DADWAGON

You know how, once you reached a certain age, your parents sat you down to have an uncomfortably awkward and likely uninformative talk about S-E-X? Yeah, me neither. Either I’ve repressed the memory of that traumatic conversation, or it never happened. All I remember is that one day, when I was 8 or 9, they gave me an illustrated book called “How a Baby Is Made.”

It was a revelation: Pictures of a man and woman, you know, doing it. Once I’d digested the relatively straightforward facts, I realized what I had in my hands—pornography! Parent-sanctioned pornography! As soon as I felt comfortable doing so, I sneaked it into my fourth-grade class, where my friends and I gawked at the pictures during recess.

I bring this up because I recently came upon (heh heh, “came upon”) the New Yorker’s brief, fascinating history of sex-ed books for kids, of which there are now a bewildering variety of sophisticated choices:

Where babies come from: that’s now baby stuff. Books for children older than about seven or eight cover that subject, but they’re more concerned with the perils of puberty, which is, apparently, scary as hell. “It is much, much harder to be a teenage girl now than ever before,” the gynecologist Jennifer Ashton argues, in “The Body Scoop for Girls: A Straight-Talk Guide to a Healthy, Beautiful You.” “Am I weird?” you wonder. “No!” Madaras insists. “You are not weird. You are 100% NORMAL! You’re just starting puberty.” Madaras’s books forever totter at the edge of an abyss of anxiety, as in a chapter called “B.O. & Zits: Is Puberty the Pits?” You’re a hundred per cent normal, but you stink, and if you would only be more careful about your grooming you could look so much better.

Frankly, I don’t remember being all that confused about the whole puberty-and-sex business. Maybe that’s because as a guy, I didn’t have to think about sanitary pads, or because in sixth grade we actually had real sex ed in school, an informative class in one of the most liberal parts of the country. More likely, though, it was because as a board-certified dorkwad, I didn’t have to face any of the implications of my changing body.

Certain issues, however, couldn’t be dealt with by books. Indeed, they were caused by books. I’m thinking of my fifth-grade experience with the beloved classic “To Kill a Mockingbird.” For all the novel’s fame and history, and its status as a Book Taught in Schools, it revolves around a question I wasn’t quite ready to deal with: Did Tom Robinson rape Mayella Ewell?

Now, I can’t remember if the word “rape” was actually in the book or not. But the concept was there, and it was something I couldn’t process. Racism? Sure. But not rape. Perhaps because I’d learned about sex from a book, it had remained something deeply abstract, and the violence and emotions of rape were simply too visceral. I actually temporarily switched out of that “Language Arts” class and into a lower one before everyone (parents, teachers) figured out where my reticence and lack of comprehension came from.

Looking back on it now, I wish my Dad had taught me about the birds and the bees the way Christopher’s father taught him: by dropping him off at a Newark whorehouse with a $100 bill and a fifth of rye. Anyway, that’s at least what I’m planning for Sasha.

Generally, writing about the things you’ve written is a publishing world no-no. What good can come from it? Inevitably, any response to commenters or critics will read as defensive, and frankly, it’s almost always best to let what you’ve written stand (or fall) on its own merits.

But sometimes the comments are so amazingly, wonderfully, stupendously nuts that I simply can’t resist.

I recently published a short article in the web magazine Tablet recounting my most recent trip home to Mississippi with JP to visit my mother (that it has to do with parenting relations is my justification for mentioning it here).

I won’t go too much into the details of the article, other than to say it has to do with my interests: the past, weird Jews, and uncomfortable pauses in conversation. For more information, I would encourage you to read the piece.

There have been, by the standards of most public response to my writing, a fair number of comments on the article, and as is typically true with comments on websites, the reactions were, by and large, negative. This isn’t a complaint on my part–the nasty always reads funnier than the nice. Those who know me personally are aware that I take far more pleasure in causing a reader upset (and hearing about it) than receiving praise that I have a hard time accepting.

In that light, I will present you with what may be my most favoritest, number one, super awesome comment of all time, from a fellow who chose “Angry and Disgusted” as his (or her) online moniker:

What a disgusting pathetic woman [note: that’s my mother this person is talking about]! She’s a self-hating anti-semitic scumbag! So is her son [that’s me] who excuses the actions of his evil mother. This women is basically a nazi. There is no difference between her and hitler, except that he murdered millions of Jews. Theodore and his mother are the poster children for Judenrats!

My mother–same as Hitler, minus the genocide.

Good stuff!

Cristopher Columbus may have sparked a genocide, but I still have to thank him for the opportunity to take a Monday holiday ride through Central Park with my kids. Coming around the northbound loop past the Met, we heard the Columbus Day parade and went to go have a look. I expected something good: giant cannolis? A bevy of sexy Berlusconi girls?

What I got was: Carl Paladino, Republican candidate for governor of New York. He was marching down Fifth Avenue, doubtless muttering dark threats under his breath as a phalanx of cameramen recorded his heavy footsteps.

This governor’s race couldn’t be more Italian if it was a contest for mayor of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx: Andrew Mark Cuomo versus Carl Pasquale Paladino. But these candidates are not the same. Cuomo is a silver-spooner who owes his career to his family, but Paladino is something far worse, a squabbly, pallid wreck of a man. Throw a hood over his head and you’ve got Emperor Palpatine. Except instead of rebels, what he really can’t stand are the Gays.

Here’s a taste of the speech he gave to a conservative Jewish group last week:

“I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexualtiy is an equally valid and successful option–it isn’t.”

This is  a classic move for everyone from politicians to those pretty moms in TV ads: use your authority as a parent to promote some bullshit delusion. Windex makes cleaning fun! Gays are an abomination! Trust me, I’m a parent.

Unfortunately for Paladino, he’s not just a father, he’s also an uncle: to a gay man who was none too happy about the hate speechy turn to the campaign.

This was all ostensibly couched as parenting advice from Paladino to Cuomo, who had taken his daughters to a this Gay Pride Parade: “I don’t think it’s proper for them to go there and watch a couple of grown men grind against each other. I don’t think that’s proper, I think it’s disgusting,” he said. To which Cuomo–who’s not my favorite politician ever–said quite reasonably: “I don’t think I’m going to accept parenting advice from Mr. Paladino.”

We can only hope that everyone can go back now to the campaign, and its evitable sad end for Paladino, and that will be the end of this miserable parent-guised gay-bashing. Just completely, like, finito.

So Ellie (the fetus previously known as the Second Coming) sits breech in the belly of my girlfriend, and has for quite some time now. Acupuncture has been tried and hasn’t succeeded, the Webster Method discussed and rejected. Suffering has come to my girlfriend in this stage of her pregnancy, in the guise of arthritic hands, a struggle to breathe, aching pain in her back, and general pissed-offedness, a fair amount directed at the swell fellow who got her in this trouble in the first place.

Which I think it’s fair to assume is me.

Tomorrow we’re going to schedule a C-section, which she’ll have unless the baby turns again, which could happen, but we’re not counting on it.

Of course I knew that the experience of having a second child would differ greatly from the first: different kid, different woman providing said offspring, different hospital, different doctor.

I just didn’t expect it to be this different. JP came when he came, took his time, and arrived on his own schedule and quite without the use of a knife. The prospect of a C-section unnerves me, for no particular reason I can put my finger on. There’s this sense of having the security of experience taken away from me. I’m no expert on birth, but I’d seen it happen once, and had some inkling of what to expect. Now I don’t.

That, I suppose, is good and bad.