DADWAGON

Another weekend, another trip to Ikea, this time to replace the door mats and kid’s rug that we lost on Friday in the flood that besieged our new apartment. It’s gotten to the point where I start to vomit blood at the first hint of the cinnamon-raisin-scent that they spray all over the cash registers on the way out. And those nifty little blue bags they con you into buying every time you leave? They’re not for the environment, you know—they’re marketed solely for me to forget to bring them to the store each time. This is a product designed exclusively to accentuate my looming Alzheimer’s.

Anyway, as I mentioned last week, I’ve been spending time in the clutches of the big box economy of late, thanks to my new residence. It’s amazing the shit you’ll come home with just by stepping into one of these places. I now own a motorized rotisserie for my grill, purchased at Lowe’s, where I went to buy a garbage can. I’ve been threatening to cook my Thanksgiving turkey on the spit this year, but no one takes me seriously. That’s my lot in life—thwarted poultry ambitions.

None of which has anything to do with parenting. Except that in my earlier post on Ikea furniture building, I received a comment from Beta Dad, a regular reader of Dadwagon. Beta—can I call you Beta?—mentioned that he never had any problems putting together Ikea furniture, which he considered rather simple, the fact that he was a licensed contractor with 20 years of building experience notwithstanding.  Harrumph!

He did send along this very funny video, embedded below, which features his brother, I believe, hammering away (amorously) at a balsa-wood dresser.

Enjoy! (That last, superfluous, exclamation point, was for Matt.)

At 22 months, Sasha is deep in that language-acquisition mode that makes parenthood (and, I imagine, toddlerhood) so enjoyable. Every day brings new vocabulary and new insights into how children use language. (Why is “no” so easy to learn but not “yes”? It reminds me of Chinese and Vietnamese, actually, where “no” is easily defined but to signify assent you assert a positive verb or adjective. But I digress.)

The wonderful part is that much of this is out of our control. Sasha brings new words into the conversation that we can’t remember having taught her—like “tired.” But her learning it and adopting it are evidence of her growing independence.

The not-so-wonderful part is that much of this out of our control. The other night, we were trying to get Sasha to eat something new—borscht, I think—and when she refused at first, I broke into song. See, Sasha’s recently become enamored of “Yo, Gabba Gabba!,” and one scene she’s watched often is a song called “Try It, You’ll Like It.” (Guess what it’s about.)

Anyway, it worked! She tried it! And… she hated it!

And then, as she made a yuck face and walked away, I joked, “Try it, you’ll hate it.”

To which she immediately responded, “I hate it!” Then she said it again. And again.

What made this extra-annoying is that I’ve been trying to figure out ways of teaching her the word “like” and “want”—the kind of affirmative concepts that can be slippery if, you know, you’re less than 2 years old.

The upside, however, is that should a restaurant critic job open in the next decade or so, I think she’ll be a natural. A.A. Gill, watch out.

This happened several weeks ago, and I wasn’t even around for it. Yet it’s somehow stuck with me, and I’m trying to figure out why.

My wife did the evening pickup from school and stopped at the playground. It was a warm August day, and our boy made his usual beeline for the fountains, edging right up to the spray to cool off but not quite jumping in, as is his habit. (Or was, till this weekend’s chill.) Another, older girl, maybe 3 or 4, was there, and stuck her hand over the sprayer, spattering him. My wife (nicely) asked the little girl to try not to get him wet, whereupon she turned to her nanny, who was sitting nearby on a bench. The girl was clearly unsure of herself—had she done wrong? Was she going to be scolded? Was it okay even though she’d been a little careless? It was clearly a teachable moment. And what did the nanny say to her, after a long, hanging pause? “You just keep having fun, honey.”

[Ed note: No, you can’t ever be 100 percent sure it was her nanny. But enough socioeconomic signifiers were on view that you’d have come to the same conclusion.]

I’m ready to call the game for that little girl—to see her, 25 years from now, as the young and obnoxious boss I never want to have, or the bratty entitled assistant I want even less. “You make your own monsters,” my mother is fond of saying, and to an extent I believe it. A lot of rotten people are created.

But what makes me think even more about this exchange is that it wasn’t a parent doing the enabling. It was a hired caregiver. Are the parents horrible narcissists, who would encourage such things? Are they good people who have no idea what sort of tiny-scaled rogue-nation-building is going on? Maybe they’d be horrified. Maybe they’d be proud. Either way, that nanny clearly thinks of her job not as developmental character-builder but as clock-puncher, getting her charge through the day with the minimum of effort and maximum of crowd-pleasing.  It’s a culture clash, between parents like (I daresay) most Dadwagon readers, who are likely to believe in raising good citizens, and someone who doesn’t give a damn about that.

It makes me grateful for at least one aspect of a day-care-classroom environment: checks and balances. It’s a lot harder to brush off larger responsibilities when there are other teachers, supervisors, a roomful of children, and a couple of dozen parents involved, any of whom could, in theory, stop by any moment. I’m sure our school has its own failings, its own weak spots, its own moments that would make me cringe if I were present, but I bet that sort of lazy approach to child-rearing is kept out of the place by the group dynamic.

I know, I know, this moment probably added up to absolutely nothing, in the end. But it still bothers me, weeks later.

Another Friday afternoon, another attempt to corral the disjointed meanderings of DadWagon’s editors into a coherent narrative of urban fatherhood. Or, this week, maybe not. As I [that is, the impersonal godlike consciousness called “dadwagon”] look over what we’ve published, I see no theme emerging, nor any anti-theme.

Take Christopher: Happy at pancakes, then comparing himself to a North Korean dictator, then admonishing a rock star for parenting like a rock star. You want insight into that? Sorry.

Theodore came close—Red Hook was his subtext as he encountered his ex at Fairway and (mis)assembled Ikea furniture in his new apartment. Or maybe his theme was exclamation points! Who knows?

Nathan, meanwhile, emerged from his high, drunken stupor—during which he giggled over the Web-video adventures of a SAHD—just long enough to ask the vital question “What is wrong with us?” then threaten to punch parents whose kids wear long words on their onesies. What is wrong with us, indeed.

Finally, Matt relied on everyone else to do the heavy inspirational lifting: When Nathan was drunk, he wrote about how his friends were abstaining. While Theodore built armoires (or whatever), Matt hired plumbers. And when Nathan considered punching parents, Matt threatened to beat up a beloved pediatrician. Lazy fucker. Let’s hope his coming weekend—and yours—is as good as his last one.