DADWAGON

(Guest contributor Gabe Soria, whose son does not look much like him at all, continues his posting this week. Read more about Gabe here.)

A pearl of parenting wisdom, imparted upon yours truly in a Greenwich Village bar by (pardon the name drop) Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead: “Having a hangover makes all of your middle-class pretensions about your kids not watching television go out the window.” True. Dat.

I must admit, though, that I never had ANY middle-class pretensions about the boy growing up in a TV-free zone. Growing up in the television paradise that was Southern California, I learned early on that television could be rad. But it can also be radioactive, glowing crack. The slack-jaw machine. As such, I’ve always felt that the boy’s TV watching was something that had to be curated and, most importantly, palatable to me. If I was going to have to sit there and let him watch something, especially while I was nursing an orange juice and a headache in the early morning, it’d have to be something that I dug, too. Pingu’s nonsense, wordless slapstick got the thumbs-up. The Little Einsteins’ feel-good pedantry? Hell no. Know-it-all little creeps. Can’t stand ‘em.

So since his early years, the boy’s been the lone attendee of a long-running scattershot film series. One of our favorite recurring features? This bizarre gem that I first caught in the late-70s while watching Family Film Festival on KTLA 5, hosted by the mighty Tom Hatten. It never fails:

I just caught up with this WSJ report on the cost of a raising a child from last week. Yes, I know, there seem to be new cost-calculations for the price of parenting every week. Given the fact that we’ve got major meltdowns on Wall Street and an energy sector in complete crisis, it does seem odd that entire armies of economists are working to outdo each other’s latest price-of-diaper calculations.

And yet, I’m a little bit addicted. Each report gives me some fresh reason to regret the past and fear the future. This time around, the takeaway is that we are idiots for not having many, many more children. From the report:

For families with many kids, however, there is some good news: The more children you have, the less it costs to raise each one. These economics of scale deliver 22% savings per child for families with three or more children. That is because kids can share a bedroom, hand down clothing and toys to each other, and consume food purchased in bulk quantities, reducing costs. Also, private schools and child-care centers may offer sibling discounts. The data is compiled based on spending by 11,800 two-parent families and 3,350 single parents with at least one child under 18 living at home.

Okay, so you can’t argue with their sample size. It’s large. And according to their calculations, the savings only start to kick in after two kids. We haven’t quite snipped it like PetCobra, so theoretically we could press on for a third kid. But that 22 percent discount they’re promising? Not enough. Not nearly enough. If I’m going to sign up for another year of sleeplessness and 2+ years of changing diapers, someone is actually going to have to pay me. European-style. That’s it.

Ah, the joys of a slow news day on the Times’ Motherlode blog. What sweetmeats of journalistic nonsense does it bring us, our faithful DadWagon readers? A feast for the senses, indeed!  Nothing short of raccoon parenting, folks, as in why did the evil little beastie cross the road with its child and not let it get hit by a hipster biker in Central Park where the author spent part of a morning instead of working (whew):

in the dappled sunlight by the Harlem Meer on the roadway around Central Park on Tuesday morning around 9. Bicyclists rounding the curve at the northeast corner of the park bore witness to a typical urban family drama.

Cyclists, runners, a police officer in a scooter and a parks inspector had formed a wide protective circle around a toddler raccoon and its mother, who tried in various and increasingly exasperated ways to get her progeny off the asphalt and back into the leafy green interior of the park.

She tried leading it. She tried cajoling in raccoon language. She tried to grab it and drag it, an attempt that involved a tussle and some raccoon-yelling. She tried feigning indifference, walking off without looking back, hoping her child would become nervous and follow.

Finally, perhaps reassured that the humans at the scene would help make sure her babe came to no harm, she retreated to greenery, watchfully waiting. Her baby headed in the wrong direction, turned around, took a few more steps back toward its mother and stopped. By this point, it was pretty worn out. The road was already nice and toasty from the morning sun. It curled up to take a little rest.

See, NYC is a jungle, we live in it, and eventually the raccoons will steal our condos, revamp the public schools, and create a property tax system that is both progressive and Utopian, while reflection Georgeist theory… or something like that.

On a more coherent note, anyone notice a similarity between this tale and Robert McCloskey’s “Make Way for Ducklings”?

I agree with Christopher on his Diddy half-defense–which centered on the hypocrisy of people who tsk-tsk him for buying the wrong kind of ridiculous gift for his children–but I’ll raise him a tick higher.

The Nightline interview that Martin Bashir did with Diddy wasn’t quite the preening sermon that Bashir ran with Michael Jackson (think what you will about MJ, that interview was horrid journalism, edited down until it was nothing but half-truth and innuendo). This Diddy piece was just a very stupid interview. For a sense of how well Bashir understood his subject, just know that he referred to Diddy as a “hard-core gangster rapper” (also telling: Diddy didn’t correct him).

But it was Bashir’s snide moralism about fatherhood that stands out the most. You can tell where Bashir is headed with this from his intro, when he says that Diddy “has enjoyed… the joys of fatherhood, no less than six times.”

When Diddy gets to defending his role as a parent, about six minutes into the interview, Bashir snaps back, “But you don’t live with them.” To which Diddy exercises his prerogative to shut that line of questioning down: “The way I raise my children, I don’t have to explain to you or anybody else.”

True enough. And it’s probably a good thing he doesn’t try to explain what it means to have a lot of children by a different mothers. To (badly) paraphrase Omar Little, Diddy is not a man for this question. He wouldn’t have the words, not enough to speak for an entire caste of non-traditional (and heavily judged) fathers.

Thankfully, the one person I know who can explain a similar brand of fatherhood has already done so, in a 2008 memoir called The Beautiful Struggle. It’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’ story of growing up in Baltimore, the sixth child of a man who had seven children by four mothers. And at the risk of giving a hamfisted synopsis, let me just say that the twist is that Ta-Nehisi gets everything he needs, and more, from his father. Ta-Nehisi is a friend of mine. We worked together. I know the end product. And I don’t think that his father, Paul Coates–former Black Panther, founder of Black Classic Press, endlessly inventive and passionate father–should be made to suffer comparison to Diddy, whom I see as not much more than a clever marketing professional. But Bashir should read Ta-Nehisi’s life story before he goes takes the pulpit again about parenting matters. Here’s an early  invocation of Ta-Nehisi’s family, from the book:

My father has seven kids born to four women. Some of us were born to best friends. Some of us were born in the same year. My eldest come first in chronology: Kelly, Chris, William, Junior, all born of my father’s first marriage to Linda. John was born to Patsy, Maleek born to Saligh, to then me and Menile born to my mother, Cheryl. This is all a mess on paper, but it was love to me and formed my earliest and still enduring definition of family.

And from a radio interview in Baltimore (where Ta-Nehisi grew up), his father makes a pretty good summation of the trick of raising sons. He’s talking about raising black sons, but I see truth in this for the rest of us as well:

I always saw it as my job to get them through. And to get them through to me meant–particularly for the boys–it meant getting them through what I feel to be some of the most critical and the roughest areas for black boys; and that’s particularly for those dangerous years between 12 and 18, when so many of our youth go over the side and don’t come back. So for me–it was a matter of steering and navigating them through that time period. Everything before 12 was preparation for 12, you see? And everything in between that was preparation for after 18.

I am not saying that a Maybach is or is not preparing young Diddy Jr for anything good after 18. I’m saying that these statistical outlines–six children, different mothers, different homes–tell us nothing about what kind of father Diddy is. The fact that he admits to his faults as a father, to wanting to be more present in his children lives, is a good sign. We all fall short, usually on that very count. And remember that admitting fault is not part of Diddy’s marketing plan, so it seems a pretty sincere admission.

But what I’m really saying: buy Ta-Nehisi’s book. Ask for it for Father’s Day if you need an excuse. There’s more truth in the first page than in all of Martin Bashir’s squishy clips put together.