The Tantrum: Should Young Men Even Be Allowed to Breed? Part III

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

Do you ever get the feeling that everything we think we know about parenting is wrong? Especially all the stuff that is new to parenting, things that our parents didn’t do and their parents didn’t do and nobody’s parents did stretching back to the misty dawn of history when we were all just monkey parents first climbing out of the trees and trudging with our children, who did not have Razr scooters or 50-point shock-resistant child helmets, onto the alluvial plain?

Well, I feel that way all the time. I second-guess a lot of my decisions, especially the bigger ones I’ve made: raising the kids in the middle of the city, choosing a career that often takes me far from home for too long at a time. And this is doubly true of one of the most elemental decisions any family can make: when to have kids.

Our decision, unequivocally, was this: we waited.

You see, I met my wife in the heart of the Fugazi era, the In on the Kill Taker years, also known as the early 1990’s. She spotted me smoking cigarettes on breaks behind the coffee shop where I worked: something about me must have screamed, now there’s a man who is going to have a multi-decade problem with nicotine. I want in on that action, because she finagled an introduction through a mutual friend. And we went from there.

I was 18 years old, and she wasn’t much older than me. That is sort of shocking every time I think about it, not just because I feel incredibly lucky (and anachronistic) to have someone who is, as much as is possible, a life partner. Like, if we don’t mess this up moving forward, we have the opportunity to have been together for nearly a complete human lifespan. It’s also shocking to me because that means that if we had wanted to, or if we had lived in a post-GOP world where there is no birth control for teenagers, we could have had kids in 1994. My child would be 18, about to make some terrible decisions the night of her prom and hopefully still going to college. Instead of DadWagon, I’d be blogging now on EmptyNesters.com. Instead of writing this post while waiting for yet another load of sheets that my preschooler peed on to finish washing, I’d probably have an amazing roast in oven, be decanting some nice red, about to have a group of fabulous creative unencumbered friends over for a dinner party with my wife that will end with some great stories and then—why not?—a few elegant lines of coke and a trip to a rooftop electronica party in SoHo for well-heeled people who don’t need to wake up at 6am tomorrow to get their tiny fucking children to Kindergarten the next morning.

This is the fantasy that I torment myself with. And mind you, I’m not even as old as my fellow-bloggers. I had my first kid at 30. But that means that right around the time that my youngest is set to go to college (inshallah), I will be hit in the forehead with the 2×4 that is Turning 50 Years Old and then soon enough it’ll be time for apply for an AARP card and get ready for eternity in a mouldering grave.

The thing about waiting, though, was that it was technically the right decision. As my fantasy of life-after-children might indicate, I have maturity issues. My teenaged/20-year-old self was a fair bit worse, and I would have had a hard time making good decisions for a child. And then there’s the question of education, and career, and the sacrifices one makes for mammon throughout the 20s. In agrarian or hunter-gatherer societies, I would have had to kill a bear at the age of 18 and eat its gall bladder* then basically my education and transformation into manhood would have been complete. In the information economy, however, I needed to finish my four (okay, five) year degree, follow my wife around the country as she got advanced professional degrees, all the while hanging around on the fringes of a major media organization waiting for my big shot. In short, I was broke and professionally unstable, and now that I’m a highly-paid dadblogger, I’m a better parent.

That’s what I think, at least. The truth is—and here, finally, is where we get to the actual topic of this tantrum—that young parents can be amazing parents. I know that from my middle-aged vantage point, it’s tempting paint younger parents as chronically unfit, the kind of people who make the evening news, who smoke weed and drive off with their baby in its carrier still on the roof of their car. There are those types of idiots, sure, but I’ve seen young parents who also do a great job. and all that chaos and instability that goes with being young can make the bond between parent and child even more elemental. They can be tough for each other, bond more deeply, become a more integral part of a joint life because, at 22 or whatnot, your life isn’t really formed at all yet.

And that gets to the heart of this question of old vs young parenting: Do you want your children to arrive onto a stage that has already been set (older parents)? Or do you want them to arrive early into a life that is still being assembled (younger parents)? I think there are benefits and drawbacks to each, but kids don’t need nice cars or stable incomes nearly as much as they need parents who put them at the center of existence. If a child arrives and is just intruding on what was otherwise a very trim and organized existence, as it seems with some older parents I know, then whom does that help?

Mainly, I long for a touch of anarchism to all of this, and that there’s a powerful case for having them young. Screw conventional wisdom. Be a teen parent. Just to prove Ted and Matt wrong.

*Note: I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Just Poop Already, Dammit: No. 2

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!”

What Almost Made Me Cry Today: ‘Love You Forever’

Looks so funny, doesn't it? Reader beware!

The other night, at bedtime, I sent Sasha to her “library” (what she calls her bookshelf) to select some reading material. She returned with Mercer Mayer’s “All By Myself,” a stack of idiotic Corduroy books, and a book I’d seen floating around the house but had never actually opened, “Love You Forever,” written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Sheila MacGraw. Where had this book come from? I wondered. What’s it about?

Well, DadWagon readers, I can now reveal to you that this is the most manipulative, depressing children’s book I’ve ever come across. The conceit is that a new mother waits till her baby is asleep, then sneaks into his room, rocks him “back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,” and sings to him this little ditty:

I’ll love you forever

I’ll like you for always

As long as I’m living

My baby you’ll be

Throughout the book, the baby gets older, growing into a 2-year-old, then a 9-year-old, then a teenager, then a grown-up man. Ha ha! There’s Mom, sneaking into her grown son’s house to rock him in his sleep! How funny!

But I knew something was up, and as both parent and child grew—and aged—it became harder and harder for me to read aloud. That line—”As long as I’m living”—was carrying with it dreadful implications that eventually became explicit: The mother is finally too old and sick to rock her son, who rushes to her nursing home to cradle her and sing the song he’s heard all his life. Then he goes home to rock his own newborn daughter and sing to her.

I read the ending in a choked whisper. Tears were rolling down my face. Sasha barely noticed. What kind of horrible book was this—so relentlessly rolling toward its bittersweet finale? How could they do this to parents, let alone children? What kind of monster are you, Robert Munsch?

After that, the bland adventures of Corduroy—look at him go fast on his scooter!—were a welcome salve.

What Almost Made Me Cry Today: Airplane Movies

It should surprise no one that on my flight back from Greece last week I watched a couple of movies that almost made me cry. That’s just how it goes in Matt World. For the record, the one that came closest to squeezing tears from my ducts was Where the Wild Things Are, the Dave Eggers–Spike Jonze adaptation of the beloved Maurice Sendak book.

Beloved by most people, that is. I remember reading it when I was little, but I don’t know that I loved it, not the way I grew attached to Sendak’s “Chicken Soup With Rice” series. Anyway, the film version adds a bit of backstory to Max, the rampaging child who flees home and discovers a land of friendly monsters and wild rumpuses; now he’s got no dad and a struggling mom and a big sister who’s more interested in hanging out with older boys than digging igloos with her kid brother. Apart from the kind of amazing special effects, the movie isn’t really all that great, meandering at times dully as Max learns that managing the social relations among the Wild Things is no fun.

But what the film gets right is Max. That is, he feels properly like a kid, thanks I guess to the script but also to actor Max Records, who’s got that volatile mix of unbridled imagination, vulnerability, explosive anger, and bravado that I remember feeling myself when I was 6 or 7. When a bunch of older kids accidentally crush his igloo, or when he goes to sleep under a pile of furry Wild Things, the sadness and delight he conveys is, well, authentic. It was almost enough to make me cry—almost.

The other movie didn’t come close to making me cry, but it did have something else in common with Where the Wild Things Are. The movie was Going the Distance—yes, the Drew Barrymore–Justin Long vehicle about a mid-20s couple trying to make a bicoastal long-distance relationship work. Maybe I connected with the movie because my wife and I have spent so much time and effort making our own long-distance relationship work, but what struck me more than that was the way the characters (she a struggling journalist, he a struggling A&R guy) spoke. It’s a small thing, but they sounded like us—sounded like me, Jean, and many other people of our age and social circle.

Or maybe that’s no small thing. For other recent and upcoming movies have the same thing going on. Bridesmaids, the new Kristen Wiig movie, features plenty of mid-30s characters who sound, you know, like urban people in their mid-30s: jokey, confused, ironic, sarcastic, fragmented, and often terrified of saying exactly what they mean or how they feel. In fact, this is probably the most salient trait of the whole Judd Apatow film world: you find it in Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin, and a bit in Date Night.

Moreover, it feels like there’s a whole slew of movies directed at the DadWagon audience these days. At Bridesmaids, we saw a preview for The Change-up, in which harried father-of-twins Jason Bateman and pussyhound Ryan Reynolds magically switch places, Freaky Friday-style. And director Alexander Payne has a new movie coming, The Descendants, in which George Clooney plays a nice dad who learns that his newly dead wife had been cheating on him. Expect the usual Payne mix of quirky humor and melancholy.

So, here’s my question: Is this a new thing? Two decades ago I don’t remember such movies being targeted at this mid-30s parental demographic. The closest thing to that was Parenthood, but that was definitely Boomer-oriented, and while it was funny back then, I don’t think its voice broke any new ground. It still sounded like old, big-money Hollywood. So is this new wave a conscious decision by filmmakers (and studios), or a natural consequence of my generation’s inevitable ascendancy?

Oh, and here’s the Descendants trailer: