DADWAGON

If you ever want an unedited look at the dank sewer of human relationships, check out leagle.com, which has an endless stream of court decisions between litigating parties. The conflicts range from petty to murderous. It’s delicious.

That’s where I found this gem of justice, in which an Indiana court actually did the right thing by the father in a custody case, ruling against church and mom in one swift verdict.

Fact 1: Gerald Clutter has joint custody of two children, ages 9 and 7, with his ex-wife Anna Finnerty. They live with mom, dad has custody Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, alternate weekends, and holidays.

Fact 2: Both parents are Catholic. But after the divorce, mom really stepped it up (ironic, yes?). She enrolled the kids in Catholic school, and started taking them to Wednesday evening Mass.

Fact 3: She sued to compel dad to either take kids to church on Sunday evening, or give up the kids at 3pm (instead of 7pm) so that she can take them. He wanted Sunday afternoons to have dinner with the kids and his extended family. She argued that she “has the sole right to direct religious upbringing for the children.”

Fact 4: She must be crazy.

Fact 5: Judge Barnes made a heroic ruling, and set the world back on its axis.

I mean, it must be hard to rule against more church in the heartland. But the court found dad to be a fit father. So this is clearly either a completely cynical power grab by mom, or she is so wrapped up in her post-divorce Christlove that she really thinks it would be best for her children to spend more time in mass and less time with their father. Given especially that, in the fine tradition of Christ in the Field and St. Francis in the Field and St. Martin in the Field and so on, one can perhaps even find God in places that are not the seat next to Anna Finnerty in church, the court was right to rebuke her. Those kids need to spend more time with their father, who art actually their real father.

“Chuck Tompkins, whale trainer, has often been asked the question “how can you get a killer whale to urinate on cue, and I can’t get my son to pee in the toilet?”

Who hasn’t asked themselves this very same question?

The above is from a short article from MyFox 25 in New Hampshire, entitled “Training whales & parenting link?”

Enquiring minds want to know.

An admission: JP is now 3 and a half years old and is only now approaching fully potty-trained.

I imagine that getting divorced hasn’t helped the process of getting him to take “big boy poops,” but that can’t really be controlled. It certainly means that there isn’t any sort of coherent strategy to get him out of diapers. Mostly we’ve just gone along at his pace, communicating through attorneys, occasionally flinging rocks at each other, and figuring he would just start doing it on his own. Ah, adulthood.

There is actually a technical term for this type of potty-training. It’s called procrastination.

By the way, the inspiration for this post, and the article quoted above, is something called Learn With Shamu potty training which purports to apply the very same “simple methods used to teach positive behaviors to Shamu” to your little one. No word on whether or not this includes aim.

Oh, and for the pervs out there (like me), here’s a link to the photo I didn’t use for this post.

Since Nathan (Jewish, but not to Lubavitchers) and Christopher (not a Jew, but frequently mistaken for one) have weighed in on this topic, I figured I’d throw in my two shekels. So:

As a Jew (even the black hats have to admit it), I’m completely opposed to any celebration of Christmas. No tree, no Santa Claus, no egg nog. (Hey, I’m allergic to milk!) I’ll allow Jew-penned carols to be sung, but not played, in my home. Midnight mass is acceptable, but only to gawk at the eccentric traditions of other cultures.

I’m also an atheist, which makes my recent embrace of Hanukkah a little perplexing, even to me. Mostly, though, I think it’s about frying potatoes and baking chickens.

My wife, Jean, is a Buddhist, but the kind of Buddhist where, if she were Jewish, she’d be eating bacon-wrapped bratwurst and wearing jackboots on Yom Kippur. (Which frankly sounds kind of hot.) She doesn’t understand my opposition to Christmas.

It’s fun to decorate a tree, she says.

Really? I decorated my first tree six years ago in New Delhi, and it was okay.

We can give presents, she says.

We can do that for Hanukkah, too. If I actually thought we should celebrate Hanukkah, which I don’t.

At the moment, however, Sasha has little to do with this. She’s not even a year old, and has no conception of holidays. Or, really, days. But we know the issue will rear its head within a year or two, and we’ve been trying to figure out a compromise. Currently, we’ve decided to do something called a “Chinese tree.” Unfortunately, we have no idea what the hell that’s supposed to be.

We do have luck on our side in one way, though. Sasha’s birthday is in early December, which means she’ll be getting a ton of presents around the same time everyone else is. And if that’s not enough, we can give her a few more on… Well, I don’t know what we’ll call this made-up, ultra-commercialized holiday, but I do know when it takes place: the Thursday before her school’s Christmas break, so she can show off her brightly colored new crap to her friends and prove her parents love her.

Which we do, honestly. But not enough to deck the halls.

There’s a heated discussion over at WaPo’s On Parenting blog. The topic: should dads be invited into the delivery room? One Gallic OB/GYN, Michel Odent, told the BBC he thinks not:

“Having been involved for more than 50 years in childbirths in homes and hospitals in France, England and Africa, the best environment I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody around the woman in labour apart from a silent, low-profile and experienced midwife,” he says.

OK, so I’m sympathetic to this argument because there are some things that can’t be unseen. But on the otherhand, the delivery of our second kid nearly killed my wife, and while that was a bit terrifying, it’s better I was there than not.

The article is worth a read, anyhow. There are other safety arguments in favor of having husbands there (apparently it can reduce c-sections). But what interests me is how completely the culture has shifted over a relatively short period of time. From the piece:

In the 1960s only about a quarter of men in the UK attended the birth of an infant, today it is well over 90%.

So maybe it’s just a French traditionalist launching a cri de coeur against the modern world. He wouldn’t be the first Frenchman to do so.

Attending the birth is clearly a requirement of today’s fathers. And yet, I can’t help but wonder what it must have been like for my grandfather, who if I remembered correctly, just went home after bringing his wife to the hospital. Did that make him a worse father in the long run? A worse husband?

I often have the same thoughts about discipline. The norms have shifted so much that yesterday’s model father would probably have his kids taken away from him. So few of us are allowed to raise a child using just a tumbler of Bourbon and a strong belt. And yet, did they really love their kids less back in the day? And the real monsters–the pedophiles, the torturers, the people who actually hate their children–are there fewer of them today? I doubt it.

I don’t want to join Odent in opposing progress just on the principle of it. But it can be so tiresome, this knowing better than any generation that ever lived. We can’t really be that smart, can we?