DADWAGON

Our day-care center is closed for the week of Independence Day. I don’t understand it–nobody else takes the week off, and isn’t the POINT of day care to cover for you when you’re at work?–but that’s the situation, and we aren’t going to change it. Both my wife and have heavy-duty workloads this week, and it would be a bad time for a vacation. So it’s time to call in the shock troops two by two: the grandparents. We are extremely lucky in that all four grands are (a) local, (b) healthy, and (c) enthusiastic. My parents just about wore themselves out chasing our little guy today, and went home giddy. They’ll be back tomorrow.

A week like this makes me grateful for their proximity, and also (yet again) reminds me how thin the support structure behind our parenting is. And we are the ones who have the deck stacked in our favor! At least we have (a passable if vastly diminished amount of) disposable income, a pretty good apartment, no illness or disability or horrible marital strife, and so forth. Cut back on any of those shaky props to a manageable lifestyle, and we’d have genuine problems. Remove a couple more of them, and we’ll find ourselves in the hanging-on-by-a-thread situation of thousands if not millions of people in this country. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If we are barely making this all work, that means a vast number of people cannot make it work at all. Gripe all you want about creeping socialism, but I could use just a touch of it this week. Preferably Swedish-style, since it’s probably not 103 degrees there.

I left my bike at work last Friday, which meant that this morning I drove JP to school (yes, I could have taken the bus, but come on–I’m a man here, folks). Anyway, as I think is fairly customary at schools in Brooklyn, the traffic cops allow parents dropping off their children to double park outside of the school for the 10-15 minutes or so it takes to get little Johnny situated. Not for the first time, I noticed that the cars idling outside of the pre-school were pretty fair examples of high-style European automotive technology. I, too, have such a ride–a bitchin’ 1998 BMW 7-series, with most of the trimmings still in good repair.

Before you accuse me of some sort of Veblen-esque display of conspicuous consumption, let me explain. I like my car, but I’m definitely a little uncomfortable owning it. Under ordinary circumstances, such a vehicle would be way beyond my pay grade. In fact, a Red Flyer wagon is beyond my pay grade this days.

The car provokes one of those weird urban moments where I’m unpacking JP from the car, about to trundle him off to his fancy semi-fancy inner city “summer camp” (translation: daycare with sprinkler), and I want to have a brief conversation with all the people on the street, explaining how it is I’ve come to possess a car that, when new, cost over $100,000. Unfortunately, I can’t chat with everyone. There’s only so much of me to go around.

But if I could I’d tell them how my stepfather is a mechanic who, from time to time, comes across great deals on cars. The BMW, which he bought for $50 was one such deal. And yes, he could have sold the car for a tidy little profit, so definitely I’m getting an obscene benefit here, but the car has about 250,000 miles on it, gets about .000001 miles per gallon in city traffic, and generally leaves me feeling like the sort of dickhead who wants to explain to total strangers that he isn’t in finance. Thank you, stepfather. Really, the car is great. I’m just feeling class alienation this morning.

Maybe I should go with a sign. I could put it on the window or something.

One morning a couple of weeks ago, I was the parent who got up to take care of Sasha. I was early, actually, and arrived in her room before she’d started crying out for company, and I found her sitting in her crib, a worried look on her face. She stared at me and said, “I sorry! I sorry!”

It was heartbreaking, not least because she hadn’t done anything. She’d just learned the phrase, and the vague context within which it operates, and was repeating it as much as possible. It’s since become one of her favorite things to say—she’ll even apologize to her toe if she stubs it—and occasionally she even uses it correctly, although you’re likely to get an “I sorry!” if it’s you who bonks her in the head. Sometimes, she apologizes to the point that she’s about to cry—which just makes me apologize over and over again to her. We are a very conscientious family.

But apparently, this is an Issue—or whatever you call it when the Times’s Motherlode blog discusses something that affects you personally. Late last week, Lisa Belkin discussed children and apologies: whether (and how) to force kids to say “I sorry!”

There are a lot of very public apologies being thrown around recently — about oil spills, and long ago massacres and extra marital affairs and ill-advised quotes to Rolling Stone reporters. And as I conclude in my essay, the message to corporations and public figures is pretty clear — say it right or don’t say anything at all.

But what about our message to our children? When we march them over to a playmate whose feelings they have hurt, or whose toy they have taken, or whose shin they have kicked, and tell them “say ‘Sorry’,” are we teaching them to go through the motions, or to mean it?

My worry, I guess, is a little different. I have a child who apologizes all the time, for nothing, and my great fear is that she will use up her store of apologies well before she needs them; that when the day comes when she should be sorry, she won’t be, because she was when she was 18 months old; that her sorrowful ejaculations will have been, as they say, premature.

Of course, the alternative way to look at this is that Sasha is just crazy precocious: She’s intent on mastering the form of the hollow apology at a very early age. No doubt this will allow her to get away with all manner of transgressions in the near future, from spilling oatmeal on the floor to poking classmates’ eyes with a stick to inadequately overseeing the installation and operation of oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. All she’ll need to do is sit there with her big, sad eyes and squeak, “I sorry! I sorry!” and she’ll be instantly forgiven the destruction of millions of families’ livelihoods (and toddlers’ corneas).

But, just in case her adorable words fail to soothe your pain, please allow me, in grand DadWagon tradition, to apologize preemptively on her behalf: I’m sorry.

Now go fuck yourself.

If you are a Real American, your weekend probably didn’t look too different from mine: serrated animal carcasses over blistering coals, five gallons of something that looked like it might be coleslaw, and a low-level explosives show, the kind that would likely make you and your family victims of a Predator strike if you were living in Waziristan.

So I’ll skip the details and go straight to the real mind-bending stuff: my cousin and his eight children. I’m not talking about one of those huge-hearted foster families. I’m talking about one man and one woman producing an octo-squad of tow-headed children.

His family could hardly be more different than mine, even beyond the sheer volume. He homeschools his kids in the Adirondacks; I am trying desperately not to. I consider myself Jewish (despite being a half-blood); I’m pretty sure he’s raising his kids very Christian. I know they are all John Birch-level conservatives (the oldest son wore a t-shirt that said “Annoy a liberal: work hard and succeed”).

But here’s the twist: his kids are wonderful, the t-shirt notwithstanding. They are gentle and outgoing and hugely cooperative. They play great with younger kids; they are at ease around adults. Their demeanor is no small triumph in our family, which has not always had such success raising kids (another cousin who was arraigned for bank robbery this weekend managed somehow to post bail and attend the barbecue with his daughter).

Given that my wife and I don’t plan on exceeding replacement rate (i.e., no more kids) and that we’re not about to move into the wooded hinterland, what can I take away from my cousin’s success? For now, one thing: don’t sweat the little stuff. These kids surely weren’t each individually swaddled with intense attention and personalized fuss. There’s just not enough time in the day to do that with eight kids. But the kids have come to rely on each other, and their parents provide the vision thing. It’s something we should all aspire to, whether we have two kids or eight.