DADWAGON

My daughter’s main imaginary friend, Zoe, has been on a strange journey. She came into our house around the time my uncle was killed, and had a fairly therapeutic role: dying often in motorcycle crashes, but coming back alive after naptime to play as if nothing had happened.

When all of that calmed down, Zoe took a traditional fall-guy role. She was the one who hit Nico when no one was looking (she really disliked babies).

Over the past few months, we’ve been learning a little more about Zoe. She’s not, apparently, a little girl. She was ten years old for a while, but is older than that now. And she’s not a girl at all, at least not in last month”s retelling. Instead, my four-year-old daughter Dalia says that Zoe is a horse. A horse with no bones. Who is very old. So old, in fact, that she died last week. And Dalia… ate her. Boiled her right up and ate her for dinner.

That’s weird, right?

My best guess, although I’m no Freudian, is that she is again using poor Zoe to work through a complicated issue, this time about, well, eating meat. She seems to share her mother’s unsentimental science-brain when it comes to prodding dead things in the park or keeping dead butterflies or figuring out where dinner came from. In Oakland a few days ago, we got burritos from the garish and delicious Mi Pueblo deli and I got the kids and me some lengua, mostly because tongue is actually a great meat for kids–it’s soft, tender, and fricking delicious. Dalia wanted to know what it was, and we told her, half out of an honesty policy and half out of curiosity of how she’d take it. After a few questions about how you get the tongue (same as you get hamburger, we told her, and thankfully she didn’t ask for more detail), and she ate the whole thing.

I’m psyched that for the moment at least–these things change, I know–she’s not a picky eater, nor freaked out by the existential mindfuck that is eating other (usually sweet-natured or furry) animals. But now that she has taken to cooking and eating her imaginary friend, I’m not so sure that she doesn’t have some, umm, processing to do.

That said, I’m not a meat-sadist. Part of our full disclosure policy is, I think, with the idea that down the road she might actually choose not to eat meat. And we would be fine with that. Because even though I’ve never been a vegetarian, I’m increasingly wary of meat and am even a little admiring of those who decide that it’s not for them. Especially if the meat being served comes from a boneless horse who was very recently your best friend.

I came across an amusing video at The Onion this morning. “New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion.” A headline such as this requires little explanation or political education to understand, but it did provoke a thought: how many parents are pro-choice?

My girlfriend’s pregnancy is, by modern medical definitions, considered “high-risk,” which meant there were any number of elaborate tests in her first trimester to verify the health of our child. Sobering stuff, to be sure, and as a result, we had a conversation about what we would do if the baby had major developmental issues. We agreed that we would terminate the pregnancy.

I think, however, if that scenario had arisen, I would have had a very hard time going through with it, and this is something I very definitely would not have felt prior to having JP. I’m not saying I would have attempted to prevent my girlfriend from having an abortion–I’ve been trained in the dialectic of whose body is whose, as befits a NYC liberal. But it would have been very hard, even factoring in the massive emotional, physical, and financial difficulties of raising a child with health problems.

Pregnancy, even for a man, makes one aware of a very simple fact: there’s a human baby floating around inside that belly. Now, again, don’t get me wrong: I’m not arguing against abortion in any legal, ethical, or even moral sense, only a personal one. Neither am I interested in entering into a pointlessly boring political argument about reproductive rights. I just want to acknowledge that having a child can alter the way you feel about abortion, or at least it did in my case.

I’m curious to hear what other parents have to say on the topic. It doesn’t come up all that often in pleasant conversation, if you know what I mean.

New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion

Some rather incredible video shot last month near Borkovka, Russia that I’m just catching up to. Not only does it give a sense of how unbelievably intense the wildfires that continue to tear through the country are (satellite photo of the fires here at left), but the video is, for our Russian-speaking readers, an absolute master-class in foul language. If forest fires could be extinguished by a flood of fuck! bitch! whore! and cock! then these fires would’ve been stopped dead in their tracks. Actually, they never would have started, because Russians have been laying down a preventative torrent of profanity for much of the last 500 years.

It’s actually a terrible situation: Moscow, which was so pleasant to me on my visit in early summer, is now choking on smoke. Old people are dying by the truckload of heat exhaustion. The villages in the outlying regions are burning to the ground. My thoughts are with all of you innocent motherfuckers.

No, Theodore, you are not the only confirmed biking-douche among the DadWagoners. The picture here is of our family bike setup, on the bike rack of the Staten Island Ferry. In front is the wife’s aquamarine-and-rust beater ($75 used from Eddie’s Bikes), just behind it is my marginally less rusty 7-speed Schwinn Jaguar ($150 used from Master Bike Shop).

The key accessories–the one that make this a posse–are the kid get-ups attached to my bike. In between my bike seat and handlebars–that bit of cocoa-colored fabric you see there–is the WeeRide Kangaroo for the two-year-old. I love having the kid bike seat up front: it’s much more stable, and I can actually talk to the kid and vibe-check him. Plus, I can tell when he has blown out, so I can stop for a diaper change in time. The other piece is perhaps even better: The WeeRide Co-Pilot. This is for the four-year-old, and acts like an add-on tandem. She gets her own pedals and seat and handlebars, but it doesn’t matter if she pedals forward, backward, or (as often happens) doesn’t pedal at all. She’s learning to ride a bike on her own, but it’ll be years before she can actually go anywhere in a timely manner. So until then, she thinks she’s riding, but actually she’s being carted around. Genius.

Why give you all this (probably quite boring) detail? As Beta Dad astutely pointed out on Theodore’s post, the kid-cargo bike, the one Kate Winslet rides (according to its preening manufacturer in the NY Times video Theodore linked to), goes for “twenty-nine-fifty”, as in $2950. Good lord. For that kind of money, I would want to actually be able to make a baby with Kate Winslet, not just tote mine around the way she does hers.

Our system is quite a bit more economical. The Kangaroo for the little dude cost $59 from Walmart. The Co-Pilot was  disturbingly hard to find (it’s a relatively new product, but I suppose it was just out of stock) a month ago, so we found ours on Craigslist for $80. WalMart, once again keeping prices low by enslaving the children of Bangladesh, is now offering it for $59 on their website. So the whole getup costs $120 before taxes and shipping, letting you spend the extra $2800 you saved on things that really matter, like injectable Oxycontin.

The family and I are in California while I sponge off of fellowship money for a week, but before we left, we rode all the way from upper Manhattan to the Staten Island Ferry, took the boat there and back (we declined, yet again, the opportunity to explore Staten Island), and then rode our bikes back along the Hudson. In all, 15 miles of riding, with just one stop for lunch/playground and some time on the ferry. And our children, not usually of the hardiest stock, loved every minute of it. Pretty remarkable.

Another word to the mom in the video, who says proudly that lots of people smile and wave at her while she’s huffing her kid-trike around town. I, too, experience plenty of people waving and smiling when I’ve got both kids, plus my helmet, plus my glasses, in tow. And I would say a fair percentage of them are actually laughing at us, not with us. I am fine with that, because my kids freaking love being on the bike, and because it keeps me from being a shut-in when I have both wild ones in my charge. But I would just keep in mind that when New Yorkers wave and smile, it is sometimes because they think you look like an asshole.