No, Texas, Don’t Mess With MY KID.

It’s generally held that Texas has more control over America’s curriculum than all the other states put together. Why? Because Texas (a) is a big market, and (b) has a stringent Board of Education that reviews every textbook used in the state. If you, Mr. Publisher, want to sell a lot of books, you have to clear every word with a panel of fifteen Texans, ten of whom are Republicans, and at least one of whom thinks public schools are a “tool of perversion.” How she got on the school board is hard to imagine.

I shouldn’t have to care about the Texan schoolbook review—except that a lot of non-Texan schools end up buying the textbooks that conform to those “standards.” For instance: As of this week, Thomas Jefferson is no longer a major Enlightenment thinker (too Deist). Separation of church and state is a debatable concept, not a piece of constitutional bedrock. Confederate leaders are positioned alongside Abraham Lincoln, out of some perverse idea of “balance.” (That last one especially kills me. “We’re not ashamed of our heritage—of the Southern way of life!” Well, when it comes to certain parts of it, perhaps you should be. Heaven knows I’m not thrilled with a lot of my own ethnic associations.)

When my kid goes to school, chances are he’s going to have at least a few books like these on his desk. You know things are going down the wrong road when you start considering certain positions previously held only by fringey folks, and when I read about this latest set of Texan criteria, the word “homeschooling” popped into my head, just for a moment. If my son weren’t coming home each night to a roomful of actual book—as well as an environment where his mom and dad can explain to him things like cultural history, social justice, and the right to reject religion if you so choose—I’d start to worry.

What Almost-Almost Made Me Cry Today

Once again, I find myself at 35,000 feet, tear ducts wide open and ready to drain me of any last drops of moisture in my body. Today’s in-flight movie: The Blind Side, in which Oscar™ winner Sandra Bullock adopts a quasi-homeless black friend of her young son. Will I almost-cry today? Probably not—I don’t even have my headphones plugged in, which makes the melodrama easier to ignore.

Or maybe I will. I’m coming back from yet another work trip, and even though it lasted only ten days, this one feels longer than usual. While I was away, Sasha was sick for pretty much the first time in her life, and every night Jean was telling me stories of yellow gunk oozing from my little girl’s nose and eyes, of how she wasn’t eating, of how clingy she’d become. I could tell from Jean’s tone that she was exhausted from the childcare, and exasperated by my absence. Even with help from my mom, it was tough.

And okay, I don’t want to compare their ten days to mine, which I spent eating my way around Rome and the hill towns of Abruzzo, but it was tough for me, too. On previous trips, Sasha was younger, and although I might be gone for a week or two at a time, I was missing an unformed baby. Now Sasha is, if not quite a whole person, certainly a character—a human system of hazily articulated desires and unconsciously charming behaviors. Missing Sasha now is different because I like her: I want to be around her, play games and read with her, wipe the schmutz from her orifices, maybe even take her out to a bar one evening. (Kidding!)

At the same time, it all makes my travel—my work—that much less fun. Ten days of bucatini all’amatriciana and pecora alla callara (on someone else’s dime) may sound  exciting, but if I could’ve done it in half the time, I would’ve. That line I wrote about last week—“Io sono casalingo”—was truer than I knew, and as I waddled back to a friend’s apartment or a stone country house from each gut-busting meal, I couldn’t help feeling jealous of these people who were already home with their families. I guess this is what you call homesickness, a feeling I’m not too familiar with.

The even more frustrating thing is that my travel schedule is not slowing down. Two weeks from now, I’ll be back on the road, on another ridiculous adventure, with even more limited Skype and phone access to Sasha and Jean, who themselves won’t have my mother around to help them through the day. After that, who knows? I’ve been asked not to go anywhere for a while, but what can I do? This is my job. Like that of a fisherman or a soldier, work leads me far from home, imposing its responsibilities in place of the ones I’d rather fulfill, and what kind of father would I be if I didn’t work? Despite all the enlightened modern fatherhood we espouse here at DadWagon, I still feel compelled, on a genetic level, to be a provider, even if I’m only a minority earner.

But the truth is, Jean could support us, and I could stay home. I could become that guy I told the Italians I was, un vero uomo casalingo, doing the laundry, cooking dinner, wiping snot from his daughter’s nose and almost-tears from his own sad eyes.

A Short Post

As seen at your local maternity ward
As seen at your local maternity ward.

Pay no mind to the fact that this isn’t, in fact, an infant, but rather world’s smallest man. Forget that he actually died today. (Yes, I’m a dick.) Reaction to this photo should be the same as to any newborn-with-parent:

Isn’t he just precious!

Cheap joke. But still funny.

Two Roads in a Wood: Here’s Hoping My Boy Goes the Other Way

JP--avoid this in later life
JP: Avoid this in later life.

My post yesterday about why we shouldn’t hate Mommybloggers who strike it rich comes from an honest source: me.

My financial woes have taken up considerable space aboard the DadWagon (and with a tightly edited and curated site like this, how dare I be repetitive?). I won’t trouble you good folks with any more of it. Times are tough all around these days.

My paranoid side reads the recent news that the economy has in some way recovered merely as evidence of the strong taking advantage of the weak. Seems as if so many solvent employers have used the downturn to rid themselves of valuable but high-priced employees, or to use this moment as an opportunity to degrade already bad wages. The creative industries, such as they are, have fared as badly as any.

Which, finally brings me to the–admittedly minor–point of this post. Would I want JP to follow in my footsteps?

All fathers, on some level, would like their sons to view them with admiration. That’s pretty natural, and I see it in myself in small ways. When JP is scared by monsters in the middle of the night, I don’t try to convince him that there are no monsters, or even that he could take on the monsters himself (maybe I should). I tell him not to fear–monsters are afraid of daddies, and he can rest easy. He tends to sleep better after that, and the value to my ego shouldn’t be underestimated either.

But to make his way into the writing world? I’m primarily an editor these days, but my first love was fiction writing. I have the shoeboxes filled with (justifiably) rejected novels to prove it. God forbid JP should ever take an interest in something as painful, unrewarding, and increasingly reviled as coming up with stories and setting them down on paper. In fact, I may preemptively ground him now–at age 3–to get that idea out his mind.

What then, you ask? That’s easy. It’s the finance life for him–oh wait, not that. That’s dead. He’ll be a lawyer! Uh, that’s not too good either. Doctor? My son the doctor? That’s gotta be good. Except they’re not faring so well either. Well, then, it’s settled.

The lottery it is.