For the top ten list of odd things I’ve learned conducting research for my book: according to my father, my mother, who admittedly is a doctor (but not a surgeon), “assisted” on my circumcision.
Please, please, please, please, please let him be lying, misremembering, or just plain wrong.
In yesterday’s cri du père about the fascism of New York playgrounds, I quoted (as pretentious bastards do) some Thomas Mann, from his famous short story about visiting fascist Italy. Later in the day, I set aside my raw grievance against helicopter parenting just long enough to read the rest of the story, which is really just amazing. Here, apropos of absolutely nothing, is one of the great, succinct takedowns of a spoiled child you will read in any literature:
The cry was addressed to a repulsive youngster whose sunburn had made disgusting raw sores on his shoulders. He outdid anything I have ever seen for illbreeding, refractoriness, and temper and was a great coward to boot, putting the whole beach in an uproar, one day, because of his outrageous sensitiveness to the slightest pain. A sand-crab had pinched his toe in the water, and the minute injury made him set up a cry of heroic proportions-the shout of an antique hero in his agony-that pierced one to the marrow and called up visions of some frightful tragedy. Evidently he considered himself not only wounded, but poisoned as well; he crawled out on the sand and lay in apparently intolerable anguish, groaning “Obi!” and “Ohimè!” and threshing about with arms and legs to ward off his mother’s tragic appeals and the questions of the bystanders. An audience gathered round. A doctor was fetched, the same who had pronounced objective judgment on our whooping-cough-and here again acquitted himself like a man of science. Good-naturedly he reassured the boy, telling him that he was not hurt at all, he should simply go into the water again to relieve the smart. Instead of which, Fuggiero was borne off the beach, followed by a concourse of people. But he did not fail to appear next morning, nor did he leave off spoiling our children’s sand-castles. Of course, always by accident. In short, a perfect terror. –Mario and the Magician, Thomas Mann, 1929
Sunday, as some of you may know, is Father’s Day, and in honor of that blessed event, Nathan and I are taking our kids to Citi Field for a baseball game [insert joke here about whether or not the 2011 Mets are actually playing something recognizable as baseball].
Anyway, JP recently went to his first pro game, up at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, thanks to some tickets from one of my many rich, crazy uncles. As is customary, he demanded commercial goods for his appropriate behavior, and thus he went home the proud owner of a new and fucking expensive white-and-blue-striped Yankees hat.
JP loves this thing. It is his hat, he picked it out, he wears it when we play catch, it is his first prized possession. Here’s the question, though, do I let him wear to the Mets game?
First, I’m a Met fan and I’m not so sure how I feel about my son pledging allegiance to the other guys in public. Then there’s the safety issue. I know, I know, if I were to ask Nathan, I should probably just strip JP naked and let him crawl to the game in nothing other than that hat—it’s good for him! builds character!—but recent events suggest that this might not be good at all. There was the recent incident of a man being beaten within an inch of his life at a Dodger game, for nothing worse than wearing the gear of the San Francisco Giants.
So what say you, readership? Let the kid wear his cap or no?
“Ought we to have foreseen the outburst of anger and resentment which her conduct, and thus our conduct, called forth?” –Mario and the Magician, Thomas Mann, 1929
It was, perhaps, a mistake to go to the playground on my first full day back in the country.
In the previous two weeks I’d become accustomed to seeing children do their dangerous work–laughing, skipping, teasing, mucking around in mud, hunting lizards–with only the barest supervision. I’d seen the children of Chechens, Adjars, Mingrelians, Anatolians and White Turks all survive this neglect. I never saw a single knee pad nor elbow pad nor bike helmet nor (more regrettably) car seat. I saw children up late and asleep under trees. I saw little boys playing tag in a Pankisi refugee center, I saw little girls playing pattycake on the steps of Istanbul’s Fatih Mosque. I never thought, Why are their parents not walking closer to them? or How will they control/protect this child?
Clearly I am not cut out for Upper West Side playgrounds, then. Consider all the rules I somehow violated when I took my kids to a playground in Central Park.
First, I sat too far away. I did this to avoid interacting with the mothers whom I had somehow sensed would find me distasteful. I found a perfect bench. It was on the far side of the fenced-in playground, in the sun, empty. All the others, the half-dozen mothers and nannies, sat clustered on benches ten feet away from the play structures.
I could still see all the children at play, including my own. But I did not have to smell them at that distance. And I didn’t have to be involved in the ruckus of children playing with children. It’s not abnormal for an adult to have a break from the shrieking and crazytalk. I love it for most of the day, but a pause is fine. And no child’s play was ever helped by having their parent or caretaker staring directly into it at close range.
So I sat on the far, far end. I tilted my head back and took in some sun. When I looked back again, my children were still there. I closed my eyes and took a breath of summer, which feels so different in New York, and when I opened them a few seconds later, my children were still there.
My second problem was that I did not rush to assist my children in playing. My five-year-old daughter came and asked to be helped up onto the monkey bars so she could play alone. I asked her why she didn’t want to play with the others, and she said that the older children had assigned her the role of one of the Bad Guys, and that she wanted to be the Good Guy. And without a prod from me, she said she would just ask if she can be a Good Guy. And then she ran back into the fray, and didn’t need me any more.
But I couldn’t help but look at the other bench. I could sense their suspicions. There were long stretches–up to 30 seconds even–where my children were hidden from view by a tree trunk or a jungle gym. And I didn’t pace, stalk, or call my children back to me. I thought that perhaps, in this well-kept playground that is entirely fenced in and where the only flooring is rubber mat, my children might survive.
I should say that I don’t want to make this about gender. As far I know, Chechens came in equal genders before the war and then after the war there were more women than men and I still admire their sensibilities. And there are many American women, including my wife on most days, who have a finely balanced sense of non-interference. But it is about gender, in that I was feeling quite like the distant father, and not minding the feeling, playing it in my head as a virtue that the mothers would never understand.
All this perceived suspicion finally came to a head when I noticed one of the mothers pointing at my 3-year-old son. He was playing in a pack of 5-7 year olds, all of them armed with thin sticks, running around. My son had some sort of wrist action involved as well, a slight side-to-side. This woman started following him around, asking where his parents were. My daughter, God love her, was nearby and tried to accept responsibility for the child. But the woman wanted an adult and was clearly not going to stop, so I stood up to walk over there.
What I couldn’t do, however, because of my jetlag and my generally sour impression of her and of all her ambient stress, was pretend that I wanted to hear whatever she had to say. But she said it anyway:
her: “Your son is swinging that stick around.”
me: silence
her: “He could hit somebody’s eye”
me: silence
her: “The eyes. The EYES.” (now pointing at her own eye, interpreting my silence for imbecility).
me: “He’s three. Every other kid here is five. He can’t even reach their eyes.”
her: “He can, too. It’s not safe.”
And so it went for a short while. I, sadly for this story, relented. I felt all the angry, uninjured eyes of the nannies and mothers and other controlniks staring at me and my boy, who is, after all, just a boy. So I told him he could take the stick home and play with it there and he seemed fine with that. He went back to playing with the bigger kids.
I should mention that my son is not new to this. He swung some sort of rubber tube around a few weeks ago and scratched his cornea (that healed on its own, thankfully). In the playground, after I took his stick away, he hit a five-year-old in the stomach and on the forehead, while playing Bad Guy. That five year old wanted his mother to make arrangements after the contact, so he told her and she told me and I told Nico that he shouldn’t hit anyone. And I do know that the moment Nico hits an older kid who doesn’t happen to be a bitchass mama’s boy, he will get hit much harder than he ever thought possible, and that will also be okay. It’s a good lesson to learn at some point.
I’m saying all this because I’m not pretending that it’s impossible that he might have hit someone with his stick. I’m saying it’s pretty damned unlikely that it would be something serious. And it’s possible that I set myself up for all of this trouble with my pre-corked resentment of the other adults. The only thing I know for certain is that kids will be fine if you just let them be kids, and I am pretty sure we are all suffering here from some enormous mind-disease when it comes to raising and protecting and coaxing and coaching and appeasing and controlling our kids. It’s intolerance toward the very nature of being a child. It’s stress that children don’t need, never asked for, and will never benefit from.
