DADWAGON

It’s July 20. Forty-one years ago, Neil Armstrong stepped down from the Lunar Excursion Module onto the fine gray dust of the Sea of Tranquility, and took one small step for [a*] man, one giant leap for mankind. The club of men who have walked on another world’s surface is the most exclusive imaginable: twelve men, nine of whom are still living. Until NASA and Congress (or the EU or China or even Russia) decide to spend wildly on a new moon program, the club is not accepting new members.

It’s a moment that once seemed so epochal that it was printed on new desk calendars: July 20, Moon Day. And today, apart from the This Day In History segment on the news, it’ll blow by without notice. It feels antique, a bit of the Cold War that lingers on, like the American military presence near the former border of East and West Germany, or the Cuban embargo.

I bring this up on DadWagon because, like a lot of science-inclined kids in the seventies, I drank up this story like no other, and at the time it was still a living tale: the Apollo program had just ended, the Shuttle program was on the way, and the general public indifference to space flight and its budgetary requirements was just beginning to harden.  It may be the political issue over which I find myself most conflicted, too. My head says to listen to the scientists, the ones who say we can do a huge amount more science for less money by sending up bots and probes, which require neither oxygen nor food nor training. Drone astronauts are a good idea, particularly if we’re husbanding our budget, as we should be.

And yet…and yet. Unmanned probes are cool but not mind-blowing. They inspire the hardcore but not the kids. And they don’t feel like the next generation of Lewis and Clark. They feel like high-tech banking or running Predator drones. The advantages of manned spaceflight are hard to quantify, even though a lot of people try to quantify them. (Things can sometimes be fixed on a manned flight, for example, whereas when a robot breaks, that’s it; a little dose of pliers-and-duct-tape improvisation can be useful a quarter-million miles from home.) As I say, I’m conflicted, but I think I come down on the side of optimistic spendthriftness. Maybe not right now, when the budget is a disaster. But in a few years, after the financial collapse is behind us (please, God, please), if federal spending is even close to balanced, I say let’s go back. Yes, it’s a little pointless; no, we no longer do technological things Just Because. But here and there, we should.

Will my son see someone walk on another world in his lifetime? It’s a tossup. But I’d like him to. If he’s so inclined, in fact, I could, just faintly, envision him in a bulky white suit, joining that extraordinarily exclusive club.

*Is the correct quote “for a man” or just “for man”? The former makes sense; the latter is what we all heard. Or is it?

If the steaming-hot issue (yipes!) of designer diapers is now discussed in the pages of Gawker, does that mean fancy-poop has reached a cultural critical mass (bam!)–or is it totally done?

You decide:

Incredibly vain parents are actually buying Huggies horrible denim diapers, so much so the brand regained the market share they recently lost to Pampers. This can only mean one thing: diaper war…Ad Age reports that Huggies’ (owned by Kimberly-Clarke) share of the diaper market recently increased by 2%, mostly thanks to the sale of their limited edition denim diapers, selling 2 million packages of them to women who want their baby to be just as fashionable as their handbag. Pampers (a Procter & Gamble brand) just won’t sit still and let those whippersnappers take over the market with their jeans! No, they have their own line of fashionable shitpads from designer Cynthia Rowley.

Shitpad. How does that stack up against “crotchfruit”?

Nothing like almost taking a child’s life to bring on a bout of nostalgia. I was driving home yesterday from the Pier 6 playground, where I was one of the few dads shameless
brave enough to take off my shirt and shoes and join JP in the “water lab.”

As I may have mentioned earlier, I live in a neighborhood more on the “gentrifying” end of the gentrification spectrum than the “gentrified” end. This means that at times it reminds me of the New York City in which I grew up (for reference, please see, “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Taxi Driver”). As I was coming up a street of frame houses equally between renovated and crumbling specimens, I noticed that someone had opened a fire hydrant for the kids to play in. I slowed down in case there were children ahead that I couldn’t see. As I got closer, a young boy darted out in front of me chasing a rubber ball. I didn’t really come all that close to hitting him, but for a second I thought I might.

Going by, I could see that there were about four or five pre-teen boys playing in front of their house. I turned to my girlfriend and asked her if she had ever played in a hydrant (she’s from Chicago) and she said no.

“You know,” I said, “I think I grew up in the last NY generation where kids regularly did that kind of thing. I played in fire hydrants, swam in the fountain in Washington Square Park, played stickball.”

What I really meant, of course, was that my generation was one of the last in NYC that was allowed to play alone. One of the pivotal moments of my childhood was the abduction of Etan Patz, a boy who lived not far from where I grew up in Manhattan who disappeared one day on his way to school. I could be wrong about this, but it seems in my memory that the culture of parenting anxiety that we presently live in began with that event. It wasn’t long after Patz’s disappearance that missing children became a regular presence on milk cartons, and although we now live in a much safer society than 1980s America, we seem to spend a greater amount of time spinning out the consequences of what could happen to our children if they leave home unattended.

Either way, playing in a fire hydrant is a fine thing on a hot day. JP will have to experience it, even if that means I will have come with him to do it.

As we continue to explore the All Joy and No Fun paradox from last week, which included Christopher’s excellent Q&A with Jennifer Senior, here’s some Monday morning reading (is there any better kind?). On her Psychology Today blog, Nancy Darling has a slightly different take. For her, “parenting” seems all chore mainly because the word itself doesn’t encompass the best parts about having kids.

Parenting is full of unexpected pleasures.  It used to amaze me when they were babies that their bodies were so perfect or how good they smelled.  Listening to my youngest practice a violin etude last night–one he had bored himself silly with all summer–I was just awestruck that this kid who has terrible handwriting, who likes fencing with sticks in the back yard and who will do anything to start a water fight–could make such truly beautiful music.  I love just watching the look of concentration on his face as he focuses on it.

Note that, unlike the behaviors evoked by the word ‘parenting’, these these are passive behaviors.  They involve just sitting back and enjoying my kids being themselves.

None of those pleasures are captured in a standard measure of ‘parenting’ or–I think–evoked by the word ‘parenting’ as it is used in studies of time use.  That isn’t parenting.  It’s being a parent.  If you asked me about how I felt about parenting, none of those pleasures would be assessed, because that’s not what I think of when I think of the word.  That is an issue of construct validity.

A semantic argument, perhaps, but the point is well-taken. The best parts of being a parent–those quiet moments, the deep love–are the hardest to name and define. The worst parts–trying to get your kid dressed in the morning, waking up every two hours when they’re young–are much easier to identify and complain about. So just remember: “parenting” is a shallow river of suck. “Being a parent” is a far deeper ocean of something that is, well, pretty indescribably good.