DADWAGON

Two years ago, on the coldest day of the year, at 4:30 a.m., I could be found standing in line in the dark in Brooklyn, shivering, too cold even to drink coffee. J.P. was 2, and it was time to enroll him in a local preschool/daycare. Now, to say “enroll” makes the process seem in some way rational and humane. It wasn’t.

Consider the fact that I wasn’t even the first person on line at this ridiculous hour. I was second. There was a nice older lady who had arrived earlier than I had, which meant she was that much closer to freezing to death than me. She was not, however, the parent of a prospective student. She was a nanny. The family she worked for was on vacation in the Caribbean, and they had paid her $500 to be the first in line. This is what we in NYC call being smarter than you.

J.P. had been rejected by two other schools already, after paying an admission fee ($50 bucks, non-refundable), filling out the application (“describe your child’s strengths/weaknesses”) a group play with other kids working their way towards Harvard, and a visit to the home. This school, our last chance for the year, had no formal admission process — it was first come, first served. Doors open at 8 a.m., parents must arrive with check in hand, and the late ones can find a nanny, thank you very much.

By the time 8 a.m. rolled around, my decision to come so early seemed semi-sane. The line for admission stretched down the block and out of sight. If I had showed at 6:15, say, I would still have been freezing, but I also would have been shit out of luck.

This wonderful experience was but the first of the many awful hoops that parents in New York must jump through to educate their little ones. It starts with preschool and extends through elementary, high school, college, and into the cutthroat business of securing Junior’s Social Security benefits.

For those of you in Des Moines or wherever, places where the right school for your child means choosing between the local public and the local public, perhaps you might watch the trailer for “Nursery University,” to get an idea of what I’m talking about. Not convinced that it’s so bad? Well, do any of you out in suburbia have to hire an educational consultant to get your kid into nursery school?

Do you need an “action plan” that comes complete with school “information, procedures, maps, and data sheets”? What, you may ask, is a “data sheet” for a nursery school? Who knows? And is it really necessary to attend a “Intro to Nursery School lecture,” where for $20 you can hear (from someone who admits that her primary qualification as a consultant is the fact that she has twins) about “nursery school philosophy” and how to stay “under control and in perspective”?

Do I seem under control and in perspective?

If this sounds like I’m complaining, I am. If you register a note of self-pity, rest assured that it’s there. If you think I haven’t called this woman already and asked for a discount…

Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I’m here in Germany visiting as many new German babies as I can. I lived in Eastern Germany after reunification, and all my German friends are in the middle of a late baby boom — just like my friends back home.

One thing that keeps coming up: it turns out that if you grew up in East Germany and start raising kids now in a unified Germany, you miss your old toys and children’s characters. In the absence of Barbie and My Little Pony and other such Western decadences, East Germans had a staple of homegrown cartoons and comics, few of which were overtly political (unlike, say, Assud the Hamas Bugs Bunny, who promised to “eat the Jews” after Farfur the Gazan Mickey Mouse was “martyred” by Israeli soldiers).

Of course, what happened in Germany after 1989 was less a Reunification than a complete cultural takeover by West Germany, and children’s literature and television wasn’t spared. Which is why I was so happy to see Sandmann lying near little Frieda’s crib in Luebeck. He was a little action figure based on the beloved East German children’s TV character, a kind of sleep-Santa with a billygoat beard and a satchel of sleep-sand that he uses to put children to bed. Today as in the former GDR, the Sandmann comes on TV for 10 minutes twice a day–at 5:50pm and 6:50pm–tells a good-night story, and then tosses a bit of sleep-sand to all the kids at home. The best part is the GDR-original song, a sweet little ditty that will haunt your dreams like another pseudo-German, Freddy Krueger.

Actually, Sandmann was such a beloved character that even before the Wall came down, West Germany copied him and started running its own version. Which is perhaps why he was allowed to live (my admittedly biased East German friends said the West’s Sandmann was basically the same, just that he told slightly more boring stories). Another survivor, for older kids: the Mosaik comics led by Abrafaxe, a trio who look like the offspring of Asterix and Smurfette. It’s now the best-selling comic in both Eastern and Western Germany

Now, I’m not saying that I’m going to run out and get a Masters of the Universe Battle Hawk for Nico, but there is something nice about having some touchstone characters from your own childhood around. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Babar, whatever: It doesn’t take much. Continuity is nice. So today I’ll be thinking of the things that haven’t changed in 20 years, like Sandmann.

Woolen baby hats have two positions:

(a) Pulled too low, covering the kid’s eyes, or

(b) falling off.

If any inventors happen to be reading this, put on your (ahem) thinking caps.

The baby is crying, screaming, thrashing, limp. The kid is in a diaper and socks, writhing on the floor, in the car seat, arms and legs alternately flailing and stiff. The kid is inconsolable, possessed by demons, a blubbering spastic.

These children are, thank goodness, not mine. They’re on YouTube, the stars of a little-discussed genre: the meltdown video. These pure, unadulterated temper tantrums have been eating up my spare time, minute by minute, since I discovered them last summer. I’ll  sit and watch them even while my daughter, Sasha, is crawling on the floor at my feet, begging for attention. There’s something fascinating about these snippets of other people’s miseries.

Fascinating—and horrifying. My first reaction was: What kind of awful parent is it who, when their kid flips out, instantly picks up the videocamera and hits “record”? But as I watched the temper tantrums unfold, often triggered by the most innocuous of events (failure to blow out a birthday candle, or Mom saying, “Sorry, bud, I said no”), I began to understand that impulse. After all, what can you actually do when the kid is freaking out? No words can mute the true temper tantrum, no hug can stifle the fit. The best you can do is wait it out and watch.

That didn’t explain my own obsession, however, but after a while I began to realize: I was searching for a glimpse of the future. Sasha, who at 11 months is only just developing a sense of what she is and isn’t allowed to do, will without question become that nuclear meltdown baby before too long. How can I be so sure? Because both my wife, Jean, and I were temper-tantrum kids.

I don’t know what Jean’s fits were like, but I remember all too well the rage that overtook me, the way that the conscious mind would recede and the animal within would explode, whether I was at home or in a toy store or the supermarket or wherever. In a way, part of me still wants to give in to that pure physical anger—which is probably why I like to go running now; with enough exertion, my brain simply goes away, leaving me oddly at peace.

Afterwards, I can—as I used to do when I was little, after my parents had sent shrieking me to my room—eventually re-emerge, all murderous urges purged, and announce, “I’ve calmed down now.”

The world is safer for it.