DADWAGON

Thank you New York Times Idea Blog (if you go to the link, I suggest you ignore the blah blah blah about the resilience of television in the face of new media, because, really, who the hell cares?)

This is a pretty fascinating one from Transparental, which is a parenting blog put together by, well, what is the vocabulary here? A woman, mother of two, is “transitioning” into a man, and is keeping a blog to document her experiences. (and for those of you out there, I am truly uncertain of the vocabulary; what pronoun? Is she a woman transitioning, or a was she a woman who has transitioned? etc. No offense to anyone).

Anyway, once you get past that bit of context, the rest of the post is rather familiar. Michel leaves her child alone in a cafe for a moment, and when he (help!) returns is mistaken for a predator by a woman sitting nearby. The issue is only resolved when Michel’s daughter calls (Michel–again, vocabulary?) Mama, at which point the woman in the cafe is freaked out, but has to retreat:

No one has ever assumed that I was a dangerous predator, especially in relation to my own children. I wasn’t at all sure how to respond, so I did the only thing I could: I froze in place and waited for her to move out of the way so I could sit down and think about it.

Right then, with perfect timing, Younger called me Mama. The woman, flustered and mortified, retreated back to her table. She assiduously refused to even make eye contact for the rest of the time that we were there.

Sometimes I have male privilege, sometimes I’m Schroedinger’s Rapist. I never know ahead of time which it’s going to be.

Now, I’m not going to condescend and write to Michel, “Welcome to the male parenting world,” but there is always that sense of being slightly out-of-frame as a man parenting a child. Whether the second look is approving or distrustful, there’s often a second look.

Here’s the last from the post, also interesting:

When I told this story to several friends, they came up with some interesting solutions: change body language and attentiveness around children to make the relationship clear, always greet a child immediately by name to establish the relationship, etc. I think they’re all good ideas, it just makes me sad that a woman around a child is assumed to be a mom and a man around a child is assumed to be a predator.

How about hanging a sign around your neck that says “Go fuck yourself.” That’s my instinct.

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one issue over the course of a week. Normally, we try to answer a question, but this week, with the publication of “Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball,” by Will Leitch, we’re doing something different. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

First off, a confession. I am a sports fan, but a pretty lame participant. I am smallish and nearsighted and whatever the opposite of a gifted physical athlete is. Most of my game-playing has been of the variety where twenty-sided dice are considered sporting goods. My proudest athletic achievement, such as it was, came a couple of years ago in one of our publishing-league office softball games, when Hendrik Hertzberg and I were the starting pitchers, and I got the win. (I should add that we lost to The Paris Review that same season. That’s right: We got beaten by poets.)

But my bookish inclinations left me plenty of mindspace for Messrs. Winfield, Mattingly, Guidry, Murcer, Cerone, Nettles, et al., and being a Yankees fan may have been my first real disagreement with my father. I should explain that I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, child of two Brooklynites raised in the 1940s. Do I need to explain? Kings County back then was a place where wearing a Yankees cap could get you beaten to oblivion and left for dead. There was only one team in Brooklyn, and when the Dodgers left, in 1957, it wasn’t a question of transferring one’s allegiance to another team. Baseball ceased to exist for many of the people of Brooklyn. As far as I know, my father didn’t go to another game for nearly twenty years, when he took me to Shea Stadium to see Tom Seaver pitch for the Mets.

It didn’t take. Around the age of 12, goaded on by my brother (to this day the most knowledgeable baseball watcher I know), I started rooting for the Yankees, and regularly begged to go to weekend games, which back then you could still do on the spur of the moment, fairly cheaply. It just stuck in my father’s craw, for three reasons. One, it was the damn Yankees. Two, he justifiably hated handing over money to George Steinbrenner. And three, we lived far enough away that the haul up to the Bronx and back was exhausting after a long week’s work.

But he did it, as often as he could stand to. He even warmed up to the Yankees, maybe because they were as second-rate in the eighties as the Dodgers had been in his youth, and because it was nearly impossible not to like the charming and shockingly well-adjusted Don Mattingly. And for his indulgence, I am grateful, particularly as I am only now understanding how wiped-out a workweek can leave a dad come Saturday morning.

I don’t know if my kid will do the same to me, but if he does, it won’t play out the same way. You can’t necessarily just show up at Yankee Stadium these days and be assured of getting in. A lot of games sell out months in advance; most are full houses; the remaining tickets are often colossally priced. A game has become a special-occasion thing, a birthday event rather than something you can just do. And there’s even a bit of irony to that: My son and I, unlike my father and my young self, won’t have to haul up the Jersey Turnpike to do it. We live right atop the Lexington Avenue line, with a straight shot to 161st Street/Yankee Stadium stop. Easiest possible trip.

Which is why he’ll probably end up a Mets fan, and drag me out to see them at Citi Field. All I can say is, I’m not calling it by its right name.

My favorite type of parenting writing is the kind that tells you to re-examine your fatherly (or motherly) anxieties and then just dump them down a deep, dark mineshaft and forget about them completely. Today’s example—an article in Slate revealing that the milestones we rely upon to tell us how our babies are developing have little basis in reality:

Babies take different routes to the same destination. There’s no right way to learn to walk, for example, and there’s scarcely even a right time: The accurate range for when babies should start extends from 8 months to almost 20 months—an amazingly, almost meaninglessly broad stretch of time. The most interesting research on motor development in recent years treats it as the product of many different systems: the infant’s environment, personality, nervous system, and personal physical limitations. When all these variables interact, you get a lot of different results, as countless studies have made clear. You don’t get a chart that looks like something out of The Ascent of Man.

And so, once again, I tell you, my dear, dear readers, to chill out, relax, stop worrying, have a beer. As Pete Townsend once sort of said, the kids are alright.