DADWAGON

It’s become accepted Mad Men fan wisdom that Betty Draper is a horrible mother, an ice queen, one of those wire-frame monkeys from the Harlow experiment. Up till this week, I only half-bought it. Betty, I always thought, was just supposed to be a chilly WASP archetype, not much worse than the other moms on the block. Okay, maybe a little worse, but for heaven’s sake, she was married to Don through half a dozen affairs. You could forgive Betty a little anxiety.

Needless to say, if you saw last night’s episode [SPOILER ALERT, for you patient DVR people], that is no longer a tenable position. She has revealed herself to be a cruel and utterly self-absorbed disaster around her daughter.  Sally acts out, and gets slapped across the face. Sally dares to mess around with her own body, silently masturbating late at night during a friend’s slumber party, and Betty thinks it’s purely about embarrassing Mom. She threatens to cut her daughter’s fingers off.

If I were a certain sort of blogger, I would here try to build a contrarian position: that Betty Draper is, actually, a good mom. (Keeps a nice house, is always home for the kids, may not be as horrible to the boys as she is to Sally.) Nuh-uh. She’s horrible, and getting horribler. And I can’t wait to see more of it. Come 1969, around season 6 or 7 of Mad Men, Sally will turn 15, and you don’t have to be Matt Weiner to see that she’s headed off from Ossining to Woodstock in the back of some dude’s VW.

The only other thing I have to say about Mad Men, for now, is this: AMC’s decision to air the episodes at 10 on Sunday is a vicious thing. At the end of every wrenching hour, I find myself pacing the floor, picking over the episode. This is no way to go into Monday morning: As my wife put it just now, before vainly trying to calm down and go to sleep, “Goddamn Matt Weiner… I start every week now at a deficit.”

Dear Readers,

This week we ‘wagoneers—at least Theodore and myself—picked up on a trope launched a couple of weeks earlier by Nathan: the open letter. Isn’t it a fine idea? You pretend to be writing a letter—say, to porn star Sasha Grey—and that’s like an article! And then people starting writing open letters back and forth to each other, like the one in which Theodore dubbed the Sasha Grey letter “linkbait” and then starting discussing JP Morgan’s deformed nose, and then I planned (but never finished) an open letter back to him about how justified link bait was, but instead I just wrote an open letter to a nice lady on the subway who was not, as far as I could tell, involved in pornography.

Although they didn’t frame it that way, Christopher and Nathan got into the same kind of heated back and forth—a sort of mini-Tantrum. Christopher: People who want Spanish-speaking nannies are pretentious. Nathan: Nuh-uh!

All was not necessarily conflict and strife, however. No, we also worried. Christopher worried about how to be more productive at home, then worried he was staying too late at the office. Theodore worried about crippling debt and the re-construction of old infant gear. Nathan worried (poetically) about the fate of his beloved California and about running down pedestrians while getting a blow job.

For some reason, I didn’t come off as worried. Maybe because I just returned from vacation? Or because I was too furious at Baby Boomers to consider my own circumstances? Or because all my worry went into finishing a rewrite of a long, complicated article that I couldn’t finish before because I was on vacation? The world may never know.

Worry not, dear readers, for we shall return on Monday. Have a nice weekend!

Sincerely,

—Matt

So I spent part of this morning going through some of JP’s old baby equipment to see how much was salvageable for when the Upcoming arrives. Most of it was in good condition. My only problem was that half of the stuff I couldn’t figure out how to put back together. Yes, I’m sure given some time to focus—as opposed to tinkering over my coffee—I’ll have more success.

What was more interesting to me was the extent to which the earliest days with JP had become a blur. Of course, two years of next-to-no-sleep does tend to narrow what sticks in the brain, but I figured I should remember enough to be able to put the car-seat straps back together. Alas.

It reminds me that parenting, particularly in the beginning, is so much work that you rarely have an opportunity to pull back and think about it. What memories I do have are of always doing rather than pulling back and considering. Maybe this makes me a less-than-perfect parent, and of course, I did consider lots of things: sleep training pros and cons, daycare, how to feed, when to feed, and millions of other things. I mean more that I didn’t often think: Isn’t this a great moment? Isn’t this a drag? I was too busy adapting to whatever new thing JP was becoming that day/week/month/second to think about those sorts of things. When I did have time and could look up from the routines, I was always amazed at the changes around me. I was always saying things like: “This is a good age,” or “I can’t believe he’s doing that now,” or “Holy Christ, kid, take that out of your mouth!”

Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but I’m looking forward to that sort of thing.

Dear Nice Lady,

First off, thank you! On our way back from preschool, I sat down next to you on the F train—and Sasha immediately turned crabby. You know the kind of crabby: whining, limp as an overcooked strand of spaghetti, unwilling either to sit or stand or be held.

But you! With the lightning speed of a practiced mom, you pulled from your purse a plastic figurine of unknown provenance, and offered it to my lil’ monster. Fascinated, she took it and held it in her hands. But frankly, her attention was more on you than on the toy: Who is this stranger, I could hear her thinking, who can produce toys for me with such ease? And how can I bring her home?

Alas, the toy was only a temporary salve. After she’d looked it over, and after I tried tickling her with it, Sasha gave up, returning to her limp-noodle mode of exhibiting her frustration. And so I handed the figurine back to you, apologized, and took Sasha into the far corner of the train, where one stop later we debarked.

I don’t know what it is with this kid. The age, right? She can’t not move, not squirm, not fidget. It’s just impossible for her to keep still, like there’s a high-gear motor running within that just won’t shut down. A stage, yes, I’m sure, but a frustrating one. Oh, well.

Anyway, thank you again. I hope Sasha’s failure to appreciate your gift (she even knows how to say—and sign—”thank you,” but she wouldn’t) hasn’t dampened your willingness to aid other parents. And you’ve inspired me, too. From now on, I’ll carry some kind of kid-friendly gewgaw in my pocket, if not to calm down Sasha then for other harried dads like me. For that, double thank you.

Sincerely,

—Matt