Ophelia, the Colombian Babysitter

No, this isn’t some tragedy like Matt foisted on our Facebook friends recently (that of the man whose wife and kids were, umm, murdered). This is more everyday, which makes it in some ways worse.

The brief story is: it’s a beautiful day in Manhattan. Literally will be 75 degrees all day. I have some work to do, and am meeting an old friend for coffee in Soho. This will be a perfectly lovely little day.

The kids’ babysitter is on vacation (paid vacation, people, this ain’t a sweatshop), so we are paying a friend of hers to come and watch the kids for a couple days. She’s bright, cheerful, and from a pretty lousy corner of the world, in the last 30 years at least: southern Colombia. We were having a perfectly fine conversation today when I made the mistake of asking her if she had kids.

Turns out she does.

Turns out they are exactly the same age as my carefree, woeless wonders: five and three years old.

No, this isn’t the more mundane weirdness/tragedy of someone looking after your kids while someone else is looking after their kids in a far borough. Instead, it turns out that her kids are still in Colombia, being raised by distant relatives, while this woman, as innocent and worthy as you or I, waits around a cell phone in Queens for spotwork for hard currency she can send back to children who must be as destroyed as she is that she’s here and they’re there.

She did not launch some dramatic Ophelian lament while telling me this. On the contrary, she sort of shrugged, with that sort of Latin stoicism that comes from being from an entire fucking continent that is on the move, in exile, accustomed to profound loss.

But me? Now I’m screwed. This is terrible news. The weather can be what it wants, but I’m going to be thinking about this woman who is watching my children today, and of her lost children 3,000 miles away.

In honor of their hard life, and in a sense of shared sacrifice, and to honor my own deep moral anguish, I will order a plain coffee in Soho instead of a cappuccino.

A highlight of the oeuvre

There are days, many days in fact, where I, an innocent man trying to enjoy his home, feel instead like the curator of an art gallery of the damned. On chairs, on the table, behind the couch, on the desk: art, art, art. Little drawings of castles that look like turds. Green squiggles that we are made to call “unicorns”. Endless pages of doodles and scribbles and collages, which are what we call pieces of food stuck to construction paper with a quart of Elmers.

It’s not the low quality of this all this production that bothers me–my kid-art, I’m sure, was equally demented. But it’s our inability to throw any of this away. We have not been given permission to throw anything away, a thought that is true and yet also makes me want to break something. We somehow have consented to play a self-defeating role in all this, whereby we praise each new picture as if it were a Tintoretto or Titian, and then, believing us, our children do not allow us to throw these pieces where most of them belong, which is the garbage can.

Instead we are made to tape them up, in hugely conspicuous places, where not only do they need to be looked at all the time, but they also will be immediately noticed if they go missing.

Look, I’m not against child art. Our daughter Dalia is even betraying, through her art, a nascent science mind, with her complex and ultimately mystifying schematics of how apples are made or how the hallways of a castle link together. And it’s no secret to us or our friends that we have little children, and that we treasure them with the myopia that all parents of young children have. A piece of art here or there would be perfectly acceptable. But it’s sheer depressing volume of it all that is troubling us.

And before you say that I should just stack them and put them in a folder, you should know that Dalia’s preschool delighted in sending her home with the most oversized and odd-shaped creations, as if it were some achievement to create very long squiggles instead of very short ones. These things don’t just tuck away. They take over.

If you, dear readers, have tips on either how to 1) convince a child that their art is both very special and belongs in the trash or 2) archive artwork in some non-obtrusive way, it would be quite welcome. Or perhaps we should, in honor of the season and the city, just ban everything except sidewalk chalk.

What happens when your kid goes to the wrong preschool.

From the depths of the New York Daily News comes this heartwarming story about a Stockholm preschool that has done away with both traditional fairy tales and gendered pronouns:

At the “Egalia” preschool, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.

From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don’t fall into gender stereotypes.

“Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing,” says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. “Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be.”

I really only have two things to say about this. Actually, really just one and a half:

1. Ain’t gonna work. Not unless the whole of Swedish society, from preschools on up, does exactly the same thing, and bans all stereotypical depictions of gendered identity. Kids pick things up everywhere, not just in preschool, and no amount of inventing new pronouns is going to counteract what they see and hear elsewhere. And I say this as the father of a 2-and-a-half girl who loves to run, jump, and hit things with sticks—and insists on wearing a “fairy dress” each and every day of her life.

1.5. “Friends,” coincidentally enough, is how Sasha’s teacher, Miss Bree, addresses the kids in her class: “Friends” or “My friend.” It’s really cute, and the kids pick up on it, too, calling each other my friend. I believe, but am not certain, that Miss Bree’s use of the term comes from what kids are called in Chinese: xiao pengyou, or “little friend(s).” And if the Chinese have been calling kids “little friends” for thousands of years, and still haven’t defeated gender stereotyping, then I hold out little hope the Swedes will succeed.

Really, the Swedes would be better off tracking down the hundreds (thousands?) of genetically modified Nazi rapist serial killers hiding in plain sight at the top levels of large corporations and major government agencies. Then they can worry about girls, boys, dolls, and sticks.

Not long ago, I wrote a little about how much I hate “Dora the Explorer,” which was becoming Sasha’s favorite TV show. As I said back in May:

Backpack, backpack. Backpack, backpack. Backpack, backpack. Backpack, backpack. Backpack, backpack. Backpack, backpack. Backpack, backpack.

But recently, I’ve learned that “Dora” has its uses. Namely, when trying to get Sasha to understand that we have a series of things to do, in a particular order, I fall back on one of the show’s tropes. On “Dora,” as the star and her companion, Boots, try to reach their goal, they look at a map and plan out the different stages of the journey. Bridge, Mountain, Field, for example. Or: River, Taxi, Total World Domination.

And so this is now what I do with Sasha. Last week, when I picked her up from school, I wanted to get her a snack, but needed to stop by the bank for some cash, and then we had a party to go to later. This became: Bank, Snack, Party. I said it, then Sasha repeated it. It made sense to her, and as we accomplished each task, we went through the list and talked about what was next. It was nice. And just yesterday, as I again picked her up from school and carted her to another party, she repeated the same list again—it had stuck in her tiny little mind.

So, Dora, I’m sorry. You have your uses. I just wish you weren’t so fucking annoying.