DADWAGON

OK, so that’s not an actual day, unlike yesterday’s Take Your Kid to School Day. But it should be.

We are late to Lisa Belkin’s fine NY Times piece from this weekend, about how parents worry about the wrong things. But I wanted to highlight the money section, as far as I’m concerned:

“The least safe thing you can do with your child, statistically, is drive them somewhere,” said Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids,” a manifesto preaching a return to the day when children were allowed to roam on their own. “Yet every time we put them in the car we don’t think, ‘Oh God, maybe I should take public transportation instead, because if something happened to my kid on the way to the orthodontist I could never forgive myself.’ ”

So we put them in that car and we drive — to the orthodontist, to school, to their friend’s house two blocks away — because “if I let them walk and they were abducted I would never forgive myself.” This despite the fact that the British writer Warwick Cairns, author of “How to Live Dangerously,” has calculated that if you wanted to guarantee that your child would be snatched off the street, he or she would have to stand outside alone for 750,000 hours. And while we are busy inflating some risks, we tend not to focus on others — like the obesity and diabetes that result when children are driven someplace when they could walk, or when they play video games inside instead of playing in the park.

We spend a lot of time on this blog rethinking the benefits of living a fecal-smelling metropolis when we could, for less money, live in the world of sweet smelling Kentucky bluegrass lawns. Sometimes we defend our Gotham a little too eagerly, other times we’re just beat down by it. But on this subject, New York has them all beat.  So much of raising kids in the U.S. involves hurtling down the highway with them at 70 m.p.h., and that’s even before they become teenagers whose peasized lizard brains tell them to get behind the wheel and text or have sex while driving on the freeway.

If there’s one thing I’m learning from my ongoing servitude to jury duty (only four more days left!), it’s that this city is awash in dime bags of heroin and loaded firearms. But at least we don’t have minivans.

Apparently, this Jonathan Franzen fellow has written another book that people are excited about. A great deal has been and could be written about why his success tends to piss people off, but it does. Perhaps the best-written example of the anger he inspires through his great and enormous and giant success can be found in the pages of the magazine for which I work (please see Ben Marcus’s “Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it,” from the October 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine, although the headline tells you a quite a bit already). Maybe you know a better-written example, and if so, correct me if I’m wrong (zing!).

One of the less-expected forms of being angry at Franzen has very little to do with him specifically–namely that his success demonstrates the continuance of sexism in the publishing industry, literary media, and the culture in general. To wit, read this from the writer Jennifer Weiner, during an interview with her and Jodi Picoult on the Huffington Post:

Why do you feel that commercial fiction, or more specifically popular fiction written by women, tends to be critically overlooked?

Jennifer Weiner: I think it’s a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book – in short, it’s something unworthy of a serious critic’s attention…The only mention my books have ever gotten from the [New York Times Book Review] have been the occasional single sentence and, if I’m lucky, a dependent clause in a Janet Maslin flyover piece: “Look! Here’s a bunch of books that have nothing in common but spring release dates and lady authors!” I don’t write literary fiction – I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today. Do I think I should be getting all of the attention that Jonathan “Genius” Franzen gets? Nope. Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby? Absolutely.

I neither agree or disagree with Weiner, who I’m afraid I’ve never heard of before–but if she wants to be the lady-Nick Hornby, well that’s her problem. I will point out that on Weiner’s website, included among the blurbs in praise of her newest book, Fly Away Home, is this little tidbit from USA Today: “The season’s hottest chick lit!” Make of that what you will.

The Huffpo thing then prompted another piece, this time on the site, Double X (what, they were too cheap to spring for the third?), by Liza Mundy, a reporter for the Washington Post, in which she discussed the double standard female reporters face while traveling for their work:

I find myself obsessively counting reporting trips, men’s versus mine, and comparing their distance and ease and duration. I personally love reporting trips and professionally feel that it’s important to talk to people in locations other than, say, my own neighborhood, but like all working mothers, I pay a price whenever I try this. Forgive me, hard-working fathers, if I hyperbolize, but in my experience, male reporters say something along the lines of “Bye, honey!” when they go out the door to the airport, while women reporters have to make 7,000 back-up plans involving not only spouses but primary baby-sitters, secondary baby-sitters, pet-walking services, and carpooling colleagues, just to make sure that while they are away, no child gets forgotten overnight at gymnastics practice. Women reporters take the earliest train trip to their reporting destination in the morning, and the latest possible train back, rather than spend an extra, leisurely night in a hotel room. Women reporters stuff breast pumps in their carry on bags and help with homework over the telephone. Because of this, from time to time I confess I do suffer from stabbing spasms of malenfreude, when reading that a reporter got to take some long, luxurious reporting trip to an exotic destination, despite being, you know, a dad.

I’d be curious to hear what Matt and Nathan, both of whom travel for reporting more than I do, have to say on this topic. I will say that in my household, her assertion is more than just hyperbolizing–it’s a crock. When I was still with JP’s mom, the few reporting trips I took were subjects of endless debate within our home, and on my return, the guilt and recriminations flowed. Now, with my girlfriend, I don’t face the same problems. But I do still schedule my reporting trips around my parenting responsibilities to the extent that I can, and I would bet Matt and Nathan, and most male reporters under the age of 65, do as well.

In general, my work tends to come second in my home, and for a very simple reason: I make less money than the women I’ve chosen to be with. Full stop. I earn less, therefore I get less choice about what things I do. Is that the case with all the swinging dick Post journos Ms. Lundy has to contend with? No clue. Am I less successful within my chosen field than they are? No. But someone’s gotta pay the bills, and that means my reporting work comes after JP goes to bed, and on weekends when he’s with his mother.

At bottom, I’m not really sure what Mundy is saying. Does she want the freedom to be away from work without feeling anything? Or does she want her male colleagues to feel bad about their trips? As for the breast pumps women are taking with them, I’m afraid there isn’t much to be done to rectify that.

Meanwhile, someone send me a free copy of Freedom–all this attention has made me curious.

Presuming most DadWagon readers have dabbled in procreation themselves, I am not going to try to impress you with stories of my kid’s cuteness. Your kids are cuter, I know.

So I will try to present the adorable stream of neologisms that my 4-year-old has been unloosing on the English language as a linguistic phenomenon only. For her, some of the new words are simply mistakes, some are intentional puns. But they all expose a bit of the mechanics of the 4-year-old brain, which are impressive.

I always feel when I’m writing that words have become, in my mushed and drug-punctured mind, somewhat sticky. Certain words stick to each other in predictable ways. This is how cliche happens. One of the biggest challenges of writing is getting words to lay down on the page in surprising juxtapositions. That, it turns out, is a preschooler’s strength.

So in Dalia’s mind, a guinea pig is a “piggy hamster”, and though she’d really love a bunkbed, when we play music in the bedroom, at least she has a “funk bed”. Also musical are Rock-ie Talkies that people can talk or sing through. And so on… you no doubt have your own better examples. It’s sort of a universal word-flexibility.

This is why I’m not so impressed with the reciting 3-year-old. Who needs adult diction, when the kids do it so much better?

I caught a bit of this forum started by Jim Lin (of Busy Dad Blog). His question: What is the right policy on swearing and kids?

It’s a good question, and one worth what I would call future-thinking (as in, deeper thought when I am freed of the subpurgatory that is jury duty). What I can say is that swearing and kids seems to fit in with all those other adult vices that we may or may not try to shield or hide from our kids. Like drinking Daddy Juice.

Or, in our house, tattoos.

We are not heavily tattooed parents–just three tattoos between the two of us. But we do have them, they are in plain sight, and they raise some interesting conversations.

Last night Dalia went a little mental with her markers, giving herself a Maori-style face tattoo and inking up Nico’s arm (including, curiously enough, a pretty good replica of the Tivo dude). That led, of course, to other questions she had, about how we got our tattoos, whether they wash off, why they don’t wash off: everything short of asking me, “what kind of asshole tattoos someone else’s name on themselves?”

More surprising, perhaps, was the fact that Dalia–still only 4 years old–seemed quite certain that she would be getting a tattoo as well. A flower. On her arm. Pink and black.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Even though she’s not watching those tattoo-parlor reality shows, she still gets those little vending-machine surprises in the plastic capsules every once in a while. Half of them seem to be biker-style rose-and-thorn temporary tattoos. And it’s not just us that have tattoos: Her uncles (not on my side, ahem), have a collection of lovely prison tats, the kind that really look like they were made with ballpoint pen. The themes are different, you might say, than what I would wish for my daughter.

The good news: There should be time to try to convince her about location, image, etc. I’d be happiest if she waited to get them until she was 28, like I did. But I suppose kids are getting edgier (are they actually?) and tattoos are getting easier to remove, so Dalia may only be 14 years removed from the glorious day when she can have 56 stars tatted on her face and then blame the tattoo artist.

A father can dream, can’t he?