My name is Mr. Thomas O’Malley. I talk weird. I look funny. My nose is long, and the hair on my chin is not a beard—it’s a mustache. I know tricks: how to make it look like you’ve only got nine fingers, how to confuse your brain to mix up left and right, how to scotch-tape your nose to your forehead. I also have another name: Mr. Weirdy-Weird.
All this is, of course, according to Mimi and Dada, the 7-and-a-half- and 5-year-old children of our friends D. and B., whom we visited over the weekend. The kids spent every day running me ragged, demanding pony rides and piggyback journeys and matches of Tangram Puzzle Pro and round after round of dreidel (yes, Chinese kids in suburban Philly learn to play dreidel in school) and pretty much just constant attention from the moment they woke up till they went to bed. Along the way, they may even have played the Why? game.
If hell is other people, I’d like to ask Sartre, then what are other people’s kids?
Not heaven, certainly, but not a lower circle of Hades either. Worn out as I was, I actually had a pretty good time, and I got the chance to see, right up close, how other parents are doing their job.
And my first, tentative reaction was: God, I don’t want to make the same choices! Mimi (whom I nicknamed Penelope Spheeris) and Dada are lovely and smart and everything, but they have way too many toys. As soon as they get in the minivan, on comes a Disney DVD to keep them entertained, whether it’s a trek up I-95 or a ten-minute ride to the Chinese restaurant. They get on well, but they fight in the irritating way that little kids do—about nothing at all—until eventually they get yelled at. They’re wonderful, but I’m so glad they’re not mine, and that mine won’t, given her and our progression so far, become them.
But I don’t want to be judgmental! I realize that so much of this family’s life is determined by where and how they live. A New York City dad like me doesn’t have to think about installing a DVD player in the minivan; suburban dads do. A New York City parent with limited square footage can more easily quash the toy-buying; suburban parents can devote an entire room (or rooms) to plastic gewgaws. Neither choice is morally superior to the other—it’s all about what we can bear, and that itself is determined by so many factors only partially under our control. In the Sisyphean world of parenting, the boulder is going to tumble down the mountain no matter what, and it’s all we can do to nudge it a degree or two in what we think is the best direction, and to hope we’re standing on the right peak to begin with.
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