When parenting goes viral

Into every stay-at-home parent’s life comes that transformative moment. Maybe your kid is finally old enough for you to go in search of a reentry point on that career path you left behind, or maybe that irresistible job offer comes in, or maybe your family just needs more money. So you get back to work.

It’s a juggling act, of course. You’re still trying to be a good parent and give the beastie plenty of attention, and the spouse can’t be neglected, but you’re also dedicated to doing your best and proving that you still have what it takes for the new gig. Sooner, rather than later, assuming you don’t fuck it up, you hit your groove and settle into a demanding, but do-able schedule.

And then the shit hits the fan.

That expression is all too literal in my case, since I came down with gastroenteritis, probably courtesy of norovirus, three weeks into a new job for Reason magazine. On a Tuesday morning, to be exact, with the rest of the week yawning ahead. There I was, running a fever, weak, nauseous, bed-ridden, and very much with something still to prove. So I propped myself on pillows, put the laptop on … well … my lap. And tapped away.

I can never watch this movie again.And then, two days later, Tony got sick. He had the same gut-wrenching virus I had, but magnified by his youth and relative lack of experience with maintaining a death grip on a cold, porcelain disk. What was horrible for me was a tour through hell for him. I was still sick at this point. So my wife rented movies, bought gatorade, and basically tossed them in our direction while holding her shirt over her face and mouth and wielding Lysol wipes like sacred relics.

I literally worked in 15-minute spurts between sessions spent propping Tony over a tupperware bowl, rubbing his back and uttering soothing reassurances. Then off to the porcelain throne for my own turn at misery, and back to the job. All of this accompanied by endless repetitions of Ice Age: The Meltdown, to which Tony clung like it was a lifesaver of joy in a sea of bile-flavored suckage.

On Friday, I kid you not, the laptop got sick. It picked up some pernicious version of the Google redirect virus that resisted Unhackme, Windows Security Essentials, Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware, Combofix and some unnamed stand-alone product from Avast. The wizards of Bangalore employed by OfficeMax finally dug it out, but by this time, I was ready to pursue my old fantasy of chucking it all and living in splendid solitude in a shack in the desert. No computers, no kids, and no shortage of receptacles the next time I came down with stomach flu.

I didn’t do that, obviously. Frankly, I haven’t yet recovered the energy to flee into the wilderness, and I’m well aware that, by the time it returns, my mind will have blissfully blurred the sharp edges of last week’s memories, making the events less immediate and more tolerable.

But with work, parenting and the ever-looming prospect of random disaster, the juggling act continues.

Holidays in a house of dissent

There’s nothing like Christmas to highlight religious differences in a family. On Christmas Eve, which already seems much longer ago than the crate of not-yet-stored decorations on my office floor suggests, my wife, sister and mother shuttled Tony and his cousins off to church. After they trekked off, my father, brother-in-law and I settled down to the serious business of discovering just how many obscure and unlikely cocktails could be mixed with the contents of my old man’s preposterously well-stocked liquor cabinet.

How many? Answer: Holy shit!

Which was about as holy as the male side of Christmas Eve ever became, in a continuation of a long family tradition. If the women in my family occasionally commune with the Spirits, the men prefer to commune with spirits — a pattern that was set before I was born.

My father these days is slippery in characterizing his religious views; a few years ago, he described himself to me as a “zen Judeo-Christian”at a time when he occasionally attended my mother’s church — mostly, so far as anybody could tell, in order to spar with the minister over politics. I say “minister” because my mother decided some years ago, despite all available evidence, that she is a WASP. The theological implications of this odd revelation she initially addressed by attending a Congregational church. Having since discovered that Congregationalism is something of a New England eccentricity, she now makes do in her mid-Atlantic digs with Episcopalianism. Come to think of it, Episcopalian churches are probably better venues for political debate than for religious discussion, so my father may have been on to something.

My old man has since abandoned his peculiar entertainment, and now confines himself to spiritual musings that, honestly, I find a little bizarre. But when I was a child, he called himself an atheist, and so I was raised in an environment in which maternal religion and paternal irreligion were given equal time, leaving me free to make my own choices.

I chose the path of irreligion, myself. Not the fervent anti-theism of Christopher Hitchens, mind you, who, despite the pleasure I take in reading his work, seemed to have carried over his old Leftist joy in absolutist factionalism to a fresh jihad (with a twist) against believers, but more of an unconvinced eye-roll against the world of commandments, clerics and invisible, all-powerful beings. My stance, I think, isn’t far from that of Epicurus, who essentially dismissed the existence or non-existence of gods and their alleged desires as irrelevant to the business of living.

My wife, on the other hand believes … in something. She was raised in a divided house, herself. Her father was Jewish, her mother also Episcopalian (an odd convergence in my life). She has variously identified with one side or the other — mostly depending on which of her now-divorced progenitors she got along with better at any given moment. Having come to a mid-life truce with them both, she currently professes to believe in a god (or God, if you prefer), without worrying whether he or she prefers bagels or martinis.

I want Tony to be raised knowing that there are a multitude of religious beliefs, including the divergent views of his parents. So he marched off to his first Christmas Eve service — first church service of any kind, really — with mom, knowing that dad chose to abstain. All for the best, it seems, since he ended up enjoying the music and the pageantry. He may end up being a believer, at least for a while, just for the theatrical aspect of it all.

Whatever our differences, we all agree that we like the smell of pine in the house, that we enjoy exchanging gifts, and that Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra still can’t be beat when it comes to Christmas carols.

There’s nothing like Christmas to highlight religious differences in a 

family. On Christmas Eve, which already seems much longer ago than the

crate of not-yet-stored decorations on my office floor suggests, my

wife, sister and mother shuttled Tony and his cousins off to church.

After they trekked off, my father, brother-in-law and I settled down

to the serious business of discovering just how many obscure and

unlikely cocktails could be mixed with the contents of my old man’s

preposterously well-stocked liquor cabinet.

Answer: Holy shit!

Which was about as holy as the male side of Christmas Eve ever became,

in a continuation of a long family tradition. If the women in my

family occasionally commune with the Spirits, the men prefer to

commune with spirits — a pattern that was set before I was born.

My father these days is slippery in characterizing his religious

views; a few years ago, he described himself to me as a “zen Judeo-

Christian”at a time when he occasionally attended my mother’s church

— mostly, so far as anybody could tell, in order to spar with the

minister over politics. I say “minister” because my mother decided

some years ago, despite all available evidence, that she is a WASP.

The theological implications of this odd revelation she initially

addressed by attending a Congregational church. Having since

discovered that Congregationalism is something of a New England

eccentricity, she now makes do with Episcopalianism. Come to think of it, Episcopalian churches are probably better venues for political debate than for religious discussion, so my father may have been on to something.

My old man has since abandoned his peculiar entertainment, and now

confines himself to spiritual musings that, honestly, I find a little

bizarre. But when I was a child, he called himself an atheist, and so

I was raised in an environment in which maternal religion and paternal irreligion were given equal time, leaving me free to make my own choices.

I chose the path of irreligion, myself. Not the anti-theism of Christopher Hitchens, mind you, who, despite the pleasure I take in reading his work, seemed to have carried over his old Leftist joy in absolutist factionalism to a fresh jihad (with a twist) against believers, but more of an unconvinced eye-roll against the world of commandments, clerics and

In which I embrace snobbery

I’ve admitted in the past that I’m a snob, and that only becomes more true the longer I’m a parent.

It wasn’t always so. Years ago, I had a girlfriend who, it turned out, bitterly resented what she described as my ability to walk into a room full of people and make an immediate social connection without regard to whether the place was teeming with bikers or opera buffs. I thought it was just because I enjoyed finding common ground with people who didn’t immediately repulse me; she thought it was reason to increase the frequency of her meetings with her shrink from one to two sessions per week.

Yeah. That relationship didn’t last.

But that was before I had a kid. The fact is, raising a little social sponge who is capable of aping the speech and behavior of everybody he meets makes me much more sensitive about what he soaks up. I may still enjoy tossing down a drink with pretty much anybody who has an interesting story to tell, but I’ve also become invested in somewhat tailoring my son’s environment in hopes of reinforcing behavior and values of which I approve, while discouraging those I disdain.

And, who knew? It turns out I disdain a lot!

This doesn’t mean I’m raising the kid in a Skinner box, even if caging the little beast is sometimes a nearly overwhelming temptation. But it does mean that I steer Tony away from people with bad manners, who clearly don’t value responsibility, education, work, hygiene, carrying their own weight … I encourage his interactions with kids who come from homes where reading, culture and a broad and tolerant view of the world are emphasized.

And when you’re a parent, your social world tends to be heavily influenced by that of your kid, and vice versa. You may not bond with all of the parents of your little beast’s herd-mates, but they do have a tendency to work their way into your life. And when you tailor your children’s interactions based on compatibility of culture and values, your own world starts getting more homogeneous. So that, one day, you look around your living room at at the people attending a pot luck, and you realize that, even though they don’t all look like you, they are like you in important ways.

Honestly … while I never thought I would become so selective and frankly snobbish in life, none of this bothers me half as much as I thought it would back when I was knocking down shots with those bikers.

The friendly skies

20110619-103237.jpg Whatever could delay a scheduled flight for over an hour? Could it be engine trouble? Or a sick pilot? Or perhaps . . . a broken latch on a seat-back tray?

Yes, really. On a US Air flight (really Mesa Air — flying commuter flights under the livery of other airlines and giving them a bad name for a bunch of years, now) out of Long Beach, Flight 2780, on June 11, returning to Arizona from a Disney/Lego vacation (to be covered in another post), the plane was actually delayed because a small plastic catch had broken, allowing the seat-back tray to flop into my wife’s lap.

My wife was quickly moved to another seat on the half-full plane, and we firmly expected that the flight attendant would quickly solve the problem with a strip of duct tape and let us get under way, but it was not to be.

The pilot explained to us over the PA that FAA regulations require broken seat-back trays to be repaired with very special, approved tape — tape that wasn’t to be found at hand. So the maintenance department was contacted — in Phoenix — and asked to call their guy on the ground right there in Long Beach (apparently, just waving the guy down from the window of the plane in the tiny airport is frowned upon). The arrival of the guy then had to be waited upon, and waited …

20110619-105402.jpg Finally, the guy showed up. He peeled off three or four squares of double-sided, clear tape, stuck the tray in place, and carefully affixed a . . . well, I think it was a Post-It note, warning of the temporary inconvenience.

Yeah, this really took over an hour of sitting on the tarmac, as we entertained ourselves passing camera-phones around so everybody could preserve the incident for posterity.

I’d like to add an extra thanks to the world’s laziest gate agent, who lost interest in re-booking passengers about to miss flights connecting with the small commuter plane about half-way down the aisle, so just left. That was a truly impressive display comparable to anything I’ve ever seen in a Department of Motor Vehicles.

Fortunately, my family had nothing to connect with but a car parked in an economy garage at Sky Harbor, but others weren’t so lucky.

Big ears, big nose, big hassle

Evil MickeyAt least, that’s my initial reaction to the family’s upcoming trip to Disneyland. Yes, I know that I’m the dad, and if I so dread a journey to the Magic Kingdom, then I have nobody to blame but myself. But the fact is that we get to punch three tickets on this trip: We take Tony to a place that is, admittedly, a childhood Mecca, we visit my father-in-law/step-mother-in-law, and we visit my mother-in-law (never the twain to meet, lest a massive fireball consume much of the LA area. Come to think of it …). That is, we’re packing an awful lot of grownup pain into one week in order to clear the schedule for the rest of the year.

Now, I have to admit that I had a great time at Disneyland when I made my own childhood pilgrimage. Of course, that was … err … something like 38 years ago. My tastes have shifted a bit since then. I seem to remember my father grimacing a lot and searching — in vain — for a drink.

In vain, I say, because you still can’t purchase alcohol in Disneyland. A more sadistic policy I can’t begin to contemplate. But booze is blessedly available, I’m told, at something called Disney California Adventure Park, which used to be one of Disneyland’s parking lots. We’re getting park-hopper passes, which allow us access to the neighboring venues, so I’ll get to see which is magicker — and grab a much-needed drink.

I’m going to need that drink, I’m sure. Let’s see, two days of ricocheting like a pinball off the wife-beater-bedecked hordes from Middle America and their ill-bred spawn. And the soundtrack will be, “It’s a Small World…” over and over again. Yep, I’m going to need that drink. Or electroshock therapy.

Do I come off as a snob? Damn straight, I’m a snob! I also hate crowds, and I have a low tolerance for kid-oriented activities (hence holding off on fatherhood until I was 40.) Frankly, if there is a Hell, and I wake up there, I’m convinced it’s going to be a theme park. A really crowded theme park.

Tony is going to have a wonderful time, I’m sure, comparable to the joy I felt lo those many years ago, when I first discovered Pirates of the Caribbean and the wonderful world of Tomorrowland (I’m still waiting for the punchcards I’ll need to access the home terminal connected to the community super-computer!) For a kid, the only thing that beats rides and cheerful characters is rides and cheerful characters geared towards lovers of pirates and Star Wars.

The kid scores across the board.

Who knows? I may even shed a bit of my accumulated curmudgeonliness and enjoy some of our time at The Happiest Place on Earth.

But then there’s Legoland. Crap, we’re going there, too … Well, at least I’m told there’s one place to get a drink …

A (dental) rite of passage

Tony’s first tooth came out with little drama. Between one word and the next, while chattering about (what else?) Star Wars in the back seat of the car on the way to school, his loose tooth tumbled out of his mouth and down his shirt.

That was easy.

The next one … Not so much.

We had just come out of Tae Kwon Do, Tony was strapped in to his seat, chomping on a fruit leather as I backed out of the parking space. I heard a crunching sound.

“Crunch?” I remember thinking. “Fruit leathers aren’t crunchy.”

That’s when the howling started. Tony had bit down exactly wrong (or right, depending on how you see it) on the fruit leather and dislodged the loose(ish) tooth right next to the first one to go. Ouch. Yeah, that apparently hurt quite a lot.

And boy, was there a lot of blood. Like, horror movie quantities. It was dripping down his chin as he wailed, so there was a vampire-run-amok quality to his image in the rear-view mirror as I hastily re-parked the car.

Thirty seconds later I was rinsing his mouth out with a water bottle and then packing his gum with a wad of tissue when a mom with another tot in tow walked over to the SUV next to mine. Quickly surveying the scene, she correctly judged that, despite all evidence, I was neither beating my son to death nor being consumed by the undead. She introduced herself as a dentist, produced a sealed packet of sterile gauze from her purse,and then went on her way.

Oh, thank you, wandering puller-of-teeth and filler-of-cavities.

Funny how I’d blocked these particular memories from my own childhood, but now they’re all coming back. Forget fruit leathers; right now, the pantry is full of apple sauce.

Kiddy omerta or (mostly) stop snitching

Soon after Tony started kindergarten, Wendy and I noticed that he seemed to be taking the school’s code of discipline a bit … too seriously. Specifically, I remember him coming home and telling us that he’d informed the teacher that one of his classmates was out of her seat when she was supposed to be in place drawing or tracing or fingerpainting or engaged in whatever educationally enriching pastime was supposed to occupy the little monsters’ attention.

Had she bothered him?

No, she just broke the rules.

Now, Wendy and I may have occasional differences, but neither one of us is interested in raising a snitch, a stool pigeon, a cascittuni.

Not that it’s so dramatic. Pretty much every parent spends extensive time and effort trying to get the kids to follow some basic rules, only to find the once anarchic, feral beasts turning into rigid enforcers of every petty rule upon one another. Their natural personalities and their upbringing both have a say in how far they take the self-deputization, but it’s pretty common.

So, what to do?

I didn’t want Tony becoming a tattletale, but neither did I want him sitting quiet while some deranged classmate ran amok with a sharpened popsicle stick. It was time to start drawing distinctions. Certainly confusing distinctions at this early, black-and-white stage of development. But distinctions nonetheless.

So I told Tony that a lot of rules are in place to make the lives of teachers and other authority figures easier, but he didn’t need to worry about those — let the teacher enforce his own rules. In fact, a lot of those rules are silly, so while he shouldn’t go out of his way to break them, he doesn’t need to worry if his friends break them. I told him that he should only tell on rule-breakers if he thinks somebody might get hurt, or if somebody is taking or breaking stuff that doesn’t belong to them.

I think that’s enough for now. So far, it’s working. Tony seems to understand the distinction between petty red tape and rules that actually protect people and property. And he understand that his parents don’t emphasize the former but consider the latter worthwhile. We haven’t had any more tattletale incidents, though he has complained about the snitching ways of a classmate.

I’m sure we’ll run into a few speedbumps, but we had to start somewhere, and this was as good a place as any to set the precedent for (mostly) no snitching.

That’s right. I’m an old bastard

At Walmart, this morning, I wheeled my cart up to check-out and noticed that, of the … oh …. fifteen? … eighteen? … checkout registers, exactly one was open. There’s a line, of course, because people have an odd habit, during daylight hours, of wanting to buy stuff at places where there’s stuff to be bought.

Well fuck that, I think. And I headed to the self-checkout registers. I did this despite the fact that I had … loose vegetables.

If you’re familiar with self-checkout registers, you know that the problem with loose vegetables is that the whole process of purchasing the damned things is dependent on some half-wit clerk entering the right product code so that, say, the big picture of carrots and the words “bulk carrots” that pop up when you hit the “Look Up Item” button on the touch screen send usable information to the computer when you jab ’em.

The right code was not entered for loose carrots.

Or for Gala apples.

And the twitchy device threw a fit and signaled “unexpected item in bagging area” when … I don’t know … the air pressure in the vicinity experienced a mild shift?

Then, of course, my age had to be verified because I had three bottles of surprisingly drinkable plonk that The Wine Group has been kind enough to bottle for Walmart at $2.97 a pop.

This means the the 19-year-old seat-warmer overseeing the robotic station had to motivate her shapeless derrier in my direction a total of four times. The fourth time she politely suggested that I might be happier standing in line at a manned register in the future. I don’t think I was being extra-sensitive in perceiving that politeness as the variety generally directed at whispy-haired folks who treat television remote controls with the fear and awe often assigned to downed fighter planes by Pacific cargo cultists.

18K of RAM, bitches!Would it have been worth my while to tell her that I still have my old Timex Sinclair 1000 (with the 16K add-on RAM module)? That I can hand-code HTML? That I once converted a 386 PC to a 486 by swapping out motherboards on my kitchen table to save myself the price of a new computer? So I know the problem ain’t with me, but with her pimply boyfriend, who’s been banging her in the freight bay instead of maintaining this piece of electronic crap.

Hell no. That would have confirmed me as an artifact in her mind. So I just smiled and completed my transaction.

Now get off my lawn, honey, before I hack your bank account. Yeah, I can guess your password (by the way, you misspelled “Bieber”). Let me just get this cassette drive warmed up …

The mad archer is loose

Prized possessions that they are, the bow and arrow we built together are locked away in Tony’s room, so I don’t have a photograph to offer. But he’s very proud of them, and damned if the arrow doesn’t travel quite a distance, despite being fired from a homemade weapon of green wood strung with mason’s line (after an unsatisfying experiment with jute string).

The idea came from … well … every boy’s imagination, of course. But it was inspired by The Dangerous Book for Boys and its nostalgia for the risky, outdoorsy, jury-rigged boyhoods of yore. I experienced much of that kind of boyhood myself (can you say tennis-ball-can mortar?), and I’m inspired to hand it on to Tony.

Of course, the British authors of Dangerous recommended types of wood entirely unavailable in Arizona. Ash? Where in hell am I going to get ash? So we used a mesquite branch. But mesquite is covered — I mean covered — in thorns. So I shaved them off with my pocket knife.

Which is yet another reason to make sure Tony has a pocket knife!

Then we found out that jute string is crap, lasting maybe three shots before shredding. So we broke out the mason’s line.

And that arrow travels! It’s only a green-wood bow, good until it dries and loses its springiness, but that dowel arrow flies far enough to give any mothers or roaming wildlife a few tense moments.

Tony is very happy now. And more dangerous, of course.

It ain’t luck

Bouncing around town with Tony to Tae Kwon Do, the library, the playground, school, doctors’ offices and the like, it’s inevitable that I see a variety of parenting styles. I don’t think there’s any one right way to parent, but it’s obvious that there are some … ummm … styles of parenting that are steeped in failure — soaking in it, wallowing in suckage — while the successful ones have a few broad commonalities.

In any area where kids and parents gather, I’ll see some children who are reasonably well-behaved on an ongoing basis, and others who seem to have slipped unobserved past the gates of Hell to wreak havoc on the world at large. The well-behaved ones are almost always the ones with parents who treat them with some amount of affection, positive reinforcement and kindness. The monsters are the ones whose parents bark at them, insult them, or ignore them.

Usually — almost always — the well-behaved kids and affectionate parents show signs of being gainfully employed and self-supporting — not wealthy, but obviously making their own way in the world: clean, with decent clothes, functioning cars, and a sense of organization and purpose. The abusive and neglectful families (as likely to be random guardians of the moment as actual parents) of the hellions all too often (with occasional unfortunate exceptions) show indications of precariously perching on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder, or maybe just teetering on the brink of the abyss, surrounded as they are by a funk of despair, BO and stale cigarette smoke.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the people with, let us say, less-admirable parenting habits might see some cause-and-effect relationship here? One style (or group of styles) of parenting seems linked to better-behaved children and all the indicators of a measure of economic success in life. The other style correlates with a multi-generational train wreck lived within the confines of trailer parks and government-subsidized housing.

Except … Except …

A couple of times I’ve been approached, and seen other good parents approached, to be told that we’re “lucky” to have such smart, well-behaved kids.

Lucky.

Isn’t it funny how much good luck seems to result from a modicum of planning, work and giving a shit?

But if you sit around waiting to be blessed with a “lucky” kid, time is going to drag on …

  • Commercial Zone