DADWAGON

Headed toward daycare, pushing the Boo in his stroller. Light changes, and I’m just pushing him over the lip of the curb when zoom: a skateboarder appears out of nowhere, fast, the wrong way up the one-way street. He pulls up as hard as possible, practically falling off his board in the process, and arcs his body six inches over that of my baby son to avoid a collision. Then takes off without a word.

I should explain that this isn’t some dumb 13-year-old with no judgment who will outgrow his cluelessness soon enough. The guy is more like 30, and is fully kitted out for his web-design/graphic-arts/hip-ad-agency job, in a blue-and-white-striped dress shirt and hipster sneakers and a very expensive full-coverage helmet. A guy you can dislike on sight, without guilt.

In my old meek civilian life, I’d have grumbled and moved on. In my newly empowered dad-as-righteous-protector role, however, I shout after him: “THIS IS A ONE-WAY STREET, BUDDY.” He stops, abruptly, and looks at me quizzically. Whereupon the guy next to me (who also almost got clobbered) ambles over to the guy and starts to get into it: “Yeah, you know, this is a one-way street…”  I leave them to it and head off, appreciating that someone has my back, and musing on how little patience I have with skate-punk culture as practiced by grownups.

Driving home from Connecticut yesterday, I was faced with the following, unusual question from my wife in the back seat:

“Is the baby bipolar?”

After my double-take, Jean explained: A few minutes ago, Sasha had been bawling in her car seat, inconsolable. But, since we’d stopped for soft-serve ice cream, she was now cheerily cooing—180 degrees from her earlier mental state. Could she be bipolar?

Um, no, of course not. The explanation for Sasha’s switcheroo may have had something to do with copious amounts of sugar.

But the more I thought about it, the more bipolarity made sense as a way to explain her lightning-fast mood changes. She’s not, however, just bipolar. She’s struck by various aphasias, saying “nose” when she points at her mouth. Acute claustrophobia has been known to strike her in elevators (particularly glass ones), and her constant requests to wash her hands are clear evidence of obsessive-compulsive disorder. One day, if all goes well, she’ll invent imaginary friends and we can add schizophrenia to the list.

As I’m sure Theodore would agree, babies and children are all essentially mentally ill, and not just mentally ill but stricken with a constellation of syndromes. Find it in the DSM IV, and it’ll probably apply to your LO. Echolalia, kleptomania, phantom Joubert syndrome, malingering, motor skills disorder, narcissistic personality disorder—chances are, your toddler has more than one of these issues.

Which makes me wonder: For those of us dealing with miniature mental patients, can we find parenting advice from psychiatrists? (Other than psychopharmaceuticals and strait jackets, which we’re all already using. Right?) How do asylum orderlies deal with echolalics and mud-eaters?

And, on the other side, is there some scientific value in the idea that, as we grow up, we naturally shed mental disorders until we’re left with none (or maybe just one or two)? Is there something going on in juvenile brain chemistry that could somehow be replicated in adults suffering from mental illness?

If so, and if Pfizer or Merck develops drugs to simulate this natural development, then I claim patent rights. Until then, however, I’ll invest in a set of restraints for my budding malingerer, sponsored by Klonopin™.

Loyal reader(s),

Your four earnest and diligent Dadwagoners are, in a way, dinosaurs from a different era, an era of print, of publications read front to back, of stories (now known as content) sandwiched in between an archaic form of capitalist death ritual known as the advertisement. Ludditic relics of an earlier age we four were trained to expect a certain form of coherence from our media outlets, which is the term all the hip kids now use instead of publications, and when we set out to create this site, our primary goal–other than racking up big, heaping pots of steaming cash–was to translate that commitment to polished, old-school editorial coherence onto the Interwebs.

We failed. We failed big time, we failed without really making an effort to succeed, we failed because Matt was too busy getting drunk and sleeping in Sasha’s crib, because Christopher thought this was supposed to be a “happy blog” with happy stories, because Nathan was too busy “reporting the news” to remember to write about his children, and yes, yes, yes, because my raging, near-insane screeds against anyone I’ve ever met (minus JP) allowed no room for the folks at home to play along.

To prove my point, I am going to present you this week’s material as links, without context, without explanation or an attempt at linear progression. I am going to give you the Internet, folks, because now that we’ve embraced the suck, we are going to have to start rolling in it.

Matt: Soviet children’s literature, alien babies, shit other children broke, the utter meaninglessness of existence, kill the environment!, babies are sociopaths and so is everyone’s mother

Christopher: stop molesting my boy, creepy New Yorkers, fat baby, not fatburger (don’t touch my pickle), fatherhood has sucked out my brain, the Times is riding my jock, I love my Mommy and my wife

Nathan: Fuck China!, Kill baby food, kill, kill!, the anti-grammarian, I am a bad father because I let my daughter touch a frog

Theodore: Happy hate, healthy lies, screaming, conceptual art and screaming

Happy clicking.

Theodore

Being a catastrophist by nature, I think about this all the time as I push my son down the street in his stroller: What would I do if a real emergency blew up in my face this very second? This guy knew:

I hope to god that, at my advanced age, I have his reflexes.