From Radley Balko, a man whose libertarianism is pure enough that I do believe his ideal world might mirror the anarchic hellhole that Snake Pliskin had to blast his way through, made a very good point today on the Twitters: California’s assembly just passed a lunatic bill that is the kind of thing that would make all of us libertarians if we think about it too hard.

The topic: babysitters’ rights.

I am obviously a partisan here. A large portion of my paycheck goes to paying our nanny/babysitter, and my wallet and conscience are in constant conflict. Ultimately, I think, conscience won: we play more than twice minimum wage, guarantee minimum weekly salary, with four weeks paid vacation and unlimited sick days. So I don’t believe I’m some sort of bastard sending our babysitter underpaid into the salt mines of childcare.

However, Assembly Bill 889 makes me seem like one. I love Tom Ammiano, the oft-heroic Supervisor from my former town of San Francisco, but he’s gotten into something weird here. To wit:

Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers’ compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.

I actually agree with about half of this. Minimum wage? Hell yes. Overtime? Sure. Keeping good records on a timecard is probably also a good idea. But worker’s comp? Do any of us have worker’s comp? Can we throw in a couple extra bucks an hour for that and health coverage? That’s probably a cop out, I know, but involving the state of California’s worker’s comp system in your childcare arrangement sounds like an invitation to bureaucratic trouble.

But the real clear crazy here is the mandatory breaks, the idea that you need to hire a babysitter to cover for your babysitter every two hours so that first babysitter can have a break/meal. Will you need to a hire a third babysitter to cover the second babysitter’s five-minute breaks? Has anyone who voted for (and passed!) this bill in the assembly actually tried to find a babysitter for a Friday night? How the hell are you supposed to find not just one, but a second one who will come in and work for 15 minutes every two hours.

I know it’s hard work taking care of someone else’s miscreants. I can barely take care of my own, and I happen to really dig them. But babysitters, as I know them, are not short of breaks. They set kids in front of Rio and bliss out on their phones. They drag them to faroff playgrounds for playdates with children who are way too old or way too young because the babysitters of those kids are their buddies. They text constantly. They are geniuses at carving out time for themselves.

Back to the good parts: I applaud elected officials for looking out for a working class constituency that doesn’t exactly have a powerful lobby. But the problem with labor reform in this country is that sometimes when pass an ambitious Swede-style package of rights, you’re squeezing an employer (in this case, a parent) who is already squeezed by the shitty economy themselves. It’s hard to give an employee far more protections and things like mandatory breaks when the employer has none of that either.

Classic race to the bottom, I know. We all stab each other in the back on the working end of the spectrum, and Goldman Sachs gets to roll in bathtubs of money. But this ain’t the solution.

It was not much more than a week ago that I lamented Sasha’s slow toilet training, enumerating the many, many places she has managed to pee (e.g., on her bike seat, on a cafe chair) while marveling at the sole instance of her actually pissing in a toilet in front of me.

Well, much has changed since then, my friends, much has changed. For three afternoons after that first miraculous micturation, Sasha peed on the classroom potty before we went home. Wonderful, but still within the normal range of her behavior.

At the beginning of last week, however, I drove Sasha up to Connecticut for an extended stay with my parents, and almost immediately she began demanding to pee in the potty. And then, amazing to behold, she’d actually pee in said potty. Again and again this happened, as many as five or six times a day. Some were gushers, others were trickles, but all took place at her command (or, okay, occasionally, her assent). “Daddy, I need to peepee!” is a phrase often heard around this house. Once, when I was busy, I even instructed her to go find Grandpa for help, and she did so.

It’s just fucking incredible, that’s my point. One day, not too long ago, she was like a wild retarded animal, befouling herself uncontrollably, and then, out of nowhere, she decided to civilize herself, to walk upright and pee sitting down. What happened in there? What mental switch was thrown? And why did everything else (peer pressure, parental pressure, teacher pressure) fail? (Or did it somehow really succeed?) How does this all happen?

Of course, there is a downside to this: Sasha has already learned that requesting assistance with the potty is a great way to get my attention. So, even when she doesn’t need to pee that bad, if she’s feeling neglected, either because I’m talking to a grown-up or cooking or blogging or something, she’ll demand a pointless trip to the toilet, where, after squeeze out a few drips, wipe up, and happily declare, “I pee awesome!” And though I can see through her charade, I have to admit: She’s right.

1. In her diaper.
2. Through her diaper.
3. Through the infinitesimal crack between her diaper and her thigh.
4. In her bed.
5. On the couch.
6. In her undies.
7. In her undies and her shorts.
8. On a chair at the Van Leeuwen ice cream cafe. (Afterwards: “I didn’t pee on your face, Daddy!”)
9. On her bike seat.
10. On the sidewalk.
11. On my lap.
12. In the potty at school yesterday HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

Your paperwork is not in order, daddy

My child is corrupt. Not morally (I think), but in that old-fashioned way of all the clerks and bureaucrats in Chekhov stories. She wants bribes. She has from the day she was born. Part of me thinks all children are like this. Beneath the faultless skin, behind the innocent eyes, lies a sweaty Carpathian customs official, always demanding a small fee to fix some unspecified problem with your confiscated passport.

I have encouraged this venality. We thought, like some first-time parents, that we would never bribe. But we saw quickly that this is functionally impossible. Children are forever holding us hostage, with a tantrum in public, a meltdown when it’s time to sleep. At those moments, they have essentially confiscated your passport. They have created a situation that needs solving. And they know, from the earliest prelingual days, that you will solve this problem by offering a bribe.

[Space here for your judgmental thoughts about me. I am a lazy and maybe bad parent who conditioned my children to expect these bribes and then blames them for it. You are right. Bravo. Now back to my point.]

I’ve used this corruption to my advantage at times. Particularly when it comes to travel, which is something that I have to do and have to explain to my children when I do it. And I hate how unhappy it makes them. Because if I was a cleverer or more kindly father, I might not do it or have to do it, and then they wouldn’t cry. But instead, I have, since the beginning, placated them with offers of bribes. Buhpizes as they’ve been known in my children’s particular dialect of babytalk: surprises.

It’s actually a little disheartening how this would turn them around. One moment distraught at the prospect of losing their father for some unknowable number of days (unknowable only because they didn’t actually understand what a day or a week was), the next moment almost glad to see me go, because whenever the hell I came back, I would come with some chocolate and trinkets, maybe a stuffed monkey from the Hudson newsstand at the Atlanta airport.

[Thus revealing the true nature of fatherhood: I want to leave and I want to be missed when I do.]

This is all on my mind because last night, as I reminded my five-year-old daughter that I’m headed to Russia today, she did not hold out her proverbial sausage-fingered hand. She did not look for a kickback. She told me not to go, and when I said I’d bring back presents, she said a string of words that I’m not sure she’s ever said in that order before: I don’t want a present. I want daddy.

Don’t worry, dear reader. I will not trouble your image of me as a selfish corrupter of my children by getting all moist about my daughter’s new love for me instead of trinkets. Because last night, it occurs to me, simply marked the arrival of Corruption 2.0. She’s almost in kindergarten; her mind has developed enough that she can now see around corners. Her “I want daddy” shtick? A charade, part of a cunning new strategy to defer gratification now (the promise of chocolates or one of those stacking matryoshka dolls) in order to sucker me in with her cooing words so that I will make, in future, much larger concessions. This is not a small shakedown. This is a patient con, laying the groundwork for a string of ultimate heists: my house, my car, my heart. And I won’t even know I’ve been robbed.