DADWAGON

There is something foul afoot in Manhattan. It is the sheer expensiveness of the place. We did fine for a while, when I had a corporate job, and then even afterwards when I had left that job but was working plenty. But now, even though I’m actually working more than ever, somehow we slipped, fell behind. This place is too much money.

Enter Craigslist. We are looking for a cheaper place to live. But we are not sure: Brooklyn or Manhattan.

Data point: a child’s fourth birthday party in Greenpoint on Saturday. Not a random child, but the child of old friends. We love these people, and now that he’s around, we love their child. They also still live by art, for the most part, and earn accordingly, which is why they live in Greenpoint. It is cheap(er).

And yet, it’s not just cheap(er). It’s also, well, a community. We walked around the corner into the yard of the church (where the mom volunteers at the soup kitchen while the boy naps, bless her heart), and BOOM. Five thousand kids. Which is terrifying, unless you have kids yourself and then it’s pretty great. Because your kids are fired up and they don’t want a thing from you, which is all we are really asking for as parents.

These kids were just kids from the neighborhood. Some from the boy’s preschool, but many just met at playgrounds, etc. And that’s just it: I can hardly remember the last time we met someone from the playground in the Upper West Side. We met one family, and they were great, then they moved to Maryland. But in general, the attitude of the upper west is: you have a kid? So do I. Fuck off. Or: you have a kid? I’m busy. But text my nanny and our kids can play before I get home from work.

This is the lot of the Upper West, and lord knows I am not complaining, because we do have good schools and shaded streets. But like so much of parenting, what is more expensive or desired is probably not the best thing, for parent or for child.

All of our friends live in Brooklyn. That is what it is.

Data point, opposite direction: there were a lot of hipsters in the Greenpoint crowd. I felt like a banker, and I am actually just a writer with a lowgrade drinking problem. But forreal: one dad there had a fedora and a red leather jacket, which is fine, it happens. But then I looked around and saw that his son, not more than five years old, ALSO had a fedora, a tiny one. And a red leather jacket. And that was a little much. So it’s possible that with my stiff shoes and baggy “normal” jeans, I would be an outcast there as I am here, but for different reasons.

So we could move to Brooklyn. But it would not be cheaper, really (it isn’t, because Brooklyn is not undiscovered or underdeveloped. It is a fabulously expensive borough, for the most part). And it might not be a social panacea. We could pay all the money and the hassle of moving and find that they are not our tribe either over on the other side of the East River.

On the plus side, if we did move, then at least you wouldn’t have to read my chronic complaints about whether or not we should move to Brooklyn. And then we could just give in and name this blog FedoraFathers or something like that.

The other night, things were proceeding as usual. Sasha had finished watching 愛探險的Dora (or, as you may know it, “Dora the Explorer”), had guzzled 8 ounces of warm milk, and had just had her teeth brushed by her mother. Then she raced down the hall to the living room, where I sat not writing my book, and screamed, “Daaaad!”

Now this was unusual. “Dad”? Not “Daddy”? In fact, though it was still unusual, it was becoming more common. At the ripe old age of almost-3, Sasha has graduated from Daddy to Dad.

Honestly, I’m not bothered by this, as some people would be. I’m just surprised. I mean, I think I was 9 before I made that switch—maybe even older. For me, the identities of my parents were fixed: Mommy was Mommy, Daddy was Daddy. I couldn’t think of them any other way.

Maybe it’s because Sasha’s growing up bilingual that she understands one person can have multiple names. Mommy is becoming Mama, and not only am I now Dad but I’m also sometimes “Maddy,” which is either a corruption of “Matty,” which Jean sometimes calls me, or Sasha’s starting to say “Mommy” and switching mid-word to “Daddy.” Even Sasha recognizes that she has multiple names: We’ve been reciting her many nicknames as we walk home from school (Sashala, Sashenka, Sasha-Pasha, Pochette, and so on), and when Sasha’s speaking Chinese she’ll refer to herself as Sa-Sa, a more language-appropriate pronunciation.

Still, though, I have the sense that this is weird. Is it just me? Would other people be bothered by a toddler addressing them as Mom or Dad? Is Sasha going to be calling me Matt by the age of 6?

Of all the things I like about my daughter’s kindergarten, part of a independent public K-8 school housed in a hulking old Manhattan school building, here’s something unexpected: I like the stairs.

There are elevators in the five-floor building, but the AM rush is a shitshow, to put it mildly, of way too many parents and students there for the three (I think there are three) different schools that inhabit the same building. That Dalia’s school also has a high proportion of physically challenged kids in wheelchairs, walkers, etc., is one of the things I like about the school (diversity isn’t always just a question of pigment). But it means that the elevators are better used serving those kids than my own child, whose primary handicap is deep, genetic laziness.

At least, I thought it was. But this morning as every morning before, Dalia has taken to the stairs with something bordering on aggression. Even though she’s not always excited to be going to school (no one plays with her, she says, or calls on her when she raises her hand in class), she doesn’t quit on those stairs. She lugs her bag up, breathes a little heavy, doesn’t mind the older kids flying headlong down the same narrow stairwell, and just gets it done. Her class is on the 3rd floor, so that’s a good forty or more steps each morning.

And as our friends at DadWagon subsidiary the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention helpfully point out in their Get Active infobomb, if you are afraid that a “lack of skill” is keeping you from exercising, you can either 1) “learn a new skill” or 2) take the fucking stairs (I paraphrase).

The stairs success is a small thing, but a good lesson in finding value where you can. The building is old. It’s got the same crappy linoleum that my public high school did. When we were in school and had the chance to do some sport event across the SF Bay at one of those flash suburban schools with rubberized track and carpeted hallways, we felt poor and aggrieved. In the same way, Dalia’s facility pales, no doubt, compared to suburban schools. But I like the virtue of this: she will have far tighter abs and glutes than any child that goes to a fancier school. She and her classmates will be second only to the real hardbodies. You know, the kids who attend kindergarten way up on the fifth floor.