DADWAGON

[This week DadWagon is proud of ‘basically goading’ NYC writer and father Alex Smith into guest-blogging for the week. Alex was recently profiled in AM New York for having over 2,600 CDs in his collection, so you can be assured he’s ‘basically fucking insane.’ Welcome aboard, Alex.]

Sure, it sounded like it would be fun, but here we are on Monday and I’m already stalling.

When my former colleague Nathan shot me a note two weeks ago basically goading me to contribute to DadWagon, I envisioned a week’s worth of pithy posts rife with meaningful insight and sidesplitting anecdotes. My qualifications were all in order: Like Nathan, I’m something of a cantankerous loudmouth and I somehow managed to dupe an unsuspecting, lovely lady into not only being saddled with my unenviable last name, but also into procreating with me. I’m now the father of two little folks, Charlotte (age 6) and Oliver (age 4), and I document the many travails with same on my otherwise trivia-fixated weblog, Flaming Pablum, in a little category called The Dad Zone.

I live in downtown Manhattan in New York City, basically right in the crotch of NYU, where the sight of a parent pushing a stroller is about as welcome as a parade float covered with bedbugs. Despite years of cruelly unsentimental gentrification, there are still portions of town that like to consider themselves insouciant hotbeds of urban bohemia. Having grown up in NYC myself, I bristle at the contingent of waifish, collegiate hipsters who barely conceal their “move to the country, already!” glares as my little kids hopscotch through their fauxhemian fantasies. I once foolhardily composed a post about what a bitch it was to push one’s stroller through the Union Square Greenmarket. Said post was picked up by Gawker and my inbox was suddenly bloated with hate mail, zealously taking me to task for the audacity of inflicting my children on my fellow Manhattanites. Listen, here’s the deal: People have kids, even cool New Yorkers. Last time I checked, Patti Smith, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys had all sired a few offspring, and no one’s sneering at them.

Becoming a father changes a man in many ways, but not always in the manner you’d imagine. Before Charlotte was born, I had this rosy preconception that along with parenthood came this giant, figurative hypodermic needle loaded with weapons-grade maturity that would enable the injected to handily clear the innumerable hurdles one encounters as a new dad. Suffice to say, this hasn’t been the case. While no longer technically a newly minted dad, I’m still prone to making myriad boneheaded decisions and ill-considered declarations in the name of doing my parental duty. It’s a learning process for all parties concerned.

I look forward to sharing those embarrassing moments with you all as the week rolls on.

Two kids or three?

I’ve been entirely certain that we had reached our limit—two kids—until this weekend, when some sort of synapse fired and suddenly it didn’t seem like complete insanity to have another child. It seemed, in fact, like a lovely idea.

Now that it’s Monday and all the reveries of the weekend have again been put in storage, I’m trying to diagnose what would cause me to have such wild and anarchic thoughts (my wife is also doubtless wondering about the pendulum of my mind). After all, I also bought our Christmas plane tickets home to the Florida Keys this weekend, the first Christmas where I had to actually buy an adult-size ticket for my 2-year-old. So now if I want to go see my mother for the holidays, I have to buy four plane tickets. Would buying five freaking plane tickets really be that much more fun?

Sometimes emotion trumps economics, though, and I think the desire to contemplate a third kid stems from the fact that I like our current pair a lot. You might even say I love them. They’ve been particularly sweet/curious/solicitous as of late, and given that toddlerhood is quickly disappearing in my youngest, there’s a sense of loss and also a sort of creative confidence. We’ve had two babies now and they’re both physically healthy and (we think) not total assholes. Why not try a third?

Here’s why not: if the desire to have more children is led in part by a love for your current children, maybe we should just reinvest that emotion back into the two you’ve got. Not in order to become sweltering helicopter parents, but to really have the time and courage to get to know and understand and respond to them as individuals.

I bring this last part up because I finally got to watching Sean Penn’s Into the Wild off the NetFlix queue this weekend. I had read the Jon Krakauer article in Outside magazine years ago, about Chris McCandless, who wandered into the Alaskan wilderness in his early 20s with no backup plan for surviving in the wild. It was lunacy, in some ways, driven by his resentment against his argumentative middle-class parents. When I read the article, I felt some points of identification with McCandless (though I’ve never been as incautious or alienated as him). When I saw the movie, I spent more time thinking about the parents.

Leaving aside their issues of domestic violence (at least as the movie portrayed it), it seems to me their biggest mistake is that they have no earthly idea who their son is. They offer him a new car after graduation from college, even though his old Datsun is clearly a large part of his self-identity. They misunderstand how much space he needed and what kind. As a result, they were never a part of his ambitions, and they never even had the chance to just give their kid a couple pieces of advice (e.g., “Ask a local what happens to the river in spring, dude”) that could have saved him.

Obviously, a movie—not even a new release!—has literally nothing to do without whatever strange play will act itself out between us and our kids. But even if I’m confident that we could produce another child worthy of love, I’m not overconfident in our ability to really know the ones we already have. It’s more than providing for them, it’s much more than just protecting them. It’s about really recognizing who they are, and that takes a tremendous amount of time and wisdom. For one, much less two, and certainly not three.

That’s my stance this week at least.

[polldaddy poll=4089862]

It seems so long ago, last Friday morning. Back then, things were good. No, great—I was loving fatherhood, finally feeling at ease with the routine. Then, like an idiot, I called down the wrath of the god: I wrote about how easy it all was.

By that afternoon, I’d been stricken with the flu, and spent the next 24 hours in bed, alternately shivering and sweating under the covers, subsisting on Progresso chicken noodle soup and orange juice, becoming a burden to my wife and child.

By Saturday afternoon, I was feeling better, or at least good enough to pace around the house in my sick clothes while Jean made dinner for Sasha. At one point, I watched Jean carry said dinner—rice and something—in one of the nice bowls I brought back from my recent trip to Ireland, and I remember thinking I would never see it again. I was right: Within seconds, Sasha had thrown the bowl from her highchair, despite our frequent, almost daily admonitions not to throw food (or food containers) on the ground.

All of which just presaged the fact that this was a difficult weekend with Sasha. As she nears 2, she can express herself as never before—and yet she still can’t express herself fully. She fixates randomly; when she heard me say the word “yogurt” on Sunday morning, she demanded to eat yogurt, and wouldn’t touch anything else. She’s led by mysterious whims; one parent can hold her, but not the other, at least until she changes her mind and wants to hold both our hands and swing in the air.

And at the same time, she’s insanely cute, and knows it. After one of her timeouts, she came to us and, quoting an episode of “Yo Gabba Gabba,” said, “I’m sorry, guys. It was an accident.” And she made up for her misdeeds by joyfully sprinting back and forth from Jean to me at a local playground.

The point is, it’s not easy, and maybe never was. And even if it does someday get easy again, you won’t hear me crowing about it. I hate the flu. Instead, I’ll just go on complaining, as we always do here on Dadwagon, knowing you’ll understand and, better yet, the gods will leave us alone.