Yesterday I wrote about how we got our daughter to swim by telling her that she couldn’t. I want to just add, briefly, that it is not always a good thing, this humiliating your child with various burning words. Case in point: on return from that same gloriously flamingo’d state where Dalia learned to swim, …
Author Archives: Nathan
And Then, Suddenly: Victory
A child’s development is a strange, lurching thing. You are convinced you kid can’t (or in some cases can) do this-or-that, and then on a dime, it all changes. This is how it went on Friday with my daughter. The skill: water-survival. The backstory: for years now our daughter, an intense and thoughtful five-year-old who …
America the Beautiful: The Weird Lost Verses
Happy Fourth to all of our stateside friends. For those babyswingers and other foreigners here, let’s just say that the Fourth of July is a very special day in which we blow shit up, char meat, and demand to see the president’s birth certificate. DadWagon is on vacation today, but we did want to leave …
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My Daughter, Bobby Fischer
Some things my daughter has in common with Bobby Fischer: –She’s part German and part Jewish, just like Fischer, whose status as mixed-race diaspora-child made his late-life anti-Semitism all the more confusing. –She is also part Mexican and part Japanese, which Fischer was not. But he was conceived in Mexico, or so Wikipedia tells me, …