DADWAGON

If you’re the first-time dad of a new(ish) child, which mom owns the day? Your wife, your lifemate, who is exhausted in ways she never thought possible? Or your own mother, with whom you’ve been having celebratory breakfasts every May for 40 years?

Sometimes it is possible to keep everyone happy, and this weekend was one. Partly because (thank heaven) both the mothers in my life had simple requests.  My wife is not one for a big Mother’s Day present–in fact, she specifically told me to stick to child-produced art, beginning next year, when crayons will likely replace tomato sauce as his chosen artistic medium. My mother has also specifically told me the same–that she can do without material presents, and that what she really wants on any given weekend is lots of time with her grandkid.

So our present to the grandmother was a full weekend at home with her grandson, which drove her nearly giddy with joy. And she in turn gave my wife a spectacular gift: an extra two and a half hours’ sleep on Sunday morning, while she dealt with the breakfast shift. Everybody wins! Particularly me, because I got a free ride on the extra-sleep train.

This past weekend I was faced with an unanswerable question from Theodore’s almost-4-year-old son, JP. Why, he asked me, are you an adult?

How do you respond to such a question? How do you tell the truth in a way that a preschooler will understand—and that actually feels true to you as well?

“I’m an adult,” I told him, “because I have a beard.”

He seemed to accept that just fine, and pretty soon he was throwing a piece of wood into some bushes. But JP’s query came back to me on Sunday when I read A.O. Scott’s piece in the Times about the “Generation X midlife crisis”:

The Gen X what? I wish I could inflect those paired pop-sociological clichés with the requisite irony, but my air-quote fingers are afflicted with incipient arthritis. The ridiculousness of the phrase is telling, though, since it registers the sense of absurdity, the innate nonseriousness, that has been this generation’s burden ever since the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland christened us in his 1991 novel, “Generation X,” the title of which was inspired by the second-rate punk band that gave the world Billy Idol.

I see you rolling your eyes. That’s right, you: the one in the fake-vintage rock ’n’ roll T-shirt and thick-framed glasses reading this on an iPhone at the sidelines of your daughter’s soccer game. But you know exactly what I’m talking about, pal. (And by the way: stop trying to be a hip alterna-sports dad. Just cheer, for God’s sake.)

I’ll have you know, Tony, that my T-shirts are just plain old fake vintage—they have nothing to do with rock ‘n’ roll. But anyway, his piece is structured around three pieces of fiction I haven’t seen or read: the movies “Greenberg” and “Hot Tub Time Machine” and the novel “The Ask,” by Sam Lipsyte, each of whose central characters, all firmly Gen Xers, face the dilemma of how to grow up, having never considered that a particularly worthwhile thing.

What if you donned the binding garment of maturity only tentatively, and accessorized it with mockery, as if it were a hand-me-down from Grandpa or an ugly shirt plucked from a used-clothing rack? And what if, from the start, your youthful rebelliousness had been a secondhand entitlement, without a clear adversary?

In his piece, Scott is primarily playing diagnostician, breaking down the fictional treatment of the Gen X midlife crisis into his component parts. But he doesn’t try to explain why we (yeah, I have to include myself in his analysis) happen to be this way. Why do we wear fake-vintage rock-band T-shirts and expensive sneakers? Why don’t we grow up?

Now, we could probably fill many, many pop-journalism books with the answer, but this is a blog so I only have to present a sketchy, evidence-free theory. Which is:

It’s more profitable today to remain stuck in adolescence.

Think about the transformation of the American economy over the last thirty years or so. We went from a manufacturing economy—which encompassed union blue-collar jobs not to mention the affiliated white-collar management positions—to a service economy. And not just a service economy but an entertainment economy. If America exports anything these days, it’s American culture.

And if you want to be an exporter—to participate in an industry centered on independence, freedom, creativity (all commoditized and commercialized, of course)—it helps to remain stuck at the emotional age where those qualities are ripe and productive. Can you imagine the stentorian fathers of the 40s, 50s, and 60s thriving in today’s creative industries? It sounds sickening even to me, but knowing the history of 1980s hardcore bands (subspecialty: D.C. area), the My Little Pony back catalog, and all the secret Mario Bros. levels are arguably more valuable to your career than a mastery of Keynesian economics. After all, anyone can learn that on the Internet. To get a reference like “Knowing is half the battle,” you have to have lived it.

Okay, so watching G.I. Joe reruns ain’t the Greatest Generation, and it might not get you a job at Google. But it’ll help you get a gig writing movies like “Hot Tub Time Machine.” The film may not make much money, but your friends will laugh at it, and may even pay to see it. If they’re not too stoned.

One of the marvels of language development–this process that all of us parents get an unexpected front-row seat for–is how a child will occasionally fall into a vortex, some pattern of wrong or incomplete language that they get stuck in just long enough for us to take notice. It is a real phenomenon, not like the maybe-moral baby-gaze that is trumped and fluffed in this weekend’s NYT magazine.

One of these hiccups in language acquisition has turned my son–the auburn-haired heir of All that is Mine–into a kind of auto-repeating voicebox. On the eve of his second birthday, he made a cognitive leap to interrogative pronouns, but instead of the full arsenal of Who, What, Where, How and Why, he says Who to all of them. And in his previous act of new cognition, he got into relative pronouns, but stopped at That. So, in essence, the only thing he’s really wanted to say for the last two week is the same thing they’ve been saying in New Orleans for the last 30 years: Who Dat?

He wants to know where his sister is: Who dat?

He wants to know what is for dinner: Who dat?

He wants to know who is that kid on the playground: Who dat?

I think I smell another NYT Magazine cover story in here somewhere.

Usually, every Friday when we put together “A Week on the Wagon,” we try to discern a uniting theme for the past five days’ posts. Were we all cranky? Did we put up a lot of funny pictures? Was Theodore cranky, Nathan morbid, Christopher nerdy, and Matt drunk?

But sometimes, nothing emerges. Like this week.

But that’s not a bad thing! We had our usual fun, after all, and the Tantrum, in which we reminisced about sports experiences we had with our fathers, and may have one day with our children, got us some good mileage. It also brought in a guest post by the esteemed Will Leitch, who wrote of dutifully informing his dad he’d never be a major-leaguer. Will doesn’t yet have kids himself, but he seems to have a good handle on how disappointing and depressing they can be.

Elsewhere, Nathan was fairly serious this week, talking about how the Gulf oil spill may save his beloved childhood home of Key West from being destroyed, and angsting over whether 3-year-olds need preschool “standards.”

If it’s free, Theodore wrote in response, then yes. Then he called Nathan stupid. Theodore also gave us insights into his reading list: the NYT’s Ideas blog, where he watched the Simpsons; Transparental, the blog of a mother of two who’s “transitioning” into a man; and inCharacter, whose essay on the science of embarrassment he deemed “dubious.”

Chris was in hiding for much of the week, but emerged from his underground lair (actually a section of old pneumatic tubing he’s been decorating with old Polaroids scavenged from Midwest yard sales) to reveal that there is now such a thing as chocolate-flavored baby formula.

Matt’s incipient psychosis apparently deepened this week, as his fervid imagination bounced from suing Tylenol to blaming mothers for everything. In his more lucid moments, he fretted over not being able to teach his daughter the word “butt” and considered looking for a sitter so he could see “Iron Man 2.”

All in all, it was another week of typically insane, difficult fatherhood, brought to you by four overstressed guys who don’t know what they’re doing, or who they’re doing it to anymore. Have a great Mother’s Day—we’ll see you Monday.