There are plenty of chances for the children to bump into the saltier world of cursing. Network television can bleep profanity, but life doesn’t. And my kids, at least the newly minted 6-year-old, are well aware of these words. Case in point: a relative, on our recent trip to California, couldn’t fit something in the trunk. “Shit,” the relative said, upon which Dalia reflected for a moment and asked: “What does ‘shit’ mean?”
Side-note: The great thing about that is that she knows very well what ‘shit’ means. Her question was just a way of gently busting the chops of the adult who had said it, while pretending that she wasn’t busting anybody. At the precocious young age of six, my daughter is mastering passive-aggressive behavior. She’s almost ready to go work in a corporate office where cubicle-dwellers stab each other in the back all day!
I’m obviously not too worried about the language, probably because through dumb luck and nothing else I’ve been given an older child who prefers not to work blue even though she could.
HOWEVER.
Our daily walk to school through Manhattan—not a long walk, just six blocks or so—is starting to remind me more and more of a stroll through Deadwood, except with puffy jackets and snow instead of trenchcoats and dust. I don’t know if it’s just our little slice of the island, but we have some very foul-mouthed individuals living around here. And they get after it EARLY. I mean, I try to resist that first mutherfucker of the day until at least 10am. The day is long. There’s plenty of time to mutter fuck fuck fuck under your breath around lunch, or type listen, asshole as the header of an afternoon email that you decide wisely against sending.
But we walk to school at 8am and already the Germanic cognates are flying. Often the person is on a cell phone, doing that New Yorker half-shout into it. Not in direct anger—they’re usually talking to a commiserator, as in, “So you know I told him to mind his own fucking business, right?”
Dutiful controlling parent that I am, it’s actually tempting sometimes to say something: “seeing as we are all waiting together for this light to change, could you at least not shout motherfucker?”
Saying something would be a terrible idea, I’m pretty sure, in that it would most likely add ten minutes and three fistfights to our little morning commute.
But still, I wonder, how could these good people of Manhattan, my neighbors—often women, no less—curse like Carlin, with such vigor, right next to my preschoolers? And then often I look at their other hand—the one not attached to the cellphone into which they are currently announcing plans to fucking kill that bitch—and find that they are holding something altogether unexpected: the hand of their own preschooler, young and smooth-cheeked and headed for school.
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Sasha and Matt enjoy the iPad in Rome, each with their drink of choice.
We saw them everywhere we went in Rome last month—at restaurants, on the bus and metro, in cafes. They looked like tourists, American most likely, youngish, with a toddler in tow. Totally normal. But, we’d notice, in the middle of meals, or squeezed into a crowded, slow mode of public transportation, they’d do the unforgivable. The kid would start to act up, and out would come—wait for it, wait for it—the iPhone. Sometimes the child would play simple games, Tozzle and the like, but often a video would come on, and the child would then sit entranced, immobile, ignoring the plate of specially prepared pasta al pomodoro while her parents would, in turn, ignore the child—and while all the sophisticated Italians in the area tried not to notice the little glass slate’s bleeps and burbles. And we, we resented them all—fatuous digital addicts in the birthplace of Western Civilization. How could they?
They were, of course, us, the Gross Family, simply trying to muddle through a two-week vacation in Italy with the least amount of distress. Our daughter, Sasha, is 3, with all the impulses and uncontrollability that go with that age. For the most part, she’s pretty good, pretty quiet, pretty well-behaved, but at a certain point in every meal or museum trip, she’s run out of steam, and though we’d do everything we could to calm her and engage her in the food or activity, there were limits. And so I’d bring out my iPhone and fire up “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (in Mandarin, for what it’s worth) or Monkey Preschool Lunchbox (keeping the volume way down, for what that’s worth), and then Jean and I would enjoy the rest of whatever in relative peace.
But the guilt! The incredible, unbearable guilt! We’d succumbed to the worst of all temptations, and had proved ourselves to be the lazy, irresponsible, uncreative American parents everyone stereotypically expects us to be. No verbal games for Sasha, no in-depth toddler-level conversations, no new flavors discovered. Instead, pulsing pixels and slackjawed amusement for Sasha, an extra glass of wine for Mommy and Daddy.
Actually, that’s not true at all. Actually, I felt no guilt whatsoever. Sure, I would’ve preferred Sasha to eat all her food or attempt to engage with us, her parents. But just because the iPhone (and its ilk) is the easily ridiculed emblem of our digital age doesn’t mean it’s essentially bad.
The thing is, we love to make fun of our addiction to new technology—almost as much, in fact, as we love to play with new gadgets. But their ease of use and startling breadth of features always somehow provoke a level of guilt. Our parents and grandparents didn’t have these things—they had books and banjos and candlelight and each other, and they did fine. We shouldn’t have to placate our kids with retina displays—we should make do with yesterday’s (or last century’s) tech, right?
It’s a romantic idea, and a stupid one. I mean, I’ve been using computers in a serious way for the last 28 years, and now, what, I should deny my kid the opportunity to get the same experience? There is no fighting the fact that devices like the iPhone, iPad and i-everything-else are going to be a fundamental part of our children’s lives (barring a zombie invasion or SkyNet takeover, of course), and those who would argue that there’s something inherently better about pre-digital entertainment are wasting your time, and their own.
I don’t mean to say you shouldn’t also try to promote things like actual books, wooden toys, or whatever. I’ll certainly squeal out loud with joy (if internally) the first time I see Sasha amuse herself with a tome of quality material at a restaurant meal. That’s what I used to do when bored, and my total immersion in novels does not strike me as all that different from Sasha’s immersion in Pocket God.
So, today I would like to call for a small but subtle change: From now on, let no one express surprise over the facility with which small children manipulate Apple products. From now on, let no one use “iPhone” or “iPad” as snide shorthand to dismiss children and their parents as tone-deaf solipsists or cultural philistines. From now on, let’s accept the place of gadgets in our lives and our children’s lives alongside the books and Matchbox cars and dolls and Legos and all the other crap we amuse ourselves with in order to forget for a too-brief moment the crushing boringness of life and the inevitability of our deaths—and theirs, and their children’s, too.
From now on, let us chill out about technology, and guiltlessly use it whenever the hell we want. And let us not use it, too. These things are all equivalent now.
Let me leave you with one final anecdotal observation on kids and technology. Late last year, as Sasha’s third birthday approached, Jean and I discussed what to get her. She’s always been interested in the photos we take of her with our iPhones, so we thought: How about a kid’s camera? We got her the Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Something-Something, and when she opened it that December morning, Sasha was excited, running around the house and taking as many pictures as possible. Pretty neat.
But after that, she just didn’t use it much. If it happened to be lying around, she might pick it up and fire off a few shots, but it wasn’t the center of her life. And when we went off to Rome, it stayed home.
Which is not to say she didn’t bring a camera. No, she brought one—a tiny plastic toy camera, whose button cycles through images of various wild animals: a lion, an elephant, etc. It fits in her pocket, and it always seems to be nearby, and she’ll bring it up to her eye and squeal, “Say cheese!” as if she’s really taking a picture. She loves it, more than the digital one, I think. And that’s fine. When she’s ready to get serious about digital photography, the Fisher-Price one will still be around, and she can learn on that. Unless, by that time, she’s ready for her own iPhone.
Today is my daughter’s 6th birthday, so of course I’m thinking about death.
Or rather, I’m thinking about the way life unfolds dimly and predictably on the path to death. I was reminded of this just a minute ago: In line for coffee uptown, I overheard two men, better dressed than I and even a little grayer, talking about their weekends. Specifically, that there had been a birthday in the family of one of them, and that the birthday was a sixth birthday, and that the boy chose a superhero-themed party.
Which is, of course, exactly what Dalia’s party was yesterday (hence the caped crusader flying on the chalkboard here). It was a superhero party. She had all her friends come to a place near Union Square called Karma Kids, which based on the name could have been annoying but turned out to be fantastic, and they ran and played and planked and had a ridiculously good time.
I didn’t butt into the conversation this morning—I like to pretend I never eavesdrop and also I like to not talk to people before I get my AM coffee—but it all reminded me of the sameness of six-year-olds. It’s akin to the sameness of 3-year-olds and of 16-year-olds and 36-year-olds. Dalia is many wonderful things, but right now she is, more than anything, a six-year-old, with the skills of a six-year-old, the interests of a six-year-old, the emotional tics of a six-year-old. She likes to draw, and dance, and play games on the iPhone when I let her. She is a big fan of Star Wars. They all are.
And I am a 36-year-old, with 36-year-old skills, interests and emotions. I did not shave this morning, because there is little point of rigorous hygiene when you’re married and 36. I rode a bike like an idiot up the length of Amsterdam this morning, squeezing between delivery trucks and cabs, because I am a 36-year-old and a slightly irresponsible bike-ride is the perfect amount of risk/rush for 36-year-olds. I am in the middle of everything, neither hot nor cold, not young not old, not wildeyed nor asleep. I may think I’m an individual, but actually I’m just a 36-year-old.
I find all of that a bit depressing (of course! I’m 36!). In the same way that when all of us started moving in with our girlfriends, and then we all started getting married and then we all started having kids, I grew increasingly suspicious that what I had seen as joyous new developments on the path of life were in fact just predetermined Stations of the Cross, and that we are all just dullard pilgrims kissing the ground at each then picking ourselves up and moving to the next station. Even those of us who defied neater timelines, delayed by drug use or stubbornness or bad luck, also seemed to be predictable. Rather, their unpredictability existed in predictable ratio to the rest of us.
This post? Also totally typical for a 36-year-old. I have the capacity, quite standard for my cohort, to squeeze the joy out of anything. And there, as expected, is where my daughter, and all her little friends, are so much cooler than me and mine.
Part of what makes a 6-year-old a 6-year-old is the fact that every new station is greeted with absolute enthusiasm and joy. It’s as if Dalia was the first person in the world to turn six and enter this magical world of sixness. As she put it yesterday, “My brain is telling me: BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY.” So it is with all the other changes. Loose tooth? Awesome! Starting kindergarten? Hell yes! Big enough to hold a dustpan and a broom? Fantastic!
Her emotional life, just like that of all six-year-olds, is getting more complex by the day. But still, there is an underlying response to life, whether she rages or swoons, that is so direct and so luminant that I can hardly bear to look at it. In other words, if I was forced to think too much about how happy she was yesterday, it might break my heart. Why? Fuck if I know. Probably because I’m 36.
So Tomoko was out of town for a couple of nights this week on a business trip, and it happened to fall on the nights I had JP. This meant two kids at home to take care of, along with work, dog, cat, and various other responsibilities. I mention this not as an exercise in cyber-bitching (which I very much enjoy), but instead as a way to demonstrate how incredibly good a father I have become: I’m pretty fantastic.
Back a few years now, when it was just me and JP for long stretches, the thought of taking care of two little people on my own would have been highly intimidating. How do you feed, clean, and not totally ruin two dependents at the same time? Doesn’t one get in the way of the other, like Cain and Abel, Romeo and Juliet, peas and carrots? One was tough enough–but two? Perish the thought.
Yet there was a moment last night when I had completed dinner for both kids–a dinner, I might add, that JP even ate–when I had managed to navigate JP through his bath while changing Ellie’s diapers and getting her into her pajamas; when I had answered every one of JP’s nightly 5 million questions while making sure he brushed his teeth and Ellie ran around the room holding my shoes and brandishing a copy of the New Yorker; when both were in the bedroom at the same time, in the dark–JP drifting to sleep, Ellie on my lap sipping a bottle–there was this moment, it happened, when I knew they would both go down easily for the night, and that I could handle both at the same time and it would be no big deal; that I could tell JP a quick story and give Ellie a last pat on the cheek before dropping her gently into the crib; and it would all be just Jim Dandy.
What was particularly nice about this, you see, was that while, in my estimation, life with children generally offers a great many long-term rewards–loving relationships, pride, someone to keep you out of a hospice–but in the short term? It’s not always so easy, frankly, and mostly feels more like struggle and strife and poop (and calling things poop) and tears and the fact that I haven’t been to a movie in over a year.
But last night was pretty good, mostly because for the first time in a long time, I felt like I owned the whole damn thing.
