DADWAGON

Got home a little early for once yesterday, and my wife arrived from the daycare pickup a few minutes later. “So look at this,” she said, holding out our little boy’s arm to reveal two pairs of dark-red scabs. “That’s a bite.”

At first I misunderstood, because I had just moments earlier been reading a news story about bedbugs. No, she explained: a human bite, from another child.

Now, some of this is to be expected, or at least understood. In the past, he’s nipped at me, and once another kid, himself. But nothing broke the skin, and I had the sense that he was just using his teeth as a third hand. This was different. It was bloody, and showed torn flesh. It looked like a dog bite, and a violent one.

Our daycare center has a policy at moments like this: They will not identify the biter to the parents of the bitee. I understand that, even if it irritates me. The center does not want to get caught in the middle of your-kid-bit-my-kid, well-who-provoked-whom, well-who-was-supervising fight. Better to just move along. They do, however, alert the little monster’s parents.

I find myself caught on a picket fence here. On one side, I am furious that anyone would draw blood from the sweetest child in New York, possibly ever. On the other, I am understanding: it’s another toddler, and even well-behaved toddlers are not reliably even-tempered. Which camp I fall into changes by the minute. More or less depending on whether I’m looking at his arm or not.

Comparable experiences, anyone? Advice? Take it to the comments.

Just yesterday, you were at the playground, chasing little Ayden as he bolted around the jungle gym, keeping a hand outstretched in case he might stumble and fall. Or maybe you were at a middle-school PTA meeting, cowing the other moms and dads into submitting to your field-trip theories. Or perhaps you were at the principal’s office, arguing at length why Carmela, now a 16-year-old junior, needed to be part of the National Honor Society, despite her 2.9 GPA and lack of any extracurricular service deeds. Well, wherever you were, you were a helicopter parent. (Unless you were in Scandinavia, in which case you were a “curling parent.”)

Today, however, as your precious heads off to college and you struggle to detach your identity from theirs, you are now a velcro parent. Congratulations.

This post isn’t really about anything substantive—I’m just fascinated by the way we name parenting styles. Or maybe not fascinated—more like “annoyed.” In the U.S. these days, we often get seduced by the cleverness of a particular phrase, and certain ideas enter the public consciousness based on how outrageous or funny they are, not whether they accurately reflect reality.

Consider another parenting label: the idle parent. Frankly, this is an idea we at Dadwagon can really get behind—just don’t do too much, let the kids organize their own fun, and if you really have to deal with the children, get them to do odd jobs around the house that you don’t want to do yourself. Okay, good! But as an idea, or meme, “idle parent” just doesn’t have the popular currency of “helicopter parent.” Ditto for “slow parenting,” which doesn’t sound quite as sexy as “slow food.” Whereas “free-range kids,” whatever the merit of the idea, is just a fucking awesome moniker.

If it wasn’t 8:30 in the morning and I didn’t have other things to do, I’d come up with my own clever list of catchy parenting styles soon to be brought to you by some local newspaper. But since this is a blog and I need to run, I’m leaving it up to you, my readers: What’s the next ridiculous (and ridiculously catchy) parenting style the New York Times will soon discover?

JP’s away for the week with his mother, and my girlfriend and I also decided to leave town, as this might be our last solo vacation before the new baby comes and changes everything. I’m upstate in a little shack by a lake, and it’s raining, and the only thing to do is watch the ducks feeding in the water. Last night I grilled clams and sausage and made a fire with wet firewood and drank Irish whiskey until it got late. Not bad.

Of course, it’s always a little disorienting to have too much fun when JP isn’t around. I tell myself not to feel that way. First, what good would it do, and second, he’s off with his mother enjoying himself, and I should feel good about that, and I do, so why feel bad? But it’s difficult. It only highlights the ways in which it’s unnatural to be apart from your child. I am keenly made aware that he has half a life that exists entirely independent of mine, and half his childhood memories won’t include me.

The house next to mine on the lake is occupied by a friendly family with a bunch of kids. The youngest is a boy about JP’s age, about his size, about his build, about the same color hair, and so forth. Yesterday, he was fishing on the pier with his grandmother—pulled in three sunfish in the space of an hour while I had a short swim and puttered about with the grill.

You ever have the feeling the world is conspiring against you? That forces exist that not only run counter to your best interest, but that are actively conspiring to lower your spirits? I rarely do, but this child sapped some of my pleasure. Not that the boy had anything to do with me, other than wanting to show me his fish and comment on my dog, but he just sounded so much like my son that I had to go inside.

Ah, well, the rain today has certainly made me a pleasant fellow. I think I’ll have another coffee and then call JP.