DADWAGON

From the Times’s Motherlode blog:

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University videotaped 39 mothers while they put their infants and toddlers (ages 1 month to 24 months) to bed, and also gathered questionnaire data about how the mothers were feeling at each bedtime and how the babies slept each night.

Physical actions — holding a baby close or nursing him or her to sleep — are, essentially “going through the motions,” the study concludes, and had far less impact on sleep quality than emotional cues. When the mother did those actions while feeling warm and positive, the baby slept well, on average; when the same types of things were done by a mom who was irritable or brusque or distracted, the children were more likely to sleep poorly.

Holy shit. It’s not enough to care for your child. It’s not enough to get the little demon to go to bed. It’s not even enough to love your child despite it all. You have to be in a fricking good mood. Where are they going to find a mother who is, on some level, not “irritated or brusque or distracted”? Tell me. I’d like to find her.

By the way, the article notes that fathers weren’t included in this study because the amount of time we spend putting our children to bed was “statistically insignificant.” Living on my own with JP, I do put him to bed, and we have our little routine, which is usually fun and pleasant—bath, brush teeth, bathroom, in bed, book, song, see ya later—but if I were held to the non-brusque, non-irritated, or undistracted standard, well, I certainly wouldn’t pass muster. And I’ve yet to encounter the mother who would, either.

Of late, I’ve been trying to determine in my head what are some of the common threads that run through the posts on this blog. One of them, it seems clear to me, is an exploration of a motif in the popular culture in which utterly unattainable parenting standards are set, left unmet, and then guilt over said failure is manufactured. I don’t really know where it comes from. Is it a reaction to a two-working-parent society in which children get less time with their parents? An outcropping of our litigious society in which every action has to be contingency-planned, and if something goes wrong, someone has to be held accountable? Or is it just that we don’t have anything better to do with our time than to pick each other apart?

There are few things more male in this world than beer. Why, just ask men—they’ll tell you. But it turns out, according to the Wall Street Journal, that women are better at tasting beer than men are:

[T]he British company SABMiller PLC decided several years ago to reach deeper into its employee pool to find adept tasters, inviting marketers, secretaries and others to try their hand. The company concluded that women were drinking men under the table.

“We have found that females often are more sensitive about the levels of flavor in beer,” says Barry Axcell, SABMiller’s chief brewer. Women trained as tasters outshine their male counterparts, he says.

So, great. Fucking wonderful. Thousands of years of dominating the alcholic refreshment world, and now it turns out women know our drinks better than we know them ourselves.

But! There is an upside. It turns out that women who taste beer well don’t necessarily enjoy drinking it more, nor do their friends enjoy drinking around them:

“It’s hard to be a social drinker sometimes,” says Laura Dopkins, 28, a MillerCoors panelist, who has a master’s degree in food science and used to taste cereal bars for Kellogg Co. “Other people don’t find it fun to drink around you” when you refer to beer as “metallic.”

What that means is that while women may be better at tasting beer, men are still better at enjoying it—even if that means we’ll put up with metallic, skunky beer.

Although, actually, we may not have to. Since women are supposedly “the superior sex when it comes to detecting such undesirable chemicals as 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, which makes beer ‘skunky,'” we can continue to employ them (at home and unofficially, of course) as quality control, like the dupes who taste Obama’s food for poison. Honey, can you get me another? This one tastes … funny.

Yesterday was screeching hot in New York City, so JP spent a good part of the day in the playground cooling off in the sprinkler. Later in the day he was joined by one of his little buddies for a playdate, and his friend’s mother brought along some water pistols for them to play with. Now, I happen to live in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that is rapidly gentrifying (please direct all your hate mail to the Dadwagon tip line): bodegas and over-priced cafes and the like. One of the odd ways to see this social dynamic is in the playground.

First, you have the gentrifier parents with their gentrifier kiddies. This is not, as one might expect, an all-white crowd. There are mixed race families, same-sex families, the whole Benettonian rainbow. Along with that are the non-gentrifier families, which are almost entirely non-English-speaking Latino (with some Russian).

I could write a book on the tensions and pleasures of that juxtaposition. I’ll focus on one thing: water pistol aggression. JP and his friend were blasting away with their little guns, in a very friendly way, and for whatever reason, not at each other. A young Latino boy decided to join the fray, but when he sprayed JP, JP cried and ran away. Not too surprisingly, the little boy thought this was amusing, and spent the rest of the afternoon chasing JP with his water pistol and shooting, with tears from JP the unhappy result.

I tried a variety of things: first, I told JP to spray him back. This worked initially, but not for long, as JP ultimately just didn’t want to be sprayed. More tears. I told him to tell the boy to stop then. Didn’t work as the kid didn’t speak English, or if he did, he wasn’t letting on. I told JP to move away from the kid if he didn’t like being sprayed. No go. The kid followed him around, spraying and evidently enjoying the tears he was provoking. I tried talking to the kid. He sprayed me.

All of which is no big deal. Eventually the kid got tired of JP, JP found other kids to play with and everything was fine. But one thing I thought about was the total embargo on male aggression among the gentrifier families. Aggression is a disease in the “enlightened” classes these days, something that is stamped out whenever it rears its ugly, pushy head. JP, at least at this stage of his life, just doesn’t have it. That’s largely good. I don’t want him knocking other little kids around, and I don’t want anyone hitting him. But this child he encountered had plenty of aggression. He identified a weakness in JP and pushed at it.

There was no real danger for JP so my instinct was to push him to work it out himself. I stepped in when that didn’t work. And when my intervention failed, well, I didn’t really know what to do. The kid didn’t respond to me and his parents weren’t in evidence. Not the most dramatic tale in the world, but it is a part of the odd mixture of families and upbringing that you see in a neighborhood like mine.

Yesterday, if you can remember, was hot. Hot and muggy. And by the end of the day, it was as if all the filth on the sidewalks had evaporated and was floating around in midair.

Inside my apartment, it was nearly as disgusting, and while the air-conditioner struggled valiantly to cool the living room, Sasha’s room had no such newfangled technology. There’s a long story to be told about why her own air-conditioner had been sitting on the floor, under her window, for months, but no one wants to read that. Anyway, Sasha went to sleep in the airless box easily enough, but an hour later, when we checked on her, she was soaked in sweat. Something had to be done.

So I did it. I installed the air-conditioner in her window, in the dark. It did not fall to the sidewalk below. It turned on and immediately began cooling the air. I sustained only minor injuries—a burned thumb, thanks to a hot screw. (And not the kind of hot screw I prefer, either.) And, best of all, Sasha did not wake up throughout the entire endeavor.

In the world of modern urban fatherhood, there are few instantly satisfying experiences to be had. This was one of them. L’chaim!