DADWAGON

“My wife lets me do whatever I want now that I’m retired,” [Shigeo Tokuda] says. “She’s just concerned about my health and tells me not to work too hard.”

What’s he talking about? Just read the story.

Who knows, perhaps I could be a wee bit defensive here, but does this rhetoric from the home page of Equally Shared Parenting (“Half the work; All the fun”) strike you as slightly disingenuous:

Welcome to EquallySharedParenting.com, the cyber home for fathers and mothers who have made (or wish to make) a conscious decision to share equally in the raising of their children, household chores, breadwinning, and time for recreation. This site is the brainchild of Marc and Amy Vachon, authors of the new book Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents and equal parents ourselves.

With links on how you can both “share the housework” and “share the recreation,” just who do you think the target audience is here? Cause I don’t really think it’s socialist parenting partnerships. I’m thinking it’s working mothers who think their husbands aren’t pulling their weight. Just a guess.

Please check out the site and tell me I’m wrong. The pastel colors on the site made me so dizzy maybe I misread things.

“Music has charms to soothe the savage breast,” wrote William Congreve, but he never heard me play the guitar.

It took me ten minutes to knock the dust off of my wife’s old acoustic last week, another five to tune it, and when I finally started in, my rendition of Volver may have ranked among the worst crimes against Mexican patrimony since La Familia rolled five severed heads onto the dance floor of Sol y Sombra disco in Uruapan.

And yet, I brought the guitar out again the next night. And the one after that. And, though I can practically hear the wild rolling of my wife’s eyes when I bring the guitar out each new time, I think I’ve got a nascent bedtime ritual going.

This is because my children are cobras at bedtime, hissing and bugeyed and dangerous, and I have to believe that something can charm them. Even though any sentient adult would wretch and paw at the door to escape if they had to hear me play guitar and sing, I think it has an opposite effect on my kids. It makes them just a touch sleepier, even a bit dreamy. Sometimes. Other times they pretend I’m not there and resume jumping into the walls and attacking each other with their sharp little nails. Last night, though, it seemed to have some tranquilizing effect.

But as Big Preg and I seem to agree, a good deal of parenting is more about the parents than the kids, and this is no exception. I keep bringing out the guitar because I miss playing music, even if it’s not my instrument. I can’t blame my children for having shelved my career as a musician–by the time my daughter, the oldest, was born, I was officially an ex-horn-player, someone who hadn’t been on stage in four years. But my mixed feelings about being transformed from a broke and irresponsible twenty-something to a Dad with Responsibilities in my mid-thirties has made me tie up music (and my lack thereof) with the responsibilities of parenthood.

The most insane manifestation of this: just before my son was born, I had this uncontrollable urge to find a band to play with, after a then-seven year absence. I made a MySpace demo page and started emailing any Craigslisters who had posted that their shitty ska band wanted a sax player to play midnight Wednesday gigs at some Williamsburg bar. This was at the same time that I was holding down a seventy-hour-a-week job and trying to figure out on earth we could raise two wolverines in our apartment. It was total madness, and I give my wife much credit for recognizing that my search would fizzle out of sheer impossibility; she spared me the humiliation of having to actually be told that I am not 25 anymore.

But this I can do. I can play guitar at bedtime. And it actually gives me a fixed role at bedtime, which more often than not ends with the kids calling out for their mother while I retire to the living/dining room to read my iPhone. Now I have the guitar, tuned or not, playing for them or for me, it’s all sort of satisfying. It a new use for a very old dream.

Ah, look at that sweet little baby starting to… Oh, shit, is that a wolf??!! Jesus W. Christ, people, get your child away from that wolf! What is this, Sarah Palin’s house?!

That was my reaction, anyhow, to the video that had (wolf) dog lovers cooing about how this beast is soothing the child. The Discovery Channel did a fine job of explaining that the wolf has no intent to calm the child, that it’s analogous to a dog howling as a fire engine goes by. Only in this case, the howling made the other noise stop.

The real question: why does the baby stop crying? Is it actually soothed? Or is it, in some primordial and completely legitimate way, terrified into silence because the baby realizes that it—a freshly born little morsel of helplessness—is in somehow in a small room with a fucking wolf, and its parental figure is just filming instead of actually, you know, taking action.