Category Archives: The Tantrum

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

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(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.

The Tantrum: Should Young Men Be Permitted to Breed?

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

As the elder statesmen of the DadWagon fathers (I’m 60), the first installment of this Tantrum fell to me. It’s a simple question, one that seems to be of increasing relevance to people like me (aka, people who think about not particularly important questions): is it okay to have children young?

Obviously not. Have you met men in the prime of their lives? (I’m actually 39—which is choice, not prime, at best.) Awful, stinky, deluded, arrogant, untrustworthy, incompetent, infantile mooks. Not only should they not be allowed to breed, it’s debatable whether or not they should be allowed to age.

More seriously, though, I’d like to consider the advantages of having a child while young (JP came when I was 33). Along with the fundamental matter of energy—going years without enough sleep is enough to age even a young man—there is the idea that youngsters are more open-minded and can handle the introduction of a squirming, screaming, pooping buzzkill more easily than their elders.

Perhaps. At least in my case, however, I don’t think I would have been mature enough to effectively navigate the upheavals that come with fatherhood while I was in my twenties. Not that I am such a self-effacing, putting-others-firster now, but I was definitely more selfish ten years ago—and selfishness does not a fine daddy make (or words to that effect).

Now, I will say this: there is something weird (to me) about the really old men (and by that I mean anyone older than my 39) having progeny, something that suggests a bulwarking of the self-esteem, a re-recognition of one’s virility, essentially, fatherhood as vanity project. This, I imagine, ain’t good. But at least when you’re older you are more likely to be able to pay someone to make up for your mistakes. So there’s that.

Just Poop Already, Dammit: No. 2

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This morning started out as a normal morning. I went into Sasha’s room at about 7:20 to get her up, and she told me she wanted to get dressed. No, not that dress, she said, the flower one—the one that’s probably too light for today’s wet weather. Whatever. I helped her into clean undies and put the flowery dress over her head.

As I was zipping up the back of her dress, she started to dance. “Peepee! Peepee!” she said, and I hurried her into the bathroom. She had a nice long pee, and I handed her toilet paper to wipe. She refused.

Huh? Come on, I thought: You’ve wiped a million times before. You can do it again. You’re a big girl, right?

But then Sasha said, “I want to poop.”

And then it came: Plop. Plop. Plop. Plop.

A look of joy spread on Sasha’s face, and it must’ve spread on mine, too. She’d done it, without prompting, and I wiped her ass gratefully. This might be an anomaly, but it felt like a turning point.

“I’m going to tell Mommy!” Sasha cried as she stood and pulled her undies up. Jean came in to see what the fuss was. “Mommy, I pooped!” Sasha said, then held up four fingers. “I did five poops!” (We’ll get her clear on numbers later.)

After Jean left, Sasha turned to me and said, in what I think was a Knuffle Bunny reference, “Daddy, I realized something.”

“What’s that?”

“Poop!”

The Tantrum, Part 2: Should DadWagon Get a Job?

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Consider this a mini-Tantrum. Usually, all three of the Wagoneers weigh in on a single tantrum topic. Matt already wrote his post about whether or not to get a job (synapsis: he is tempted). But Theodore was exempted from writing, since he actually made his opinion known in the most emphatic way possible: by taking a severance package and leaving Harper’s Magazine this week.

That leaves me alone to say: DadWagon should not get a job. Particularly if it’s a job they really, really like.

I had, perhaps, the jobbiest-job of the bunch, since Time Magazine is, safe to say, a more corporate working environment than Harper’s. It involved me putting on a button-down shirt (and even a tie sometimes, though I did show up at a lunch with Ban Ki Moon and the bosses of Time Inc. once without even wearing a jacket–oops). I took the subway into work during rush hours, with all the other sleepy professionals, and got off at Rockefeller Center, where I would trudge with the same mudflow of officeworkers every day. It was more of a “job” than anyone in my direct family line has held for several generations.

And in my own way, I made as emphatic a statement as I could about that lifestyle–if not about that particular magazine, whom I still write for and whose staff and editors I still admire–when I quit in 2009.

I had worked a lot of jobs going through school and in the years afterwards. I did construction, I taught high schoolers, I washed dishes and shoveled snow. None of them was a good fit for me, a person with little patience and a weak back. I once put on a suit and spent a year selling educational programs to school districts, failing so horribly that I sold somewhere in the vicinity of $3000 of product, not even a tenth of what my base salary was.

But the most dangerous job of all, to me and my family, was the one I loved. It was a tremendous privilege to work at Time Magazine. It’s a heavy brand, and it had the resources to send me around the country and occasionally overseas to write and report stories. I wanted to do well by them. I took on every assignment I was offered, and thereby wound up editing and, to a certain degree, managing people. The office at Rockefeller Center became a warm–if incredibly brightly lit–second home. My enthusiasm for the job conspired, with caffeine and insomnia, to keep me in the office up to 80 hours a week, until 3 or 4 in the morning. And I was often not the only one there that late.

I didn’t have any ephiphanic moments when my first kid was born. It took longer for me, a couple years really, to understand what parenting is about for me. That is, I realized that although many of my colleagues had made peace with working insane hours as their families moved forward, it just wouldn’t work for me. I respect the hell out of them, and the work they do and the choices they make. But I found myself not wanting to be at the office every day all day. I am prone to sentimentality and regret, which means that not only do I not get to see my kids, but I feel like I’m doing them and me some irreplaceable disservice by not being around them. And in a place that makes as many demands–rightfully so–on its editors and writers as Time does, not wanting to be in the office when you have to be there is not good for anybody.

So I left. Besides this blog, I’m more or less doing the same work, but I make a lot less than I used to (thanks for getting my back, wife!). And there are plenty of the garden-variety frustrations that freelancers have: you have to constantly motivate yourself in the face of what feels like the unmovable indifference of the (non-Time) editors of the world.

But the other side of the ledger is strong. My kids have never had to be taken to the doctor or the hospital by a babysitter. I cook for them–not often enough, but more often than I did. Aside from the times when I am traveling, I get to have an actual morning routine with them. I know my son’s favorite games, his favorite color, what new words he’s learned today. I get to see my daughter’s rapid ascent up the evolutionary tree first hand, from the protozoa she was at birth to a five-year-old who can act a lot like a homo sapiens teenager. I don’t pretend that I am spending this time or doing these things for their sake–lord knows they are free to resent my presence later on in life. I do it for myself, in part as a way of minimizing my own potential future regrets.

I did, thanks to my continued amity with Time, have a chance to reprise the office life for almost all of last week. It was almost exactly as I had left it: great to see everyone, great to be in meetings where decisions are being made, and a poor fit for me overall. From Tuesday morning to Thursday evening, I didn’t see my kids. That’s partly because it takes me so long to finish my work, partly because there’s so much else to do–meetings, mini-conferences, quick huddles in an office.

I was there. It was good. But it’s better to be home.