The Imaginary Bathtub Mystery, or: Who Is Uncle Peanut?

The interloper.

Last night, Sasha took an extra-long bath. After I’d scrubbed her up and down, she began to play, taking a plastic bottle cap and setting it on the edge of the tub. Next to that she placed a tube of Jean’s face wash—and began referring to these objects as Little Kid (the bottle cap) and Little Mommy. Then she brought over a bigger bottle of shampoo—Little Daddy, she dubbed it—and embarked on a drama, in which Little Daddy went off to work, over on the other side of the tub, then finally returned, to much joy.

Okay, fairly clear metaphor here, of my going away on long trips, then eventually coming back. Sasha’s play wasn’t particularly emotional, but it was fascinating to watch her act out our family dynamic with bath gear.

But it was what happened next, when Little Daddy went off to “work” again, that really took me by surprise. With Little Daddy on the other side of the tub, Sasha picked up the biggest bottle of shampoo in reach and brought it over to Little Kid and Little Mommy.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Uncle Peanut,” she said.

Uncle Peanut? Who was this mysterious metaphorical man coming to visit my metaphorical family while I was away? Did he stand in for someone real? If so, who?

For a while, Sasha conjured unintelligible interactions among the three of them, and I grew more and more suspicious. When would Little Daddy return and beat the fuck out of this interloping Mister Peanut?

Or had Sasha said something else—Mister Penis? Hm. I needed to clear this up.

“What’s his name?” I asked again, pointing at the bottle of shampoo.

“Uncle Ted,” said Sasha.

Well! Theodore, you’ve got some explaining to do.

From Russia, with Child Experimentation

Forget my headline. I actually have a huge sense of admiration for this man, Clifford J. Levy, after reading his story of throwing his children defenseless into the icy waters of Slavic education in the upcoming NYT Magazine. Here’s him setting the stage:

My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.

I’ve never met this man, but as readers of the ‘Wagon might know, I do a modified version of what he does for a living. That is, I live in NYC, but cover Russia from time to time. Actually, it’s a little more than that. I lived in Russia, I studied Russian, the first longform articles I ever wrote were for the Moscow Times, written about the delightfully bizarre Russian diaspora in and around Seattle, where I lived. The pay was disastrous, yet was the assignment was enough of a thrill that I quit my career as a musician soon afterwards, to the joy of the many Seattleites, some of them presumably Russians, who just wanted to get drunk without having to listen to me play.

It also happens that the first job in journalism I was ever offered was at the Moscow Times, which was in the habit of trying to lure naive hatchlings like me into taking very little pay to move to one of the most expensive cities in the world. But I was even broker than they knew and might have taken the job, if it weren’t for fear of exactly the scenario that Levy approached with such vigor. I didn’t have kids, but was already well into building a life with my girlfriend. And Moscow just didn’t strike me as a place to take an American, a Californian, no less. That she is half-Asian also didn’t bode well, as Central Asians are to Moscow what Mexicans are to Sun City, Arizona: a crucial and despised workforce.

That may all still be true. Just last month I was in Moscow having the same conversation with an old friend of mine: I could never move to Moscow, out of a combination of my own faults and Moscow’s faults. It’s corrupt, I’m morally weak, it’s polluted, so am I, etc., etc.

But if life had turned differently and I felt like I could do Moscow with my family, I should hope to do it like Levy. Watch the video at least. He threw his children to the wolves. He took them out of the Green Zone of international schools and sent them right into Sadr City, an all-Russian school with almost no foreign-speakers. And the kids, despite their valid and self-possessed points like ‘everyone thinks it’s easy for kids to learn a new language, but it was hard‘ (I paraphrase), seemed better for the experience. They learned the real lessons I keep wanting to teach my kids: that there is more than one way to life a life. That an obstacle that might seem impossibly difficult at first will just melt away with time and effort. Also, they speak beautiful Russian, especially the boy. I’ve had to work hard even to be able to mangle Russian, so I’m both impressed and jealous.

There’s a lesson beyond Moscow for us, and maybe for anyone else who tilts toward the abroad. We want this kind of thing for our kids. Especially if it came in a place like Mexico, where half of my wife’s family comes from, or elsewhere on the hispanoparlante  spectrum. We want them to live an immersed life in some incredibly different and perhaps difficult place. But it’s a tricky thing. It means moving and finding new work and paying taxes here and there and not being sure if it is really just our own scheme or something that would actually benefit the kids as well.

[Worth interjecting here, of course, that the experience of being trapped in a classroom that doesn’t speak your language, with a punishing academic culture happens every day here in the States to no less worthy kids, by the millions. With the added difficulties that immigrants are usually poorer, without health care, or sometimes documentation, so that every moment of every day is like living in a hostile Babylon from which there is no ready escape].

For Levy, and for me, it’s different. What he did with his kids was a highly voluntary choice, a luxury as such. And who knows how it will turn out, how the kids will turn out. Rootless and insecure? Cosmopolitan and confident? It always depends on the kid. But Levy and his wife deserve credit for making the most important point of all: it’s possible.

Alone With Two Children: Nook, Nookie, Lookee

Since this last Monday, Tomoko has been leaving for work early and returning home late. This last for three days, at which point she left town on a two night work trip. Needless to say, things have been rather harried in my household as a result. A sign of my not having things totally together? JP, last night during dinner: “Breakfast for dinner? Awesome!” (I then pass the syrup).

Anyway, it was during this period of over-taxed parenting that I discovered a use for the Nook JP’s grandmother just bought him: it speaks! Or, actually, what it does is read, out loud, on demand, which is good when the baby is screaming, JP is whining, and all I want to do is watch television and weep.

I can set JP up with this evil little device and let it read to him…so that I don’t have to. Can anything be more wrong? Can anything be more right?

I…ask…you.

Not only does this device ruin any possible attachment that JP might have toward actual paper books–it also allows me to avoid bonding with my child by reading to him.

Nice! Don’t you just love expensive electronic devices that play to your baser urges?

One thing this whole Nook thing has been calling up in my brain, (with my wife out of town) is nookie. Which leads to nookie-cookie, because I am a three-year-old. Which then leads to the punchline of a joke that used to literally slay me when I was in second grade: lookee, lookee, balls on hookee!

The only problem was that I couldn’t remember the joke that went with the punchline. So I looked it up (thank you totally random forums.dealmac.com): “Three prisoners trying to escape jump over a barbed wire fence, first two are silent, last guy screams and they get caught. When asked why he screamed he looks up at the top of the fence and says “Looky, Looky…”

Which actually doesn’t sound like the joke I used to know. But it’s still funny.

I Have Total Power Over My Daughter


One night last week, around 11 p.m., I was about to get ready for bed when I heard crying from Sasha’s room. Once upon a time, I would’ve just ignored this—cry it out was our strategy back when the kid was being sleep-trained, over two years ago. But now, middle-of-the-night tears sound different, more serious, and so I tiptoed into Sasha’s room to find out what was the matter.

And there she was, sitting up in a corner of the bed, her head covered in sweat. She was still crying, and trying to talk, so I picked her up and gave her a hug, and held her for a few minutes, and then put her back down. Her eyes were closed by the time her head hit the pillow, and she was asleep by the time I was out the door.

As I closed the door gently, my wife, Jean, looked at my from the bedroom and said, as she has before, “Baby whisperer.”

Now, I don’t claim to have any greater putting-kids-to-sleep power than any other father, but there’s something amazing about being able to soothe your kids’ night terrors quickly and calmly, without letting them get up and run around and watch an episode of Dora the Explorer at 1 a.m. while eating at least two popsicles. It’s deeply satisfying to be the ultimate parental rock on which your children’s emotional security rests. But with that incredibly sentimental, maybe even maudlin feeling comes another sensation:

A feeling of power.

That is, I am becoming the only one who can so easily soothe Sasha’s problems. She is dependent on me in that way—Daddy is the guy you want to hug you at midnight, or to bandage your scraped knees, or whatever. It’s a big shift, really, from how things were originally, when I was just an adjunct to Mommy, whose constant presence and milk-production facilities gave her the automatic ranking as Numero Uno.

Now I’m staking my corner. Yes, Mommy will still be around far more often than Daddy, but now, even though Sasha barely knows it, there are things I can provide for her that maybe the other parent can’t, or can’t provide as well. Ha! Take that, other gender!

Of course, I don’t really experience this as a battle for Sasha’s affection. But engendering in her that kind of dependence, well, that’s addictive. What else can I convince her I’m essential for? Presents brought home from abroad? Help with homework? Boy trouble (or girl trouble)? Honestly, this is all a fantasy right now—I have no idea what the future may bring, or what sort of roles Jean and I will inhabit as Sasha grows older. But I’m looking forward to having it defined, to knowing what I’m good at, where I can improve, and when I can join in the call for Mommy.

And, somewhere in the back of my brain, there’s also the knowledge that, one day, neither I nor Jean will be able to help Sasha face whatever nightmares arise in her life. (Nathan touched on this yesterday a bit.) But—and here we cue the sniffles and teardrops—I’m hoping that our comfort and advice have prepared to deal with them on her own.

Go on, click away in disgust. You feel the same damn way.