DADWAGON

From Calgary, home to the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth (though I’m partial to the Stampede and Suicide Race in Omak, Wash.), comes a fine shout-out to DadWagon from columnist and stay-at-home dad Jeremy Klaszus.

In his column for the Calgary Herald, Klaszus wrote about dads who get angry at their children. I was, naturally, the lead example in his column: now all of Alberta knows that I wanted to kill my pre-lingual lovemuffin because he was screaming in the tub a week ago.

I’m happy enough being the poster child for paternal anger, though, because as Klaszus rightly points out, anger and frustration are pretty common emotions that have nevertheless been edited out of our collective story about having and raising kids.

He argues that it’s not that different from postpartum depression. Those who’ve never experienced it wonder how you can feel that way about your own children. Those who have been through it just don’t talk about it afterwards.

Klaszus also links this Omertà to those rare instances where parents actually do beat their kids, sometimes to death. It’s the worst kind of crime, of course, but it does have roots in the same daily vexations that Klaszus and I share. I don’t presume to understand all the awful mysteries of infanticide, but I would bet that parents who kill their children are not contract killers. They are assholes and bullies perhaps, but not professional assassins. There’s rarely a plan. And not all of them are mentally ill. Sometimes they are just people who start getting angry and don’t stop for whatever reason.

But there’s nothing particularly unique to Canada about all that. What did seem as foreign as a looney to me in Klaszus’ column was this exchange:

I appreciated Thornburgh’s honesty because the previous morning, I’d been ready to angrily throw my own 18-month-old daughter out the back door. She’d been shrieking impatiently as I made her oatmeal. Eventually I snapped, repeatedly and loudly shouting “BE QUIET!” until my wife came downstairs to intervene.

“What’s going on?”

“She’s losing it,” I said, accusing the wee one.

“And you respond with a tantrum of your own? Go upstairs and take a few minutes.”

Is that true, Canadian readers? Up north, can a wife really just give her husband a time-out like that? That’s bad news for me, because I hate time-outs almost as much as my kids do. And yet I was thinking of moving to Canada when Sarah Palin is elected president in 2012. What to do?

The summer is pretty much at an official end, but yesterday I made a surprising discovery: Brooklyn Bridge Park, a remarkably beautiful swell of grass and wine bars under the namesake span of steel. How had I missed this place before?

Well, it’s pretty obvious: It’s a pain in the butt to get Sasha there on foot. We’d have to schlep to the subway, blah blah blah.

But now we have this fine machine to get us there and back—and wherever else we want to go. Sasha loves it: She cried “Wheee!” as we sailed through the streets of Brooklyn yesterday, and she sang “Old MacDonald” and recited her ABCs. (Note: “Wheels on the Bus” is not a good bike song. Kids love to act out the “up and down” verse.) Today I’ll even be picking her up from school in Manhattan, and huffing and puffing back over the bridge.

Today I’ll also be giving up any pretense of not being a disgusting Brooklyn hipster dad. In the past, I may have denied it, or argued around it, but there’s no point hiding any longer: I’m a nearly middle-aged, skateboarding Jewish travel writer who’s married to an Asian fashion designer and picks up his adorable mixed-race child from a bilingual preschool on a tricked-out Italian bike. Fuck me, you might say. Or, as Sasha might put it, wheeeeeeee!

The other Dadwagoneers have all weighed in about vacationing with a small child, and I am last to the party, with good reason. I travel less than my blog-colleagues (“blogleagues”?), I work all the damn time anyway, and my annual destressing week is so low-impact as to be invisible: We have available to us a family house on Martha’s Vineyard in August, and unless we someday decide to mix things up, that’s the default trip. It’s nice not to have to think about what to do most years, and blessedly inexpensive. This time, my wife’s parents were along, and since I get along with them extremely well, there’s virtually no downside to that. We divide the cooking and chores. We split childcare four ways. My wife and I can leave the house for a grownup few hours occasionally. Her dad prebooked the ferry, back in February, and did the driving to get us there. I essentially showed up and had a vacation laid over me like a cozy afghan. I had nothing to complain about.

Which made it a little frustrating when, on the first day, I got some noxious little stomach bug. It dominated the first two days of the trip, during which I had to stay (EUPHEMISM ALERT) close to home, night and day. Bah.

Wednesday was lovely, and I had recovered enough to venture more than 100 feet from a bathroom. Blue skies, warm weather. And regular, increasingly hysterical hurricane warnings. Earl was headed up the coast; Earl was likely to drag the edge of its eyewall over the island, bringing a storm surge and all the other National Weather service terminology that we learned during Katrina. We were in its direct path. And Thursday morning, after a scramble for a standby ferry slot, we hit the road, headed back to New York.

Well, as we all know by now, the storm was a fazoo. It missed M.V. by tens of miles, and took out nothing except a few branches and one long-planned trip.

I have a long-standing beef with weather-media extremism, and this is why. If you lead a twenty-first-century life, and you’re not someplace like the Oklahoma plains, a storm has to be pretty bad to affect you. In New York, I once walked home in a bad rainstorm just because my bus was taking forever to show up, and discovered when I got home and put on the TV that it was some monster nor’easter, one for the books. I just got wet, was all. We carless apartment-dwellers don’t have to contend with mud, downed power lines, wet spark plugs, or swaying trees that might fall through the roof.

Yet to watch weather-porn coverage of a storm like that, it’s Katrina all over again.  Reporters in yellow slickers do field reports to tell us that… it’s raining and windy. An hour later: still raining, in fact. Even when there’s no storm, they attempt to make weather seem worse than it is. It’s only 85 degrees? Well, “the heat index is 104!” (Don’t get me started on wind-chill factor. Just tell me the temperature, for god’s sake.) They whip up anxiety, turning banal news (it’s raining, hard) into breaking news (it’s Armageddon!). My parents, who consume a lot of TV, tend to huddle in the house during rainstorms nowadays, scared to leave. And I have to say that I think it’s nonsense.

I will admit that the resulting staycation, back in New York for the last four days of the week, was rather pleasant. I got stuff done around the house. Spent a pleasant afternoon doing some light-duty research at the New York Public Library, too. And we took the family to the Central Park Zoo (big hit this visit: the puffins). Out of that fearmongering came a nice break from ordinary life. And the weather at home, unpredictably, was impeccable: cool, dry, and without a cloud in the sky.