DADWAGON

I’m no militant on population replacement, but in general I think it would be swell if willing Americans had a kid or two. Somebody needs to pay for Social Security, and someone will need to change my diapers in a few years.

That’s why I found my conversation a little depressing yesterday–even though it was during happy hour (two for one drinks!) at Shoolbred’s–with an unmarried friend of mine.

“Why do people let kids change their lives so much?” he asked. “It makes it all look really unappealing.”

Of course, it would be tempting for us dads to stop there and say, “Listen, kids do change your life, whether you like it or not.” And that’s true to an extent, of course, but so is his complaint, one which I think ties back to babies-in-bars and lots of other conversations we have here at DadWagon: Parents are sometimes their own worst enemies. We freak out after we have kids. We hear that structure is a good thing for babies, so we take it to the extreme, and never leave the house after 6 p.m., ever again. We make visitors take off their shoes, wash their hands, stay away if they have sniffles. We paint entire parts of our home in ridiculous colors. We start calling the sexy people we married “Mom” or “Dad.”  We listen to awful children’s choirs sing “she’ll be comin’ round the mountain” while our Primus albums collect dust, because babies of course should only listen to music made by other babies, under the safe supervision of Disney or Baby Einstein.

If it looks ridiculous to people who don’t have children, that’s because it is ridiculous. And yes, I would like it if my nonbreeding friends felt better about our having babies. But this isn’t just about their comfort. It’s about our own happiness and sanity. Dial it down, padres and madres. Experiment with fitting your children into the life you want to lead. It might just work out.

Rant over.

Comes today a report from the White House about workplace flexibility, and good luck to everyone involved. I’m all for it. Workplaces ought to be like secretarial pools: fluid, able to shift work around evenly, allowing anyone the chance to run out to a school play or a daycare emergency at a moment’s notice.

I’m also in favor of free mass transit for everyone, tuition-free private colleges, and marbled New York strip steaks that don’t raise your cholesterol. Guess what: None of those will become available anytime soon, either.

The problem with flexible work is achievement. If you are pretty good at what you do, that sets you apart from others who do the same thing. Flexibility assumes equivalence, and the truth is, people aren’t equivalent at all. Otherwise, everyone at the same corporate level would make the same amount, and most of us wouldn’t change jobs much. I have reached some minor version of success at the magazine where I work–as I often say, I clawed my way to the middle–and that’s because I can do things other people don’t do nearly so well. If I walk away in the middle of a deadline, it will cause havoc. (I learned this when, recently, I caught a fierce respiratory illness, and actually did have to stay home for a couple of days. Minor mayhem ensued.) I can’t imagine the situation being any different for neurosurgeons, lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court, or White House aides. “I’m sorry, Senator. Mr. Emanuel can’t be here today, but this guy Bob who met him once can probably handle any questions that come up during that legislative hearing.”

Like I say, I’m a believer in the flexible schedule. I also see quite how far it exists from any experience of corporate life that I’ve ever had. Maybe it’s different in less deadline-driven offices, and I hope that’s true. If anyone can make it work, I wish him or her well.

Like Christopher and 20 million other waterlogged Northeasterners, I am a bit nonplussed by the Biblical rains of late. Forget an ark–I just want shoes that don’t leak.

Instead of going for Christopher’s donut fix, however, I am trying to use a little historical perspective to remind me that rain or no rain, offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf or not, life is good here.

And for that, I need little more than to remember my trip last week to Argentina, where last Wednesday was National Day of Memory (El Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia, for those of you keeping score at home). As with so many Memorial Days, the implied memory was not of that one really great summer day back in 1992 where they got high for the first time and kissed that cute girl from homeroom. No, rather, Memorial Days are somber days, and in Argentina, they are memories of things that happened not very long ago and are still not nearly over.

I had the privilege of spending much of the Day of Memory with Argentine journalist Uki Goñi, who had a somewhat terrifying front-row seat (as a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald) on the Dirty War, in which the Argentine government killed tens of thousands (20,000? 30,000?) of its enemies (students, leftists, Jews, psychiatrists, and anyone else deemed oppositional) from 1976 to 1983.

I’m not the person, and this is not the place, for a primer on the Dirty War. For that, there’s Wikipedia. Or, if you read Spanish, check out Uki’s book on the young naval officer who betrayed a group of grieving mothers and had many of them killed (or his more recent bestseller in English about the plot that brought Nazis to Argentina after the war).

As a parent, though, I find that the most fascinating thing about the Dirty War, and the efforts to memorialize it, is how traumatic it was for families. The enduring symbols of the victims are the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who would gather in the square across from the interior ministry while waiting for their case numbers to be called so they could ask what had happened to their young children who had been “disappeared.” Since any type of public assemblage was outlawed, they wore white handkerchiefs to identify themselves to each other.

Though its founders were murdered, the group reformed and still marches today, still looking for answers they’ll likely never get. Unfortunately, they are represented these days by the shrill Hebe de Bonafini, who, like some of the 9/11 widows, wades too far into the politics of the day.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, though, had a different mission: They were the parents of women who were pregnant when they were taken prisoner. Being good Catholics, the military junta would not kill a fetus, so they allowed the children to be born before killing the mothers. The orphaned babies were then adopted by junta sympathizers and military families who wanted babies of their own.

Such a perverse scenario, and one which still raises discomfiting questions of identity and parenting today. To whit: the grandmothers’ group pushed for–and won–a law that forces adopted children (who would be about my age now) to give DNA samples so it can become clear whether they were the children of prisoners or not.

But would you want to know? If you had been raised by a family for 30 years–your whole life–would you want to find out that the people you call your parents had actually just harvested you from your birth parents before they were murdered by the government?

The DNA law is thought to specifically be targeting the adult children, adopted in 1976, of media titan Ernestina Herrera de Noble. But her children don’t want to know if they were actually born to the disappeared. I don’t know that they should be forced to find out. Regardless of your sympathies in the war, it seems unfair to upend the lives of people who were at the time just innocents, just babies.

So there it is: your daily dose of horrifying moral choices that you will likely never have to face, as child or parent. I’m gonna go enjoy the rain some more.

Spend ten minutes around me, and you will learn that I am not a man who wants any part of rural life. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and I’ve pretty much had my fill of car culture and hanging out at the mall on weekends.  I conform to, have even cultivated, the worst Woody Allenish clichés about New York City existence. I have to be coaxed into leaving the island of Manhattan, and get fidgety when I do. When confronted with greenery, I start to sneeze. I was once caused to go camping, by a long-ago girlfriend, and spent the entire four days sitting around glumly waiting for it to end. (Mostly because it rained the entire time. I took that as a hint from Mother Nature.) Unlike Nate, who is pleasingly and sanely conflicted on these matters, I am a provincial, parochial, ridiculous chauvinist. I will do everything I can to live the rest of my life on this particular hunk of schist. Frank O’Hara put it nicely: “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” Solidarity, daddy-o. I’m even lucky enough to have married a city girl who more or less agrees with me.

And yet, as I trudged twenty blocks downtown to daycare in the rain this morning, for the second day in a row… pushing a baby in a stroller covered with one of those horrible oxygen-tent rain guards … holding a cheapo umbrella that blew out several times and lost most of its structural integrity halfway through the trip … I had a moment. It involved, just for a second, a big minivan with a sliding door and a carseat, and a commute that involved nothing wet except a travel mug of coffee. Just for a moment, I had a vision of my alternate life, and it seemed ever so much easier.

Fortunately, I have recourse at moments like this. It involves a stop at a place called the Donut Pub–a local institution that’s been on 14th Street since 1964. It has a spotless marble countertop, swiveling diner-style stools, and old Greek guys dispensing crullers. The donuts are several orders of magnitude better than Dunkin’; the coffee is as hot as fresh lava; and they’ll let you read the paper at the counter for as long as you want while your soaking-wet pants drip dry. On a morning when you’re feeling a little fragile, it takes the sting right out of everyday life.