DADWAGON

My kid, Sasha, is not a reticent girl. If she’s happy, she’ll shriek with laughter. If she’s even a touch upset, she’ll explode into tears. She is, of course, a toddler, so this is pretty much normal.

But every once in a while, her emotional circuits short out. Just yesterday, this happened twice. While wandering around Atlantic Antic, the mega street fair that descends on our neighborhood every year, we spotted a small booth doing face-painting—and Sasha was entranced. She patiently waited her turn, then quietly allowed her face to be painted, keeping her chin up when we asked and everything. By all rights, she should have been shouting and jumping when it was all done—and yet she was entirely somber. Unsmiling. Unreactive, almost.

It threw us, at first. Here she’d just realized a dream, and yet she couldn’t express her glee. It was only hours later, in front of a mirror at home, that she relaxed enough to smile and talk about the beautiful flowers adorning her face like some kind of “Yo Gabba Gabba!”–style tribal tattoo.

And then, again, shortly after that, we biked Sasha down to Jane’s Carousel, the gorgeous, century-old carousel recently re-installed on the Brooklyn waterfront. Sasha loves carousels, though she’s only been on them a few times. The horses, the colors, the music, the centrifugal force—these should make her howl with glee. But instead, she sat on the horse stone-faced. When I asked her if she liked the ride, which she’d approached with excitement, she said, “Uh-huh,” but that was it. Weird.

So, my question is: What’s going on here? Is this a normal thing for toddlers, to be so happy that they short-circuit? Or is it that the newness of the experience means that they simply don’t know how they’re supposed to react? A lot of that emotional stuff is, I know, taught and learned, which is why kids love to pantomime happy, sad, scared, and angry faces. Otherwise, how do they know what emotions are being expressed? But man, there’s got to be some cool brain-science stuff going on here—I just wish I know what it is.

This, from DadWagon reader JF, responding to the post “Asian Woman  + Jewish man: The New Math”:

I am a Jewish American man living in Singapore. Your satirical post is spot on. I am newly, seriously involved with a native Singaporean of Chinese descent. Besides being beautiful physically, she is probably the warmest, most thoughtful, most open woman with whom I have ever been involved. And of course, she loves me because of my huge schlong.

Truth hurts, goyim. Happy New Year.

JP takes swimming lessons once a week at a pool in our neighborhood. This is New York, so, of course, space is limited, the pool is something of a disgrace, and the locker rooms are worse. But we come so that he won’t drown, and to kill time on the weekend, and we crowd in with close to 100 other parents and their children, a sea of parental anxiety, childlike delight (and fear), and floaties.

At the end of class this weekend I made the strategic decision not to take JP back to the locker room to help him change his clothes, instead having him strip down poolside. Was this appropriate? Is he, at 5 years old, too old? When is too old for kids to go naked in public?

I don’t really know, but I know this: JP has yet to come to any awareness of the concept of nudity. He is at times clothed and other times unclothed. These states of dress mean something to him in a physical sense: warm, cold, whatever. But they do not yet have any social, sexual, or moral connotation. He remains, in this regard, a boy in the state of nature, which is a kind of nice place for him to be, I think.

Eventually, though, he does need to come to an understanding about how society views dressing. I would let it happen of its own accord, but I am not the only parent in the equation, and I don’t really know what his mother thinks (I’m guessing she’s on the side of modesty).

In the Book of Genesis, it is written that Adam and Eve are naked and that they “felt no shame.” This is, of course, before they eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, at which point “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”

The awareness of nudity is the awareness of shame, and lust, and embarrassment, and adulthood, and our bodies, and many other things. JP will come to these in time. We all do. I am in no hurry to educate him in these subjects, either, although I will soon enough, I suppose, and in so doing, educate myself.