Sasha’s “Twinkle Twos” ballet class always starts off the same way: The little girls (and one little) boy gather around the teacher, Miss Marie, who asks them each the Question of the Day. Often, it’s “What’s your favorite color?” (Sasha: “Purple.”) Once, it was “What’s your favorite drink?” (Sasha: “Purple.”) And the other day it was, perhaps predictably, “What did you ask Santa for?”
As Miss Marie went around the circle of toddlers, I tensed up. How would Sasha answer? After all, our family does not celebrate Christmas—I’m an atheist Jew, her mom’s a non-practicing Buddhist—and we’ve never told her about Santa Claus. Now her ballet teacher was phrasing this in a very personal way: What did you, Sasha, ask Santa to give you for Christmas?
When it came to her turn, Sasha answered well. “I want a nutcracker,” she said, having clearly picked up that the other kids were stating their basic desires.
Obviously, Sasha is not unaware of Christmas. You can’t walk down a Manhattan street in December, even in Chinatown, without seeing festive lights and Christmas trees, and Sasha’s toddler brain is captivated by the bright colors and unusual objects. There’s one apartment-building lobby we always pass by on the way home from preschool that she absolutely must stop at, to examine the tree inside. “Christmas!” she’ll excitedly yell, pointing.
In her mind, I think, “Christmas” and “Christmas tree” are interchangeable concepts. One is the other, and that’s because she has no real conception of Santa, or that the point of Christmas for most kids is that they get tons of presents. And she especially doesn’t know anything about the religious aspects of the holiday, if any still remain at this point in the history of late capitalism. This is how we like it, actually, and how we’re going to preserve it for at least another year. In fact, she’s going to miss out entirely on her classmates’ post-Christmas game of “Look what I got!” because we’re leaving town on Christmas Eve and not coming back for two weeks.
Essentially, we’re going to pretend Christmas doesn’t exist. Except when we don’t pretend. I mean, yesterday we were planning to take her to a tree-trimming party at a friend’s house! (Sasha’s midday meltdown persuaded us to stay home.) And when we are confronted with an actual tree, we’ll help her inspect it and advise her not to touch anything. (And then she’ll touch everything.) The other day I even heard Jean tell Sasha, “Santa Claus isn’t real,” which was an iffy move—both acknowledging that Christmas exists and arming her with dangerous knowledge.
“I don’t think she heard me,” Jean later said.
Except that Sasha is still given to saying things like “Where’s my Christmas? Where’s my Christmas?” Meaning, I believe, the tree, but the resonance of that cry echoes in my brain. Sasha, you ain’t getting a Christmas, even though your mother would be perfectly happy to have a tree to decorate. We just don’t do that. For now.
JP’s kindergarten class has a nice little library from which the children are allowed to borrow books and bring them home. JP does so regularly and we read the book before he goes to bed. Heartwarming stuff, particularly as the reading period is that wonderful moment just before both kids (usually) disappear for the night’s sleep and I get a few hours to pretend I am human.
I rarely pay much attention to what I’m reading him, as most books from the school library are boring to the point of nausea, as they must strive to educate and not to offend before offering a story. I motor through them, JP reading a page and then me, and then we’re done.
The one from last night gave me some pause, though. The title was bland enough: In the Park With Dad by Karen Ackerman. How sweet! A book about dads. JP has been going through a rather rebellious phase of late and if he’s showing affection for me again, I’m all for it. Then I turn the page and see the subtitle: “A Story for Kids Whose Parents Don’t Live Together.”
Turns out the book, which was published in 1996, is a weird sort of primer for children freaking out over their parents’ divorces. Now, there may be a companion book about shopping at the mall with Mom, or whatever, but I found this a little offensive. The narrative describes a super-fun day in the park with dad, hanging out, playing, but one that ends with the children dutifully returned to the Custodial Mom. They pass out on the couch, where they sleep the sleep of the doomed, not thinking that when they wake up half-time dad will be gone. (I have to admit I skipped this part–I wasn’t going to read the part about the weekend dad, and how that is totally normal and wonderful to JP).
Sheesh. I had some thoughts, once I had recovered from this circa-1965 vision of divorce and the variables of custody: had JP chosen the book because he was upset about the divorce? Was he sad that I had been working such late hours at my new job? Did the teacher give it to him because she knows JP’s mother and I are divorced and she assumed he didn’t live with me?
I asked the teacher about it the next morning and she said JP had picked it without knowing the story. He just liked it because it was about Dad, which is nice. She hadn’t encouraged him, which was nice, too. I haven’t entirely processed my thinking as to how I would have reacted if I had learned she had steered him towards it. But I wouldn’t have liked it. I am well aware that my family situation, while not wholly uncommon, isn’t entirely conventional. What issues and problems arise from it I would prefer to handle on my own.
When I was a kid, my brother, Steve, and I didn’t always get along. Actually, I was often downright mean to him, as I wrote recently in this travel story for Afar magazine:
“Can we put Stevie in the trash now?” was how it began, when I was almost 4, a week after my newborn brother came home from the hospital. Things got worse from there. At first, I merely took advantage of his little-brother devotion, bossing him around to find Lego pieces for me to build with, but then I turned mean. At our grandmother’s house, I sneezed on him, intentionally. I boasted I could make him cry in three words or less. Once, when we were out skateboarding with my friends, I poured orange soda over his head. I’d like to say it was to impress my pals, who were mostly jerks. But clearly, I was, too.
Over the course of the story, which details our bonding trip to frosty Montreal, Steve and I managed to find new ways to get along. Or really, I figured out new ways to deal with him, despite the fact that I was wracked with guilt about what I’d put him through decades earlier.
There is, of course, an almost irresistible human impulse to look on ourselves as the goodies or – with a little more grandiosity – as the heroes of our own narratives, whether we’re fighting over the height of our neighbour’s leylandii hedge or authorising air strikes on crumbling dictatorships.
I strongly suspect that all of the monsters of history, from Attila to Saddam, by way of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot, have viewed their actions as in some way ethical, conforming to a moral code, be it religious, tribal, Nationalistic or ideological.
And the lesson of this is that it’s always worth interrogating our motives and that, in fact, our interrogation should be most rigorous when we are most convinced of the purity, honour and goodness of our intentions.
This is great stuff, the kind of thing that needs to be said over and over again. Actions and behavior look different from different points of view. And McGowan, too, uses an incident from his childhood to illustrate his point. The short version: His group of friends, led by a kid named Chris, allows a sad sack named Duffy to hang out with them, takes him to a fetid stream (“the beck,” they call it), and then…
“There’s a cool place to jump. Up at the pool. You have to steppy-stone on the fridge. It’s not hard – I’ve done it. Chris’ll think it’s cool.” He looked up at me. “OK.”
“Duffy’s jumping the fridge,” I screamed at the others, leaving him no time to change his mind. Duffy took off his blazer and gave it to me. Chris was telling him what to do. Duffy now smiling, nodding. He looked happy for the first time since his mother had kissed him two years before.
Duffy prepared himself, he ran, he jumped. I couldn’t see his face, but I could imagine it. And I have imagined it, many times. He’d left it all in his wake, the years of horror, the beatings, the dog mess smeared on his blazer – all that. He was a butterfly shuffling off the dry, brown cocoon, becoming beautiful.
And then Duffy’s foot came down on the fridge and the fridge, as it was meant to do, betrayed him. Into the water he fell, his face contorted with surprise and fear. Of course everyone found this hysterical. Laughter, shouts, jeering.
Clearly, McGowan, like me, has been haunted by his actions, and perhaps rightly so. He was a dick to Duffy. But as I read his words, I couldn’t help thinking this was the wrong story to tell. After all, he was just a kid, and the point of being a kid is that we sometimes—okay, often—okay, most of the time—make poor decisions. We succumb to peer pressure, we lie, we tend toward laziness simply because we can, and because we know that adults have to be responsible for us. And yes, sometimes we treat other kids like absolute shit. And sometimes we get treated like shit as well. It’s possible to occupy both positions. I know—that was me. Abused and abusers, whether the abuse if casual or prosecutable, exist on a continuous spectrum. And it’s when we’re adults who should know better that true guilt comes into play. I would’ve liked to read an account of a mistake McGowan made as a grown-up—that might be even more powerful.
And besides, as Elizabeth Weingarten wrote the other day in Slate, sometimes our perceived crimes have little effect. Weingarten’s subject is Santa Claus, how he doesn’t exist, and how, as a third-grader, she intentionally revealed his non-existence to a Santa-believing friend:
“You know there is no Santa Claus, right?”
Instantly, my cheeks burned as I realized I had committed a grievous wrong. So great was my shame that it’s blocked out any memory of how, exactly, Jacqueline reacted. All I recall is wishing I could dissolve into metallic goo and seep away through a hole in the ground, a la Alex Mack. I shouldn’t have told her!
I’ve felt guilty about it ever since. Each year, around Christmas, I recall the events of that afternoon and wonder: Did my gaffe kill part of her hopeful, glittering soul? Does she think of me each year by the Christmas tree, her eggnog made bitter by the memory of the day I took an ax to her childish sense of awe and wonder?
The answer, she learns, is no. Weingarten tracks down the old friend, who it turns out has “zero recollection” of the incident. It simply hadn’t fazed her at all, and she in fact remembers much more strongly learning of Santa’s non-existence from another friend.
So it goes, in a slightly different way, with McGowan’s Duffy, who manages to grow up all right anyway and joins the Army, apparently with some success. Did McGowan’s childhood betrayal wreck Duffy’s life? We’ll never know for sure, but McGowan shouldn’t beat himself up over it, just as I’ve learned that my crimes against my brother were mostly forgotten as well. We were kids, and kids can be cruel. Growing up is learning to shed that cruelty, and we shouldn’t judge each other, or ourselves, until we’re older.
“Princess Snow White!” screamed Sasha one day last week in the middle of the East Broadway F-train station. I looked around: Huh? There were no subway posters advertising Disney’s oldest animated princess, no kids dressed up as Snow White—nothing. Then I gazed down two sets of stairs to the train platform, where on another kid’s backpack was a tiny image of said Snow White, barely visible. My 3-year-old’s eyes: damn fine!
All of which is to say that, like many if not most other little girls, my kid is mildly obsessed with princesses. Princesses, princess fairies, princess dresses, ballerina princesses—they all capture her attention, even though she’s still too young to really have any idea what “princess” means. That whole scenario of royalty escapes her. Princess, to her, means getting to wear beautiful dresses. In fact, it’s synonymous with “fairy” and “ballerina.”
I bring this up because DadWagon subsidiary Disney has, in all its infinite wisdom, created “Sofia the First,” a princess targeted at preschoolers like my Sasha. Quoth the local paper:
This week the company plans to announce “Sofia the First,” a television movie and series centered on a girl princess. It’s a first: Disney’s princesses until now have all been adults (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and so on).
“Sofia the First” will play on both Disney Channel and Disney Junior, a channel aimed at children ages 2 to 7 that is set to make its debut in the coming months. The company’s hope, of course, is for the character to spawn all kinds of consumer products. It’s a solid business bet; the Disney Princess toy line generates about $4 billion in annual retail sales.
But Disney is also keenly aware of the potential for criticism and emphasizes that “Sofia the First” will focus on learning and what it says are age-appropriate themes. Lessons will include the importance of getting along with siblings and how to be a kind and generous person.
My thoughts? Eh. Sasha’s only just turned 3, and she’s already indoctrinated into the cult of princessdom. Creating a new highness won’t make things better or worse than they already are.
But one line from the Times’ write-up does intrigue me: “the importance of getting along with siblings.” That’s because, do any other Disney princesses have siblings (and not step-siblings)? Ariel, maybe? It’s really kind of amazing to me how small these Disney royal families are, with their only children forever plunging into mortal danger. Wouldn’t it be great for Disney to create “Natasha, seventh in line to the throne, that is if her father’s younger brother and nephew don’t assassinate him first”? Or “Princess Aparna, whose father the king recently entered into an agreement with a colonial power that will flee the land in a few decades, precipitating the rise of a militant anti-royalist movement so that she’ll have to live out the best years of her life in a two-room Manchester flat”?
Okay, maybe I’m asking for too much. So, how about twin princesses? Seriously, that would be cool.
