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On Parenting Abroad: The Withdrawal Method

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My seatmate for 24 hours or so.

One recent morning, as I walked toward Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda—a Buddhist temple clad in 60 tons of gold and ornamented with precious gems—I was surrounded by children. Goddamn children. Maybe half a dozen of them. All seemed to be about 6 years old, and all were gamboling around, trying to beg money from me, either by selling crap I didn’t want or by offering to change crisp U.S. dollar bills for filthy wads of kyat, the local currency.

For a few minutes I ignored them, then I tried politely to brush them away, and then, when it got to be too annoying, I remembered something. Dropping my voice an octave, I turned to one boy and said, with absolute authority, “That’s enough!” The kid turned away and left me alone.

This was, of course, the same voice I use with Sasha when she gets out of control, when she runs far ahead of me on the way home from school, when she just turns too silly to deal with. In fact, as the Burmese child disappeared into the market area, I wondered why I hadn’t brought out The Voice before, and then I realized: After almost a week away from home, I was losing my parenting skills—i.e., my ability to connect with and manipulate young children.

This, perhaps, was a good thing. As a bearded 30-something man traveling solo in Southeast Asia, I was better off staying away from young children. But after days of being away from Sasha, I missed her presence enough that I started staring at other families—and they back at me.

One afternoon, at an open-air tea shop in downtown Rangoon, I glanced to my left and saw a gap-toothed 5-year-old Muslim girl staring at me. “She is very interesting in you,” said her father, who told me about his work (traveling to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia) and his homesickness while his kid played Giggle at the Foreigner. When they left, I realized I wouldn’t be home in Brooklyn for another 10 days.

But I didn’t have to wait quite that long for another kid encounter. When I finally boarded my flight home, I was overjoyed to realize that I’d be sitting next to a woman roughly my age—and her 4-year-old son, an adorable, sweet kid deeply addicted to asking “Why?” Yes, I was probably the first human being ever to be happy at the prospect of sitting next to a preschooler on a nearly 24-hour halfway-around-the-world journey, but there it is. For the duration of the flight, I talked to the mom and joked with the well-behaved kid, prompting him at one point to say, “Mommy. Mommy! He’s funny!” At last! Someone to appreciate my sense of humor.

All of which provided a nice easing-back-in when I eventually got home—while Sasha and Jean were out shopping, as it happened. When they, too, returned home, Sasha looked a bit bewildered. While I’d been relearning how to be a dad in mid-air, she now had to figure out how to be my daughter. It didn’t take long.

Who You Calling Daddy (Son), Revised and Improved

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I resemble this remark

Shortly after writing my last post about not wanting JP to call me Dad I got an email from my own father. He reminded me that at the very same age as JP–five and a half–I had gone to him one day after school and said that from now on no one would be allowed to refer to me by my name at the time, Teddy.

A couple of kids at school had apparently been teasing me, calling me “Teddy Bear,” a grievous insult in my estimation at that time. I think that my father, as with me and JP, enjoyed calling me by the diminutive, and at first, also as with me and JP, he resisted. Eventually, though, he gave in and he never called me Teddy again, although there are, to this day, members of my family who continue do so.

Now my father was considerate enough not to tell me what I should do with JP. He just reminded me, which, I should point out, is a pure and exquisite form of Jewish guilt. Regardless, I determined to do something to right this cosmic parenting wrong.

Earlier tonight I told JP that before he went to bed he could expect a “special story.” This is the sort of thing that he is still young enough to find inordinately exciting. When he was finally in bed, after the teeth brushing, the discussions about pooping, the final chores, and the reading of a book, I settled in to tell him the tale of how Teddy became Ted.

Once there was a little boy just about your age whose name was Teddy. And he liked his name, because it was his, until he went to school one day and a bunch of kids starting teasing him about it. They called him Teddy Bear, which he thought wasn’t very nice, mostly because stuffed animals were for kids, and he was five and a half and no sort of kid at all. So when he got home that day he told his father that henceforth and in perpetuity (Teddy wanted to be a lawyer at that age) he would be known as Ted instead of Teddy.

Teddy’s daddy, however, didn’t immediately accept this request. He liked the name Teddy, which he called to mind certain things about being a father that he wasn’t sure he was ready to let go of, at least not just yet. But Teddy was serious, and eventually he gave in and Teddy became Ted from then on.

Do you understand what I’m talking about, JP? I asked, and the answer was a rather frank and to the point, no. So I explained and I told him that I was that boy and that I had forgotten this story and that he could call me anything he liked, Daddy, or Dad, or father, or whatever he preferred.

How poignant is THAT? Surely some Daddy prize should be coming my way, right? JP would have to admit, now and in his dotage, that Daddy listened, he cared, he did the right thing…right?

Wrong. JP’s response: “That’s the story?! That’s not funny! Tell me another one.”

He can still call me what he likes.

And the Punchline Is…

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Have you ever wished you could see inside your child’s brain? Not with a hacksaw and a sheet of curved plastic—I mean, anyone can do that. What I’ve always wanted was to watch it tick, to see little 3-year-old Sasha’s brain make new connections, to finally crest each hill of understanding. As it is, we have only limited, indirect evidence to rely upon, but even that can be fascinating.

Case in point: In the last month or so, Sasha has suddenly become much more capable of understanding narrative. She watches entire movies—My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service are on endless repeat these days—and when you ask her questions about them (“Why is Kiki sad?”), she can attempt reasonable answers. It’s sort of incredible that she can hold all these things within her head and attempt to figure them out.

While in Italy, I put this new understanding to the test: Instead of reading her bedtime stories, I began to make them up. There was one story about a princess who would only wear pink, and another about Pinocchio, but most of them were about Daddy’s valiant attempts to find and warm up milk for his daughter Sasha. Mountains were climbed, moons lasso’d, rocket ships built and launched, all so that the fictional Sasha will have something comforting to drink. Each “milky” story, as the real Sasha calls them, ends the same way: Daddy returns, exhausted, and presents the milk to the fictional Sasha, who, after considering this hard-won gift, turns to her father and says, “Daddy—I want juice!”

This ending always occasions much mirth, and it’s rewarding to me to see that she gets the humor—that it’s a joke about her behavior but that, not being real, it’s seen as funny and not a harsh criticism. She laughs, I laugh, this is great.

But then something even more amazing happened. While we were all waiting for a bus on the streets of Rome, Jean and I started bouncing Sasha in our arms and tickling her. This is pretty normal, as was her crazy laughter. But then, in the middle of one fit of insane laughter, she turned to me and said, “Daddy—I want juice!” Then we all laughed, harder than ever, as she said my punchline again and again. Wow. She gets it—she really does. It’s not just that she sees some things as funny, there’s some underlying understanding of humor there—how it works, etc. She can connect things, she can play with context, she can make us laugh. This is great!

But do you know what’s even better than having a smart kid who understand both narrative and humor? Having a kid who’s dumb enough to laugh at my jokes. I’m enjoying that while it lasts.

My Son, Dopey

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We’re all in a post-Halloween sugar crash right about now. You too. I saw you sneaking KitKats by the fistful last night.

But my crash is tinged with a little dose of further regret: did we knowingly humiliate our boy for Halloween?

Of course we did, you say. Every pre-sentient (and I’m still putting a 3-year-old in that group) Halloween outfit is at least half humiliation: “oh, how cute” but also, “What a ridiculous-looking, flabby lion you make. You can’t even hold your stupid head up.”

The costume setup was this: the kids have been watching a lot of Snow White. And despite her weird and warbly voice, Snow White has been growing on my kids. My daughter is a pretty fine approximation of Snow White (Half White?): ebony hair, ivory skin. So it was decided by her and her (very involved in Halloween) mother that she would be Snow White.

The boy, small and droll, was immediately chosen to be a dwarf. But not just the more regal of the dwarves. Not Doc, the boss of the group. Nor Grumpy, who was at least allowed his feelings. Not even the stricken Sneezy or Sleepy. No, we made him Dopey, the bald deaf-mute who doesn’t do much except pratfall comedy.

But he IS Dopey. He’s funny and sweet and–did I mention–small. We say Dopey with affection. But I think it wasn’t taken that way on the Halloween circuit last night. How many other costumes would’ve gotten this response from kindly candy-givers in the neighborhood?

“Hi there! And what are YOU for Halloween.”

“Dopey”

“No you’re not, don’t say that!”

The costume was a hit with most people. But those few teasing voices must’ve been confusing for the boy. I could sense a little bit of his pride, which was considerable (it was a fine homemade dwarf tunic-and-belt combo), wearing off over the course of the past few days. Last night he had decided he wanted to be a dragon, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he regretted not sticking to his guns.

But perhaps it’s all a sideshow from the humiliation that I haven’t even acknowledged yet: pairing his costume and his sister’s together like this was some kind of central planning society, or German-style Partnerlook. That may be the thing that really appalls them right about this time next year…