DADWAGON

A new turn in the story of this Wisconsin woman who took revenge on her unfaithful man by gluing his penis to his stomach. She’s called it a “stupid spur-of-the-moment” move, and will not be doing jail time.

The fun details revealed in this story, however, include:

• a) She called in the guy’s three girlfriends to watch,
• b) She used fake-fingernail glue,
• and
• c) He allowed her to tie him up and blindfold him beforehand, because she pretended it was kinky play.

Somehow, you can’t help thinking that she’s only moderately sorry.

Dadwagon, needless to say, does not endorse this behavior, but does admire her acting skills and story sense.

(Hat-tip: New York magazine’s Daily Intel.)

Sleep training—by which I mean Ferberizing or cry-it-out or various other tough-love techniques—is, to me, in a class with deep-fried chicken nuggets. It’s easy to say “For my kid? Never.” And then, at a certain point, when he’s howling and you’re exhausted, it’s incredibly tempting to just give in.

Well, we’re not. As our boy heads for his first birthday, he has never slept straight through the night. Typically, he wakes up two or three times, sometimes more, occasionally fewer. We’ve adhered to all the basic techniques, like a consistent early bedtime and calm routine involving the requisite bathtime and books. He’s otherwise happy and healthy; we’re sleepy. Especially my wife, because nursing him back to sleep is the only thing that consistently and reliably works.

So why not deploy a cry-it-out method? With all respect to my colleague Matt, I don’t buy the argument that, since he’s not forming permanent memories, he won’t suffer any long-term effects from being left to cry in his bed for hours. What about fear, attachment, the physiological stress responses? I can’t believe that won’t leave a mark, and since nobody has done studies to confirm or refute the idea, I’m sticking with my instinct, which is to say that if my child wakes up sobbing, as if he’s had a horrible scare, something’s wrong. I can’t imagine that leaving him there, scared and alone, is going to somehow teach him how to “self-soothe,” as all the books put it.

I keep coming around to the same conclusion, every time I read this stuff: There’s no benefit to a kid in any of it. Our son is certainly sleeping enough, if not in consecutive hours then in the aggregate; he’s adhering to a consistent schedule; he’s extremely energetic during the day. Sleep training is, in the end, about parental convenience and control. That’s a goal within the bounds of acceptability, especially if your family leads a life that just can’t sustain too many late-night disruptions—if, say, you work extremely long hours, or are a single parent. But don’t go throwing out “science” that “proves” it’s a good idea. I’m not having it, even if I am about to doze off on my keyboard some days.

There was a moment on last night’s season premiere of Lost that was particularly amusing to me. In the new, alternate universe that the Losties’ H-bomb detonation appears to have created, Jack Shephard et al. land safely in LAX and begin to go about their lives. But as he’s waiting for his luggage to arrive, he’s paged to the Oceanic Airlines desk: We’re sorry, a flustered representative tells him, but we’ve lost your cargo, and by cargo we mean the coffin containing your father’s corpse. Whoops! And you thought United was bad?

For anyone who’s flown in the past, um, 100 years, this is a wry joke on the state of the airline industry (and probably significant in the Lost cosmology as well, but never mind). But it’s a great metaphor for what’s emerged as one of the great themes of Lost: lost fathers.

Throughout the series, we haven’t exactly seen many examples of good parenting. When fathers are present, they’re either drunks, bumblers, con artists, or corporate gangsters. At least Michael—remember him?—seemed like a good dad, learning on the fly how to forge a relationship with Will, but then along came the Others (who have their own odd relationships with children) and pretty soon Michael’s slaughtering innocent people in an attempt, so to speak, to regain custody.

Usually when your dad’s a creep, you seek out a father figure to take his place. But good luck finding a decent one on the Island! He’s likely to be a manipulator, or misguided, or the reincarnation of an Egyptian-Jewish god who lets himself be sacrificed for wholly mysterious reasons.

In fact, the closest thing we see to an admirable father is Ben Linus, who acquired his daughter by kidnapping her from a French woman, manipulating her throughout her life, and finally making a bet that monstrous guerrillas wouldn’t kill her. (Spoiler: They do.) But he at least reacts in a plausibly fatherly way, filling himself with guilt and rage and then taking revenge on the people who orchestrated her death. It’s what I imagine I would do myself, were I trapped on an island where the unimaginable occurs with frightening regularity.

But what then is the Island supposed to be, if not a refuge for these poor fatherless souls? (And I don’t mean in the literal sense—that’s for other geeks to discuss.) What the Island offers them, besides the fact that global warming means you have to worry about polar bears in tropical climates, is a fast track to independence, a life-or-death choice between dwelling on the failings of the man who created you or, through action and courage, becoming your own man (or woman). On the Island, the sins of the fathers are borne and expiated, leaving behind grown-up children who can think and act for themselves and must learn to, as Jack always says, live together or die alone.

And if you die alone, there’s no one to put your coffin on the airplane.

The other night, my wife, Jean, stood at the entrance to our bedroom with an unhappy look on her face—unhappy, but also helpless. From behind the nearly closed door to our daughter Sasha’s room came an unearthly wail, the sound of a 14-month-old baby who absolutely did not want to be in bed.

Of course, she had already been in bed, and sound asleep, for more than two hours, and was merely waking up as she occasionally does, for a few minutes at a time before dropping off again. Still, that noise! It’s almost impossible to ignore it; it penetrates straight to a parent’s heart; it is at the center of an ongoing debate about sleep-training—a debate that we here at Dadwagon are taking up this week.

Frankly, Jean, Sasha, and I have had it easy. Sasha is a cheerful, acquiescent character, and getting her to go to sleep—and stay asleep—has not proven much of a challenge. We did this in a very structured way:

• • At 7 months, we moved her crib from our bedroom to her own room.
• • We put her to bed at the same time every night, around 7:30, hewing to a set routine: we read her a book, brush her teeth, and tuck her in.
• • We decided only to give her a pacifier when she was going to sleep, both to keep her quiet and, à la Pavlov, to get her to associate the pacifier with slumber.

It all worked very well, and ever since, Sasha has slept 11 hours a night, generally getting up the next morning between 5:45 and 7 a.m. We’ve even weaned her off the pacifier, and she’ll often go down to sleep without a fight or a peep. Lucky us! Lucky Sasha!

And yet… There are still those cries, those moments when the sound of misery rings out in our home, and we feel compelled to rush to her and hold her in our arms and comfort her. But we don’t. (This is easier for me than for Jean.) Instead, we keep watching TV or reading or cooking or whatever, and let Sasha bawl for a few minutes, until eventually she stops.

Is this cruel?

No. Sasha has no memories yet, and though she can say a few words and understand many more, she’s not fully a thinking person.

But at the same time, she IS a person. I recognize that sleep training works for us precisely because it works for Sasha. She is one of the happier and better-adjusted babies I’ve met, and her writhing-on-the-floor moments come rarely and evaporate quickly. Were she a different child, a more nervous one affected longer and more deeply by nightly abandonment, we might have chosen a different tack.

But who knows? Maybe somewhere down the line, this harsh sleep-training will bear sour fruit, and Sasha will turn out to be a thief, a serial killer, or worse. And then we’ll have something to keep us up all night.