DADWAGON

It’s hard for me to believe that in the two short months of Dadwagon’s existence, I haven’t once written about my nanny situation. Or nannies situation(s). But current events have prompted this post. To whit:

• At 13 months, Sasha speaks Chinese. Or, really, understands Chinese. Tell her to “pai-pai shou” and she’ll clap (pai) her hands (shou). “Jiao-jiao” and she’ll lift up her right foot (jiao). “Qiou-qiou” and she’ll go fetch her ball (qiou). This is frankly pretty cool, not least because now I know, and can mispronounce, the words for hand, foot, and ball. But, you know, it’s also one of those neat things of being a parent—to be able to see the twitching, meconium-caked worm grow a brain.

Alas, I can’t claim credit for much of Sasha’s intellectual prowess. That honor goes to our two nannies. One is Sun Ah-yee, “ah-yee” being the Mandarin word for “auntie,” applied to any woman older than you who’s not yet obviously grandmotherly. Sun Ah-yee is in her 50s, sweet, capable, with no fashion sense whatsoever (she somehow dresses Sasha to look like a 55-year-old Chinese lady). She’s with us three days a week, and without her our home would quickly collapse into filth and misery. She cooks and prepares most of Sasha’s meals, she cleans the apartment, she stays late and will come in on weekends if we ask her to. She is awesome.

She also doesn’t speak any English at all. Mandarin is her primary mode of communication, but it’s accented according to her northeastern Chinese upbringing, which means it’s really damn tough to understand what she’s saying, especially when she won’t slow down for me. And when she finishes each disquisition by saying “Understand?” Even when I do understand her gist, there’s no way I can replicate it. Often I’ll just nod or shrug and try to edge away, figuring that whatever my answer, she’ll be fine with Sasha.

Because Sun Ah-yee works elsewhere two days a week, we also have Jessie Ah-yee. In her late 30s or early 40s, Jessie immigrated from Taiwan a long time ago, and has two children of her own, one with cerebral palsy. And she—thankfully—speaks English well, although there are times when she gives me a kind of blank look, one that implies she’s understood the words but not the meaning behind them. She gives this look to Jean, too, so maybe it’s not a language thing but a Jessie thing.

It’s thanks to Jessie, though, that Sasha knows her jiao from her shou. She’s a great teacher, and speaks Taiwanese too, so soon Sasha will know that tongue better than me.

Look, I’m grateful to the work these two women do, and am happy to spend 70 percent of my take-home pay so that my daughter is well cared-for and multilingual. But on some level, I wish it was me doing the teaching. With child care so expensive, it almost makes economic sense for me not to work at all, and to take on Sun Ah-yee and Jessie Ah-yee’s duties. But could I do it as well? Or is this early-childhood education-by-outsiders ultimately worthwhile?

Still, Jean and I can take credit for one thing: Yesterday evening, after Jessie had gone home, Sasha and I were playing in the living room. All of a sudden, Sasha stopped where she was standing, her face went red and her breath sounded constricted. Yes—she was pooping. She squatted there a moment, and, when she was done, got right up and marched over to the bathroom, where Jean and I usually wash her butt off in the sink after every poop. Oh, the things that stir a father’s sense of pride!

Next step: Getting her to the potty before she craps.

When the New York Times’ “Motherlode” blog asks a question like “Why Does Anyone Have Children?,” it’s very tempting to snark the fuck out of it, especially when the questioner, a reader named Baily, is so earnest:

I understand the evolutionary pull (and necessity) of procreation, I get that some-to-most women have ‘the urge,’ but the logical side of my brain can’t grasp why.

But instead of making broken-condom or Brangelina jokes, I have to check myself (before, of course, I wreck myself). Because frankly, I’m just as confused as Bailey is.

Now, I can’t speak to why women have children. That’s their business, and you won’t find us giving two shits about women’s issues here on this blog. (Except for your issues, Jean, don’t worry. I’m just talking about those other women. No, not “other women” like that. Look, can we discuss this later? Okay, fine. Hmph.)

But I also can’t really explain why I wanted children. Because for a very long time, I didn’t. I figured Jean and I would just be the cool, wealthy, cosmopolitan aunt and uncle to our friends’ kids, and live the kind of lives everyone would be jealous of. But around the time I turned 29, or maybe 31, I just all of a sudden one day wanted kids. Call it a biological clock, call it a preprogrammed instinct for survival of the genetic line, call it sheer whim, but it happened, and now, several years later, we have Sasha.

I mean, I think there might be other things at play here. Some desire to see a part of me survive after my own death (which won’t occur, I’m calculating, for a few hundred more years, if ever). A need to create something more lasting than a bunch of silly newspaper articles. An allergy to cats and other amusing pets. But I remember how it came to me with the force of prophecy, an unavoidable feeling not so much that I wanted to have a child but that I would have a child. And now I have one. And, you know, it’s pretty great and all.

But how the fuck I got here I have no idea.

Came across this amusing bit on cursing written by a friend of ours at Dadlabs with tips on how to avoid cursing in front of your child:

“Put the kids to bed at 4:30.  This really cuts down the amount of swearing that they hear. Do no not open product packaging around the kids, especially “blister packs.” You might consider building an “opening shed.” You could also assemble stuff from Ikea there.

If there are children in the area, do not install new system software on your computer. Or use the printer. Or deal with the wireless router.

Never drive with your children. Installing a plexiglass “taxicab-style” divider might work, but it would need to be very thick.

Never hit your elbow.”

I must admit that I have something of a, well, potty-mouth, and from time to time, a few blue words have been uttered in front of JP. Nothing in truly bad taste, mind you, but, as a native New Yorker, I would like to think I possess a certain flair for the fuck you.

Unlike my friend and esteemed colleague Christopher, I’m not entirely convinced that JP hearing me curse is a big deal. Nor do the Dadlabs folks, either, apparently, as this is what they think happens if you don’t curse in front of them:

Your children will grow up knowing that the world is never a frustrating or annoying place. They will understand that it is certainly possible to bottle up all your negative feelings if you just try hard enough. They will assume that drivers cutting them off on Mopac are just citizens like themselves trying to make their way through a busy, busy world, not deserving of invective.

But, like most parents, I am very capable of being shamed into better parenting. Thus, the other day, when Frankie, our dog, stole and shredded one of JP’s toys, and JP shouted “fucking dog!” at young Frankie (laughing and do a mocking version of my voice), I told him not to do it again. And I even pretended I meant it.

Fucking dog.

If you look at the far left pink spot of this infographic from the San Jose Mercury News, you’ll see confirmation of what I had always suspected: I went to middle school in an Autism Cluster.

Of course, this was in the benighted ’80s, when there was no autism, only retardation and hyperactivity. But still, I always thought there was something funny in the water.

Except that there wasn’t. The accompanying report by the Mercury News (the paper that believed the CIA was selling crack cocaine, until it didn’t believe that anymore) says that in the Outer Richmond and other clusters, there didn’t seem to be common environmental triggers after all:

“A team of researchers from the University of California-Davis has found one factor that unites this and nine other California clusters of cases of the developmental disability: parental education.”

Good thing I couldn’t get my act together for graduate school.

But seriously, there is some relief in knowing the explosion of autism diagnoses in large part reflects a widening of the autism umbrella; better educated parents are creating autism clusters because they are fighting harder to have their kids diagnosed as autistic. In previous decades, many of those kids would have been written off as unruly or antisocial or just poor students. Now they are diagnosed as autistic and have a wider world of resources at their disposal.

Here’s what I wonder about autism now: how do the families of more severely autistic kids (which includes the lovely family my brother just married into) feel about this explosion of diagnoses of very mild cases? Do they see those kids as being part of the same epidemic? Stricken by the same causes, whatever they may be?

On the one hand, having more children diagnosed has made autism a national preoccupation. But does having mildly hyper kids diagnosed as autistic dishonor or downplay the profound challenges facing severely autistic kids and their families?