DADWAGON

My child is corrupt. Not morally (I think), but in that old-fashioned way of all the clerks and bureaucrats in Chekhov stories. She wants bribes. She has from the day she was born. Part of me thinks all children are like this. Beneath the faultless skin, behind the innocent eyes, lies a sweaty Carpathian customs official, always demanding a small fee to fix some unspecified problem with your confiscated passport.

I have encouraged this venality. We thought, like some first-time parents, that we would never bribe. But we saw quickly that this is functionally impossible. Children are forever holding us hostage, with a tantrum in public, a meltdown when it’s time to sleep. At those moments, they have essentially confiscated your passport. They have created a situation that needs solving. And they know, from the earliest prelingual days, that you will solve this problem by offering a bribe.

[Space here for your judgmental thoughts about me. I am a lazy and maybe bad parent who conditioned my children to expect these bribes and then blames them for it. You are right. Bravo. Now back to my point.]

I’ve used this corruption to my advantage at times. Particularly when it comes to travel, which is something that I have to do and have to explain to my children when I do it. And I hate how unhappy it makes them. Because if I was a cleverer or more kindly father, I might not do it or have to do it, and then they wouldn’t cry. But instead, I have, since the beginning, placated them with offers of bribes. Buhpizes as they’ve been known in my children’s particular dialect of babytalk: surprises.

It’s actually a little disheartening how this would turn them around. One moment distraught at the prospect of losing their father for some unknowable number of days (unknowable only because they didn’t actually understand what a day or a week was), the next moment almost glad to see me go, because whenever the hell I came back, I would come with some chocolate and trinkets, maybe a stuffed monkey from the Hudson newsstand at the Atlanta airport.

[Thus revealing the true nature of fatherhood: I want to leave and I want to be missed when I do.]

This is all on my mind because last night, as I reminded my five-year-old daughter that I’m headed to Russia today, she did not hold out her proverbial sausage-fingered hand. She did not look for a kickback. She told me not to go, and when I said I’d bring back presents, she said a string of words that I’m not sure she’s ever said in that order before: I don’t want a present. I want daddy.

Don’t worry, dear reader. I will not trouble your image of me as a selfish corrupter of my children by getting all moist about my daughter’s new love for me instead of trinkets. Because last night, it occurs to me, simply marked the arrival of Corruption 2.0. She’s almost in kindergarten; her mind has developed enough that she can now see around corners. Her “I want daddy” shtick? A charade, part of a cunning new strategy to defer gratification now (the promise of chocolates or one of those stacking matryoshka dolls) in order to sucker me in with her cooing words so that I will make, in future, much larger concessions. This is not a small shakedown. This is a patient con, laying the groundwork for a string of ultimate heists: my house, my car, my heart. And I won’t even know I’ve been robbed.

Oh, the things you learn about on Twitter: celebrities, stray thoughts, and this, from one of my former colleagues at Harper’s: “Hume’s mother’s mother was his father’s father’s wife. This, says Baier, may have caused his ‘obsession’ with incest.”

Baier you can look up yourself. I’m too busy. But Hume, for those who don’t read Harper’s, is this guy, which reminds me of this very funny line by Lee Siegel that I read today at Slate: “It was like Herbert Marcuse’s advice to a despairing graduate student who said he had spent days on a sentence in Hegel and still couldn’t understand it: ‘You’re reading too fast,’ Marcuse told him.”

Anyway, it made me think of some old friends in Vietnam (I lived there after college for three years; that’s how I met the formidable Matt Gross—we were both copy editors at an English-language newspaper [ed.: until he got fired]).

This gets tricky, so stick with me: my Vietnamese friend and his wife grew up in a small village in the Mekong Delta. Their parents knew each other, perhaps, in retrospect, a little too well. So, my friend’s father dies, and his wife’s mother dies (or maybe it’s the other way around; I don’t remember). Then, because apparently the village is very small and suitable suitors are suitably scarce: my friend’s still living mother marries his wife’s still living father. They have no children, so the incest joke doesn’t really work, but it’s a slow day, and I always found it interesting, although, I guess, not without biblical precedent.

Don’t believe me? “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her.” Deuteronomy 25:5. Not exactly the same, but close.

Or how about this, from the Wikipedia folks, on Levirate marriage:

Levirate marriage is a type of marriage in which the brother of a deceased man is obligated to marry his brother’s widow, and the widow is obligated to marry her deceased husband’s brother. Levirate marriage has been practiced by societies with a strong clan structure in which exogamous marriage (i.e., that outside the clan) was forbidden. It is or was known in many societies around the world. The practice is similar to widow inheritance, where, for example, the deceased husband’s kin can dictate whom the widow may marry.

Good to know!

Anyway, I’m getting married (again) to Tomoko in a little more than a week. If I die, my brother can’t have her. Sorry, Jason.

We here at DadWagon aren’t exactly milbloggers, much less fighting men. But we are, as you might have guessed by now, fathers. And it doesn’t have to be Memorial Day or one of those other official spare-a-thought-for-our-soldiers days to get a little verklempt for a dad who gets to come home from the murderous abroad and see his kids.

From what I presume is the top-ranked Northern Idaho/Eastern Washington sports-and-weather site, SWX Right Now, comes this pretty cool little reunion story from a Spokane Indians minor league baseball game. The team had told these twin 4-year-old girls and their mom that they were getting some kind of award, and that they should come down to the field in the middle of the fourth inning (no idea what award the mom thought they were going to get). Waiting for them instead on the third base line was their father, back from his THIRD TOUR of duty in Afghanistan. From SWX:

The celebration started early at the ballpark, as Sergeant Chris Weichman surprised his wife Abby and twin daughters, Gracie and Ruby in the middle of the fourth inning. Weichman had just returned from his third tour in Afghanistan at 6 a.m. that day. The young family received a long standing ovation from the crowd.

And in a side note: the Indians won the game 1-0.

Before you watch the video, just think about that: three tours in an unconquerable land filled with insurgents who never sleep and would love nothing more than kill you before breakfast. It doesn’t much matter how you feel about the war. That is insane. That is so tough on families. I’m headed to Russia next week for another story and I am already feeling, as I sometimes do, a twinge of self-pity for the time I won’t spend with my kids, for the added burdens on the home when I’m away. But deployment, multiple deployment, multiple warzone deployment: that’s the rough stuff. I hope this guy and his daughters get a little breather.

No, that’s not a typo. Since Saturday afternoon, Sasha’s been ill with—as the doctor told us yesterday—coxsackievirus, a.k.a. hand-foot-and-mouth disease. It’s sort of yucky: painful sores in her mouth, lots of drooling (and complaining), bloodshot eyes. But it’s manageable. Ibuprofren deals with the pain well enough that Sasha can eat, and when she’s not hungry, the complaining mysteriously vanishes.

The only real issue is that coxsackie is contagious, so we’ve been keeping her home from school. It’s not the most easily transmissible virus out there; you just have to make sure the kids wash their hands and don’t share eating utensils. Simple, right? Well, we’re playing it safe for now, though maybe she’ll return to school tomorrow.

But… we can’t just keep Sasha inside all day watching Dora and SpongeBob (although man would she love that!). So, it out to the playgrounds we go, and if there are other kids around, they just better watch out. Or, at the very least, they’ve gotta stop tongue-kissing Sasha. What is it with the randy toddlers anyway? No wonder they’re always getting sick.

One final great thing about coxsackie: the name! Say it, then giggle. It’s okay, I giggled too.