thing before suddenly talking about something else, and acting kinda-sorta tipsy.

But was she? Could two sips of cava really send her for a loop like that? Or was she simply being a toddler? The two states of mind are actually almost indistinguishable, especially when you’re talking about a toddler who was fast approaching bedtime. Sleepy, crabby, prone to hugging at random moments—does that amount to inebriation? I don’t know.

I do know this, however. A few hours after we got Sasha home and put her to bed, she woke up crying in the middle of the night—pretty unusual for her. When we got up and tended to her, Sasha demanded to sleep in our bed, and we relented. She fell back asleep immediately—and wet the bed. I still don’t know if that proves she was drunk, but if so, she was a bad drunk. Toddler boys of the world, watch out for this one!

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Men My Wife Likes Who Are Not Me

I am not, by nature, a jealous type. Nor am I the kind of idealistic romantic who imagines his partner could, and should, never fantasize about another person. But still, I take note whenever Jean, my wife, says she finds someone attractive. These occasions are pretty rare, but I track them, and solely to embarrass her (or is it me I’m embarrassing?), I figured I’d present you with them, then let you decide who she should leave me for.

Charlie Day: If you’ve ever watched It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you know Charlie—possibly the single most hilarious character on TV today. Impoverished and illiterate, with a warped sensibility, a penchant for skintight green bodysuits and an autodidactic facility with the piano, Charlie is often the butt of his Always Sunny pals—forced to do janitorial work, and to live with the even more slovenly Danny DeVito—until he gets his revenge. He’s also hopelessly in love with the Waitress, who despises him (although the actress who plays her is actually his wife).

Aziz Ansari: Currently best known as Tom Haverford, a massively underachieving and somewhat solipsistic character on Parks & Recreation, Ansari won (sort of) Jean’s heart with a monologue about the nicknames he gives to food and food-related items, culminating in the line “I call forks… food rakes.” Dude is actually really funny:

Robert Reid: I’m including my old friend Robert Reid here mostly because I feel like I need a third option, but also because a long, long time ago I showed Jean a photo of Robert in Vietnam in 1997, and she said she thought he was cute. (She was not as impressed after she met him in person; sorry, dude!) Strangely enough, Robert’s own sense of humor is kind of line with these other guys, so maybe that means something. And maybe it says something about what kind of hilarious weirdo I am, too (in reality, if not in the blogosphere). Anyway, here’s some video of him:

So, now that you’ve met my rivals, let’s decide who Jean should leave me for (not that she’s going to leave me (I hope)):

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