Behold the latest article to rile the world of dadbloggers: Custody Lost, by Sally Abrahms at Working Mother magazine.
The piece basically argues that more working women might not get full custody of their kids in divorce because the dads are becoming primary caregivers. It’s kind of a lazy argument, particularly because it seems bereft of actual data. A few anecdotes do not make a trend, people.
The worst sin of the piece, though, is that it doesn’t seem to consider that the dad might DESERVE at least joint custody in a lot of modern marriages. Shouldn’t joint custody be applauded anyhow? Fathers are encouraged by all sides to be more involved in the kids’ lives when the marriage is still on; why should that change after divorce? Or are we so tribal that all women should wish all moms get complete custody? That seems to be the author’s take.
Daddytypes.com has a thorough takedown of the piece here. It’s worth a read.
When I was a kid, a neighbor mom — a nice-enough woman, though one whose depth approximated that of a sheet of Saran Wrap — giggled to my mother that she’d taught her two small daughters to curse, “because it’s cute.” My mother went slackjawed at this, and, looking back, I’m with Mom. As I’ve noted recently, my wife and I think our own slovenly tendencies are something to be shamefully eradicated, not something we want to pass on.
Much closer to my brand of thinking: this extremely entertaining post by Guardian contributor (and, now, movie guy) Jon Ronson. He, like us, is not proud of his filthy mouth; he’s gone out of his way to keep his kid from picking up his language habits, and good on him.
The thing is, teaching your kid to throw around the F-word is just asking for trouble, because you know who’s going to face the tirades: you, the loving parent. All you’re doing is arranging for a future filled with tantrums that are foul as well as exhausting. Plus, if you happen to live in Minnesota, things can go really bad in the end.
The art critic and journalist Carly Berwick has a nice interview with Mike Kelley, formerly of Destroy All Monsters, about noise music, that postmodern clang of junk ensembles, feedback, and found sound that arty types seem to like.
As Carly points out on her personal blog, kids really dig them some noise music, too. She should know — we are old friends, our kids are friends, and her son is a 3-year-old John Cage, fiercely musical and yet wholly atonal, often with a somewhat prepared guitar around his neck.
It’s not surprising that kids, with their thrashing and banging and offkey singing, would have post-modern leanings. John Cage once called music “not an attempt to bring order out of chaos … but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.” If there’s a better description of the nearly hallucinogenic living-in-the-moment that is the life of a toddler, I haven’t seen it.
I am sometimes confused about how the anarchic music that kids make squares with the neatly saccharine shlock that they consume most of the time. I mean, Carly’s kid may like the Incapacitants, but mine as often as not likes to curl up on the couch to a children’s choir singing “Las Mañanitas.” I think I’m taking the middle road by playing lots of They Might Be Giants (who, it must be said, make fantastic kiddiesongs). But even those are conventional creations. Only a few artists have the creative vision necessary to hold a piano concert that consists of shoving a piano through a wall. A few artists — and every child that ever lived.
My ex-wife has certain charming underminer tendencies. To wit: J.P. has had a series of rashes of late, along with a runny nose that hasn’t gotten better these past weeks.
Fair enough — every kid on the planet has allergies these days, so why should J.P. be any different?
This she follows up with a little e-mail about how dust sometimes causes allergies, and did I know that dust sometimes cause allergies, and didn’t dust cause allergies for me a few years back when we lived in L.A. and I was wasting her time trying to make it as a screenwriter, and didn’t dust actually cause my penis to shrink? Didn’t it?
Still not getting it?
Okay. My ex pokes her nose in my apartment from time to time, picking J.P. up, dropping him off — she even still walks my dog (don’t ask; it’s joint puppy custody).
The other day she sent me a message clearly implying that she didn’t think the apartment’s cleanliness met her standards. My bedside table, which admittedly hadn’t seen the good side of a rag in a while, was adorned with the following, fuck-you message, stenciled in dust:
Clean me.
Anyway, all this is a roundabout way to get to this little article on Babble about why “a messy house makes for a happy family.”
Here’s the author, Tracy Hahn-Burkett, on her housecleaning mores:
I rarely clean my house. Walk through my front door on any given day and you are almost certain to find dust collected on the coffee table and book shelves. You’ll spot books and magazines semi-stacked on floors and you might trip over those tiny, goody-bag toys kids gather like treasure. The windowsills between the inside glass panes and outer screens bear dirt deposited by seasonal storms and breezes, the wood floors do not gleam and there are blemishes pockmarking the bathroom mirrors — not to mention traces of toothpaste on the walls of the sink from kids who still haven’t learned to aim their spit in the center of the basin. In short, you will find dirt.
