Step 15: A Healthy Perspective on Movie Trailers

Green Lantern, the newest sleek superhero film starring Ryan Reynolds, is a “MUST-SEE!” This is according to my television, which never lies to me.

OK, let’s say that’s the first time it may have lied to me.

I’m not sure who the movie ad was quoting that said it was a must-see, because they didn’t use any special effects to blow up the tiny name below the quote so we could see it.

If you think my ring is cool, you should see my watch.

The next tiny name quoted by the ad said that Green Lantern was a cross between Star Wars and Iron Man, and I wondered why the critic stopped there.

“It’s Stars Wars meets Iron Man meets Star Wars 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6–the whole damn catalog–meets The Godfather meets Caddyshack meets The Hangover meets The Dark Knight meets Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It has a dash of The Graduate, a heaping teaspoon of Spider Man 2, pieces of some really exciting commercials that have come out recently, Grand Theft Auto 4–the controversial sexy-violent degenerate video game–Superman, and The Piano starring Holly Hunter.”

“It’s so good that a lot more stars should have signed on for it. Were it not for the salary cap…”

“It’s better than a solution for global warming. If you had a choice between solving global warming and seeing Green Lantern, you gotta pick Green Lantern, man. If you pick global warming, you should just kill yourself. You missed out.”

“It’s good enough that it might not destroy Ryan Reynolds career just when it’s approaching its prime.”

“It’s good enough that a few critics said some decent things to counter what most of the critics said.”

“Okay, we kind of phoned it in. But a lot of decent people worked on this movie, and some of them cared about what we were doing.”

“Just come. It’s an excuse to eat jellybeans, chocolate and butter, and nothing else out is that good.”

“What, do we need Merlin Olsen to come out and ask for your charity? It’s got special effects.”

“You see all movies like this, so we keep making more. We kept our side of the bargain, now you keep yours!”

Here’s the thing. I know you have to do this. My friend West Coast, who I mentioned in this blog, works in your industry. In fact, he writes trailer copy, which means he often has to dress a pig in a suit and make a movie look better than it is. But nothing says I can’t exaggerate, too. As a dad, that might be my job. You tell me your new superhero movie about a guy with daddy issues and ambiguous powers and a lot of green special effects is a must-see, that’s fine. I can’t give you the benefit of the doubt, because we both know that’s not true. So I won’t take it lying down. I’m going to razz you back.

I like movies with character and story and I’m a hundred years old in New-Earth time, which puts me out of your target market. But you’ll want my daughter in your audience someday. And I’m going to make sure she’s a tough get.

A delicate balance: teaching a healthy skepticism to the bloviations of advertising while not succumbing to full-blown cynicism.

Thanks for keeping me sharp.

Step 14: Minor Head Surgery

This week Isabella had her 9-month well visit to the pediatrician. We brought her in the day before her scheduled appointment, because she had filled seven diapers in nine hours. Turned out she wasn’t dehydrated: good news. Slight fever, major diaper rash, super diarrhea, all of which tend to equal unidentifiable stomach bug. We learned that the purple Desitin is the one that helps and the new, improved blue (the one we had) wasn’t worth shit, because it does not waterproof your baby like a good deck stain. Following is the conversation following her scheduled appointment.

(Allow a little poetic license to capture the anxiety produced by the results.)

“Your baby’s doing good, Daddy,” said her mother.

“Good?”

“She was above average in almost all the categories,” she said. “There wasn’t an ‘excel’ category. But she was high normal in most of the categories of the questionnaire.”

“Most?”

“There was one that she had trouble with.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What do you mean there wasn’t an excel category? You mean it was only average and below average?”

“Normal, High Normal, and Not Yet—which I liked. Not Yet.”

“There wasn’t an above normal?”

“No, just high normal.”

“But this is America,” I said, confused. “We can’t do anything without proving we’re better than the next guy.”

“Well, this was a pediatrician’s office. They’re holding off on that. They don’t worry so much about comparisons.”

I had to disagree. From our first visit, our baby was dropped in a boil of every other baby that ever lived. We were given statistics: percentages, digressions from the mean. Reasons to compare. And worry.

bell curves: breaking hearts from birth to death

“But she was high normal in everything?” I asked.

“Right…”

“Except what?”

“Except…”

“What? Go ahead.”

“She was high normal in everything, but she’s not putting Cheerios in a bottle yet.”

“You filled out a questionnaire?”

“Right.”

“And they asked you that question—is she putting Cheerios in a bottle?”

“Yes.”

This had been a concern of mine for about two weeks, and her mother knew it. .

“She’s not putting things in things yet,” I said.

“Right.”

“Should she be?”

“Well…she could be. The doctor said that it would be exceptional if she was.”

There was that word: exceptional.

“So she’s not exceptional.”

“She was exceptional in everything else.”

“She was high normal,” I corrected.

“That’s really good, though.”

I processed.

“Her head was off the charts,” her mother said, with something like a laugh.

“Her head…” Another thing we’d worried about from the very first visit.

On the first visit, her weight was forty-forth percentile, her height was forty-eighth, and her head size was in the ninety-sixth percentile.

“Ninety-six,” I’d said to the doctor, alarm bells ringing. “Is that bad?” He looked like a cross between Doogie Howser and the young-looking lawyer on The Good Wife. In fact, he looked exactly like the young-looking lawyer on The Good Wife. Saying he also looked like Doogie Howser is gratuitous.

He said, “A large head can be something to worry about, but I’m not worried.”

This sounded to me the equivalent of, “Ketchup is red, but I don’t think it’s red.”

I’d been worried about her head size ever since. I was looking at pictures we’d already taken and noticing just how big her head really was. One made me think of the profile of the alien in Alien without the multiple dripping mouths.

“What do you mean ‘off the charts’?” I asked her mother now.

“A hundred and five percent or something.”

I’d hoped it would go down. It had gone up.

“But don’t worry,” she said. “He said it’s the shape of her head that’s causing it. Some people just have bigger heads. He asked if her mom or dad had a big head.”

I didn’t know whether I had a big head.

“I was sitting right in front of him!” she said. “I figured he could tell me whether or not I had a big head!”

“I don’t know if we have big heads,” I said.

“I don’t either.”

“But he’s not worried.”

“No, he’s not worried. He said it’s the shape of her head, like I said. And you know I’ve always thought the shape of her head was beautiful.”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “But the Cheerios in a bottle.”

“Right.”

“I’ve been worrying about that.” I’d been trying to get her to put plastic shapes in a red bucket. So far, she was good at taking the shapes out of the bucket. Dumping them on the floor. I was trying to get her to build, to stack. To create, not destroy. It wasn’t working. She wasn’t Michelangelo. She was an American company.

“I told him that,” she said. “I also told him about you putting the plastic rings on her ankles and how she has trouble getting them off and how you were concerned that it might be a problem.”

“And what did he say?” I was hoping he didn’t say “child abuse.”

“He said he didn’t think it was a problem. He said that if she could get the rings off her ankle, that would be exceptional.”

I sighed. That word again. Another near-miss.

It is hard when you think of your child as exceptional a lot of the time, only to realize that the hard, cold numbers tell a more measured story. She also hadn’t written a concerto yet.

It wouldn’t occur to the numbers to hold that against her.

I hated quantification, how it made everything less. Reduced it to something flat, and hard, and cold. Like employee reviews, where the point was to stuff you back down in a box of perceived mediocrity, so you wouldn’t complain or feel slighted the next time they took advantage of you. They convinced you you deserved it.

Worldly balance sheets left no room for magic, space to dream and be something more. Pixar films were supposed to take care of that.

It was the curse of Muggle-dom, to put it in Potter-ese.

“So what does it mean that she’s having trouble putting things in things?” I asked. “What is it testing?”

“It’s categorized under Problem Solving.”

“Problem solving.” I thought about that. Something occurred to me. “Wait a minute. How is it a problem that the Cheerios aren’t in the bottle? And why is it Cheerios? She hasn’t even seen Cheerios. Maybe it’s an indication of spiritual advancement. She understands that the Cheerios don’t have to be in the bottle. Not being in the bottle is not a problem.”

“I can’t answer that.”

 But I was lying to myself. I remembered the drills I’d administered with the bucket and the plastic shapes, the rings around her ankles. It wasn’t quite Louis Gossett, Jr. making Richard Gere do sit-ups till he wept in An Officer and a Gentleman: “I GOT NOWHERE ELSE TA  GO!” But it was the first taste of competition I’d had on her behalf.

On my behalf. For her.

In my mind I was already buying the Cheerios and the containers, mapping out her training.

At some point my mother developed a rather democratic theory of comparison, saying that all kids catch up to each other in time. You might be ahead or behind at a given point, but it would all even out.

And yet, as Americans or just simply humans we still thrilled at every indication of advanced, of specialness, of better. Of exceptional. Every sign of a future model, a future college football star. I developed early and had wide shoulders in seventh grade, and everyone I met told me future football coaches were going to salivate over me. My mother was right: everyone caught up. Coaches did not salivate over me.

“Our sweetie is advanced,” her mother placated me. “Don’t worry.”

I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to care about that. I wasn’t going to apply pressure, or risk ever feeling disappointed. I was going to try not to compare. “But someone in your class got an A,” I imagined myself saying. “Why wasn’t it you?” It made me sick.

Now, suddenly, roaring up: my inner tiger mother.

My mom has another expression she likes:

I just want to live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.

Even the world seemed to laugh–or snarl–at this concept now. I just want to live in a big house in a rich suburb and be a star admired by all. Call it the Simon Cowelling of our nation.

Was it genetic, her head size, head shape? Did I have a big head? I didn’t know. But I had the sneaky suspicion that if I wanted to measure it, I was going to have to take it out of my ass first.

And keep on taking it out, since the world probably wouldn’t.  

 That said, I still didn’t see unbottled Cheerios as much of a problem. My daughter must take after me on that.

Step 13: Daddy Wars

Headline of a March 8, 2011 online article: “Suri Cruise Still Uses A Pacifier—Isn’t She Too Old?”

I clicked on the link. Of course I did. For two reasons.

First reason: I wanted to see if Suri Cruise was too old to be using a pacifier.

Second reason: I wanted to see if it was possible I was a better dad than Tom Cruise.

Who's your Daddy?

Look, he’s already a better financial provider. Take whatever he has and subtract whatever I make, and that’s the difference, and I’m not going to pretend it’s worth doing the math. The fact is, there are disparities in this world, unfairness. While I have been a somewhat handsome guy, my smile never lit up cities.  I also don’t have Mr. Cruise’s Extreme Sports Mountain Dew mentality and daredevil streak that his wife bragged about on Leno recently. I never had to jump off a jet ski in motion to prove I am a man, or drive a Porsche two-hundred miles an hour, or do my own stunts. I do other things to prove I’m not a man.

But if Suri is still using a pacifier, and experts say it’s not a good idea at Suri’s age (5) to be using a pacifier, then I can make sure Isabella is not using a pacifier when she’s the age that Suri is now, and I can start the Dad contest over just before I steal her pacifier. That way, the score will be:

Me: 1

Tom Cruise: 0

In contrast to Suri, Isabella is the perfect age to be sucking on a pacifier, and we don’t even call it a pacifier most of the time. Sometimes we call it binky, but most of the time we call it a “moo.” We call it a moo because the type of pacifier Izzy prefers leaves an oval ring around her mouth that resembles that of a cartoon cow. Her mother coined the term. Moo is a subset of pacifier as Porsche is a subset of car. The moo is sleek in design, thin of nipple, and has the BPA-free plastic guard that creates the telltale mouth ring.

Isabella clearly prefers the moo to other, thicker pacifiers, and I don’t blame her. Compared to the moo, they now resemble the thick ugly fingers of prime ministers.

Isabella is already a pacifier snob, which means that she might be more Hollywood than Suri Cruise is already.

But her pacifier has a nickname so that she will remember her roots.

I don’t know if Suri Cruise’s illicit pacifier has a nickname, other than “Shouldn’t Be Putting It Into Her Mouth,” but the adjusted score is now:

Me: 2

Tom Cruise: 0

According to the article, the reason Suri Cruise should not be using a pacifier, to say nothing of the heels and lipstick that the five-year-old has also been pictured in—

Me: 2

Tom Cruise: -1

–is that it can cause bite problems, ear infections, sleep problems. The bite problem can lead to expensive dental bills, which Tom Cruise can easily pay—

Me: 2

Tom Cruise: (back to) 0

–and not only pay, but fly her to the orthodontist appointment himself in his own jet, and stop off afterwards to buy her an ice cream (franchise) and a pony (stable).

Me: 2

Tom Cruise: 1

According to the article, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes did not respond immediately to requests for comment. Which is understandable, considering that they were being asked about their toddler’s binky use.

Not that there aren’t comments from the couple.

“You really have to go with what the child is wanting,” Katie Holmes says, using the present continuous tense and referring not only to the tot’s use of a binky but also her designer taste in clothing, which has ranged from a Burberry coat to specially designed Christian Louboutin kitten heels. She also sucked on a bottle past the age of two, much the same way her dad has sucked on Hollywood’s teat.

Me: 1

Tom Cruise: 1

I lost a point there, due to nastiness. Score is knotted.

“I’m happy that my daughter is strong-willed and determined,” Katie has said—and in fact, only Katie is quoted in the article, leading one to wonder if strong, silent Tom is maybe, I don’t know, a deadbeat dad? Maybe not, but anyway, no points awarded either way, and I will point out that Isabella, too, is strong-willed and determined. Nevertheless, she doesn’t know how to ask for Burberry coats and Christian Louboutin kitten heels. Her parents aren’t that stylish, unfortunately. In the fashion garage, they are the taxicabs.

Stylish Suri on the town:

Suri: I left my other designer handbag back at the office, Daddy

In contrast, this is how a taxicab outfits his child for pictures: 

You seem to have dressed me like a watermelon, Daddy

 

But given her defiant binky use and fashion-forward sensibility, is it possible that Suri Cruise is the tail wagging the dog? Can it be that Tom Cruise, bastion of Scientological self-discipline and frequent ab work, base-jumper, couch-jumper, Method actor who once wanted to inject himself with a drug that would paralyze his legs for his role in Born on the Fourth of July, is soft?  The man who spurns psychiatry, the man who can will his cells into a single-file line and have them march through his bloodstream collecting free radicals, the man whose grin was once so blinding and white that not even his teeth seemed able to color in the lines—though his eyes and cheekbones managed to organize the whole mess. The man who once purposely chipped a tooth to play a scruffy soldier in Taps. Could it be that this powerful, megawatt man is a pussycat, a pair of kitten heels?

Could daughter Suri be his Kryptonite?

Well, this past weekend my daughter had horrible diaper rash, red and angry to the touch, so I was blowing on her butt all through changings to keep her from crying. I rubbed on the Desitin, and I blew on it some more.

Tom Cruise allows his daughter to dress like Posh Spice and hasn’t banished her binky. I blow soothing air on my daughter’s raw, red butt and love it when she’s dressed like a watermelon.

Tom Cruise and I appear to be pretty tough tootsies.

We’ll keep it at a draw for now.

Tags: binkies, bottle, Burberry, celebrities, Christian Louboutin, Daddy Wars, extreme sports, fashion, Katie Holmes, kitten heels, pacifiers, Suri Cruise, Tom Cruise

Step 12: The Sistine Playpen

We had the whole day in front of us. Saturday. The three of us. Ten o’clock in the morning and the day yawning intimidatingly open like a tunnel at the other end of which light did not peep. Like the essay portion of the law-school exam. Other days were wrecked, destroyed, laid waste by work and responsibilities. But today was an opportunity to be plumbed. Free as birds. Free as birds with imaginations. Free to offer up more of this world to our daughter. What were we going to do?

I was thinking of building a nest and eating some worms

Most of Isabella’s days are spent either in a car seat or on one of two living room floors. Let me say that I think she is doing fine, but let me also say that I can never stop the sense that I can be doing better. Listen, I hate summer. I hate that the sun that keeps us alive on planet Earth also kills us one concentrated ray at a time. Ask me to expose my daughter’s pale wondrous flesh to your goddamn killer sun and I will tell you: five minutes. Five minutes is what I will allow. Five minutes and I’ll be biting my lip all the way through it. And she’ll be wearing sunscreen. And a hat. And be under an umbrella. And the umbrella will be under a fucking awning. And your sun can kiss my ass. So, nothing today that involves being in the sun. I don’t care for hiking anyway. I hate that I don’t care to hike, but too bad. Your hiking trails should be shadier.

But I still feel guilty, because she should be out in the world, right? Under the killer sun and in the fresh, smog- and pollen-suffused, suffocating, allergy-ridden, cigarette-smoke-filled air, rather than safe in a boring living room. Right?

Last weekend we drove to Cincinnati, using her college fund to pay for gas, ate at Red Lobster, all as an excuse to use my gift card at the Joseph-Beth bookstore. At the restaurant, Isabella sat in her high chair and tossed her plastic chain-link toy on the floor no fewer than twenty times, while she gazed in wonder and delight at the passing wait staff and ate one-millimeter-square pieces of Red Lobster’s famous biscuits. At the bookstore, she crawled on the carpet and showed all the signs of badly needing a nap. I drove us home in a sudden storm that threatened to fling us off the road or light our Jeep up like a Mario ring, while our daughter snoozed in the backseat, counting on her father’s safe avoidance of hydroplaning, lightning and roadside ditches.

It was a great time, considering. But this was another Saturday, and we had no gift card to use as an excuse, no storms to brave, and gas prices were still mercenary. And because we have heard the warnings, know that she is branching dendrites off of neurons and building synapses that threaten to snap shut, BOOM, at the age of two, and that her brain is developing at a rate it will never see again, acquiring language and empathy and security and resilience in its mysterious manner at a breakneck clip, and that the radio commercials and books warn of travesties if the proper stimulation is not rendered, we are supposed to be doing all we can to maximize it.

We are to be doing no less than picking up where God left off.

All dressed up and nowhere to go

So we should be taking her to museums and aquariums, avoiding TV like anthrax, letting her feel wet coastal sand on her Midwestern toes, watching her face get red as she fills her diaper in the halls of the Smithsonian. We should be pulling New Zealand’s cute marsupials out of her mouth, not just the remote control. We should be reading her Jane Austen novels and letting her smell the great pastries of France. We should be using mirrors to show her bodies of water when we cross over bridges, so that she sees more than butterfly mobile and blue sky. Is she old enough for Build-A-Bear? How can I explain to her Einstein’s Theory of Relativity? Why is one of my greatest pleasures derived from seeing her in an Olive Garden high chair acting her version of grown up, blocking her lips with my hand when she wants to suck on the armrest? Can I, on the odd evening and weekend, do anything more special than lying with her in her playpen like a sack of laundry while she picks up and discards plastic rings, knocks over block towers, and teethes on my T-shirt? We should be flinging the world at her, gently, in perfect balance. And yet…I’m fumbling on the floor with her like Silas Marner.

What am I depriving her of?

What is not being done to develop her brain? For God’s sake, we don’t even make her watch America’s Got Talent yet.  

But maybe the truth is more forgiving.

Maybe her mother bouncing her up and down on her ankle until she creaks with laughter, or me turning her upside down until blood fills her birthmark; or one of us hugging her and kissing her chin when she bumps it on a plastic hexagon and cries; maybe laughing and letting her go when she pushes her face into my chest and leaves a wet mouth print and wants to immediately change course and grab the disembodied giraffe head rattle—maybe these things, most performed in the confines of a gray plastic six-part bulwark in the living room, are enough. Maybe the small, ball-filled inflatable pool at her Maw-Maw’s is enough.

Maybe the Seine and the Sistine Chapel can wait. She’s too busy licking those tasteless peach puffs off her palm to care about painted ceilings anyway. Perhaps the point is that on the map of my daughter’s whereabouts, at any given time, to the best of my ability, I try to ensure that the arrow pointing to the X is labeled We Are Here.

Yeeahhh…but no. It’s pretty to think so, except we still have to play blocks and toppling towers and stuff.

And go on modest walks, with her black stroller hood pulled way down and encasing her like the Death Star, shielding her from the other death star, the sun.

After all, the ceiling of her playpen isn’t a gorgeous painted tapestry. It’s the whole world.

If

Readers: If you could use one word to describe the journey of parenthood, what would that word be?

Any words can be used, except for the following:

• Cantankerous
• Juice box
• Folderol
• Synaptic

Also avoid:

• Irrigate
• Deciduous
• Think tank
• Power Vac

If you wish to use a word listed above, that’s fine. Scientists advise against them, but scientists don’t know everything.

Let me know in a comment. Feel free to describe why your word is the perfect word.

Step 11: The Sorrows and Joys of Schadenfreude

It is a beautiful world indeed when you can slam into the back of a car on your way to work, roll away with your front fender completely mashed and the toothy grinning hood bubbled up so that your car looks like something space-age out of The Jetsons crossed with Mater from the Cars movies, as I did this morning, get to work and find out that you, in fact, have not had a bad day at all. Because at least you didn’t tweet your private parts to a woman and have it leaked all over cyberspace.

So at least there’s that.

Nor are you an ex-governor with more of your marital affairs going public. Nor are you being indicted for using campaign funds to cover up an affair you were having while running for president. I mean, you might have done these things, but for it to be a truly bad day, you have to read about them on the internet. People have to stare at you while you’re walking into work, whispering, “He’s always been so quiet.”

but the back end is gorgeous

Given the accident, I did, of course, have to endure the looks of fellow drivers who have apparently never seen a wrecked Mitsubishi that looks like Mater from the Cars movies. Long, hard looks. Cars slowing down. Shouts. People taking pictures with their cell phones.

Technology has given rubbernecking a whole new dimension.

But the same old rudeness persists.

The vehicle I hit bore hardly a scratch, which one look at my car would suggest was both lucky and utterly illogical. I also hit the coolest driver in Ohio, apparently. She stood on the berm of the bridge we were parked on the side of, shrugged and asked if we even needed to exchange information. She said someone had backed into her front end the week before.

 Yet it’s on days like this, days when I have gotten into a fender bender on my way to work and suddenly feel EXACTLY like I did twenty years ago, the last time I got into a fender bender or two, or three—that peculiar feeling that you not only are a loser, but so much so that you can’t even join Glee Club (note to future teens: if you would be a loser, be sure you have musical talent and can break into song and dance on cue)–it’s on days like this that I need a spiritual pick-me-up that restores me to my sense that if I am not the superhero I once hoped I’d be, at least I am not Sid Vicious or Godzilla, laying waste to myself or whole cities, or minivans that happen to be in front of me. I’m that person, but it doesn’t mean I’m that person. Does it?

Because when I hit that car this morning, twenty years of distancing myself from the string of little messes I got into as a teenager suddenly folded in on themselves. And suddenly all I had to show for aging all this time, for growing older and supposedly wiser, is less hair, a bigger stash of useless clothes, and countless empty canisters of the Curel I slather on my face to stave off wrinkles. I hit a deer last December, and now my car is going back into the shop again. To have its front end fixed again. I have learned nothing. I have improved no part of myself.  I don’t even recycle with the same purity I used to. My best intentions have been thwarted yet again on my way over a bridge as I rushed to work in horrible traffic trying to avoid the bumper-to-bumper interstate and not be late to the morning meeting. Because everyone knows that you can’t be late to the morning meeting!!

My spiritual pick-me-up came, as it comes for so many of us, in the form of public figures who happened to have it worse than I did today.

It is weird, admittedly, to surf the internet or watch the news and see, almost despite myself, the Hanes-clad erect penis of the good representative from New York’s ninth district. To have this stately boner foisted on me, as if e-mailed to me and me alone. As if meant for my eyes only.

There may be no greater evidence of the much-debated breakdown of privacy in our society than all the pictures of Congressional and NFL private parts we have floating around, nor of the possibility that it is largely, if not totally, self-imposed.

I can imagine a future evening when my daughter asks me why men feel the need to circulate their weewees through various media channels, and that will be an evening when somebody else can use me to feel better about their bad day.

Seeing the eager penis posted online, and reflecting on its intentions as an amorous device meant to woo its recipient via text message, I couldn’t help but think, Whatever happened to wining and dining?

Must be so last century.  

We have such busy schedules nowadays. There was a time when public figures had to capture their own likenesses by Polaroid or by using quill and ink and several downward glances. Now, with cell phones, time isn’t a factor so much as lighting and angles. It leaves more time for affairs of the state, or the supplemental draft, which is a fine compromise.

“Public figure,” I can hear Beavis chortle.

When the subject of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D) came up at work, I did feel obligated to point out that Republican sex scandals still outnumber Democratic sex scandals by a count of three to one. I can hazard guesses at what that means, but I’ll leave that analysis to the major news outlets. They’re the experts and I don’t want to spoil their fun these next two weeks.

Values may seem to be crumbling all over, but it’s still our job as parents to rivet and steel-reinforce the house of cards for the sake of our youth, at least until they’re done with Sesame Street. So far, to my knowledge, there have been no major Elmo scandals.

I have perpetrated far worse crimes in my time alive than either tweeting my penis or rear-ending a driver, and when I get home I have to once again be the confident, conscientious, put-together parent of a small child.

But with my front end still crunched, and the reality of the $500 deductible I now owe still looming, and the resonance of the mistakes of the day not quite gone from my bones, I still need a reprieve. So I think of the manhood-filled underpants  and the pink pixelated gifts granted us by Congressman and NFL Hall-of-Famers, and all the scandals of our governors and presidential hopefuls, and want to rush home and tell my daughter, “Guess what Daddy didn’t do today!”

Step 10: Have a Friend

I have a friend I met when I was waiting tables in Williamsburg, Virginia, whom I lived with for a time and who got brave right at about the time I was stopping my brave streak.

He left his possessions with a mutual friend–including a big pink stuffed amusement-park moose, which should give you the idea of the kind of Peter-Pan, I-don’t-want-to-grow-up-I’m-a-Toys-R-Us-kid kind of man he is–and moved out to Los Angeles to live, Kato-Kaelin-style, in a garage-turned-apartment and pursue his dream of writing screenplays. The bastard.

While I, conversely, moved to Columbus, Ohio, and got a corporate job, and pursued my dream, evidently, of writing on the odd weekend.

Good for him.

One of the reasons I didn’t move out there was because I wanted to stay close to my parents and brother in Illinois, and my girlfriend at the time who was attending Ohio State, and continue making several trips home a year. That worked for a while, but now I don’t even get to see them all that much.

Good for him.

Of all of this, much can be said. The point is, he embraced what I was unwilling to embrace in life–and that is our mutual inner slut when it comes to Hollywood.

I was reading US magazine by the time I was twelve years old. I had pictures of Richard Grieco (from 21 Jump Street; the dark guy with hoop earrings and limitless black T-shirts who was NOT Johnny Depp) on the corkboard wall of my room (don’t ask; or, ask, but be prepared for a long answer, and it’s not because I’m gay, although I know that this admission does a good job of hiding that fact). I can still rattle off names of the third lead in an 80s movie you probably didn’t see, which not only doesn’t help me in life, it doesn’t even boost my score in Cosmo quizzes. I still know WAY too much about celebrities and movies—I know, for example, the name of Patrick Swayze’s wife (Lisa Niemi) and can quote early Mel Gibson (“I ain’t ugly, but I wouldn’t call myself an Adonis, either”)—and I had to cancel my subscription to Entertainment Weekly because the movies it promises don’t make their way to Ohio until five months after I know about them, and in the meantime I end up trying to find the screenplay and reading it online, and getting upset and boycotting the movie when it finally gets here because I’m disgusted at having to wait so long and have read all the reviews, and…

 The point is, I have lived, in part, a lie.

I was better than Hollywood. I was going to do my thing in the Midwest, write my novel or a script, ship it off to one of the coasts, and they were going to embrace it, embrace me, and I could do it all without having sold out, without having to admit my infatuation with the movers and shakers, the glamour hounds and beautiful people. I was going to do it with one foot in.

Well, so far the Hokey Pokey has not worked. I remain out.  

For the purpose of this blog, I will call my friend on the west coast West Coast. He is a transplant from Charlottesburg, VA, but embodies the values of the east coast that he shamelessly seized, with all the emptiness that implies, while I chose to dwindle away my potential in a dry office setting, with all the emptiness that implies.

Life is often the choice between emptinesses that are implied.

But he has both feet in, and that implies risk and courage beyond the empty sluttiness.

West Coast and I talk on the phone a lot, and he offers some of the same wise counsel as Handsome Randy Jackson, but the truth is they would not get along at all.

Here is what I will say about West Coast: I hope I live long, and that he lives at least one day longer. He keeps me sane, and he would applaud the selfishness in that sentiment.

In our friendship, I am usually the unselfish one.

When my daughter was born, he flew 2,200 miles to Ohio the following month to see her. He held her, awkwardly at first, and awkwardly at the end, and he recoiled at the poop that came out of her, and he constructed a homemade mobile for her out of the cardboard image of the audience at an Obama rally.

I hasten to say that’s kind of cool. The mobile; not the revulsion at her poop.

Revulsion at poop is actually sensible, but when it’s your daughter, you want people to smile at it like flowers.

When I told him I was having a daughter, I did it late. She was already born. I didn’t do it earlier because I wanted to tell him in person. So when I flew out to Los Angeles (actually Santa Monica, where the rent is still ridiculous) to tell him, I actually had pictures. I’ve been keeping something from you, and I had my reasons, um, here’s a picture of my daughter…

He could have drowned me in the Pacific, but he didn’t.

He sat back in his chair with tears in his eyes and said, “So I’m going to be an uncle.”

That is one reason I want him to live one day longer than me.

He is one of about ten people I fervently hope that about, and most of them are related to me, and he is not one of the ones that are over sixty. Nor my daughter, her mother, or my brother. I’m not sure why I am wishing for my own death over these people, but if any of them are planning to die anytime soon, I’m going to be really pissed and their ashes are going to hear about it.

When I was a basket case about all the toxins and impurities in the world that I feared were assaulting my daughter every minute, West Coast reminded me (as Dr. Spock did not) that exposure to germs and impurities make her stronger every second, and are, frankly, essential, which was exactly what I needed to hear and which reduced this heartless beast of a world to the level of a case of chicken pox.

He also sent a custom-made T-shirt:

And I should mention, since he brought it up, that he is really funny. His blog is here. If I didn’t mention that he was funny, way funnier than I am, he probably would drown me in the Pacific.

Hopefully we all have friends like this. I believe, though, that this is not so. I believe I am lucky. I hope that Isabella one day has a friend like this.

Okay, that’s enough sentiment. West Coast actually chaps my ass quite a bit, and we argue more than we agree, and when we argue, a third party could be forgiven for wondering why we are even friends. He has crap taste in movies, according to me. He has selective discipline, according to me. And he didn’t pretend my daughter’s poop was flowers. The nerve.

 But the world, and my world, is a better place for him. And that is something I hope to inspire in my daughter as well.

And if you up and die before me, West Coast, that homemade cardboard mobile with the audience from the Obama rally is going over your mound so fast, you better have a speech ready from the grave, because they’re cheering down at you and you never keep a sacred audience waiting. And in this scenario, my thousand-year-old daughter is going to dance on your grave like a flying fish. Otherwise I want to be long dead and dreaming of all of you.

That’s all I’m saying.

my daughter, my friend

Tags: 80s movies, celebrities, custom T-shirts, daughter, friendship, Patrick Swayze, Richard Grieco, surprises, true to yourself

Step 9: When It Comes to Wonder, Avoid Tangents

Have you heard about this ant?

I should say, have you heard about this fungus? But I’ll get to that in a minute.

 As a dad, I’m charged with many things. One of them is to filter my daughter’s sensory input, narrate the objects of her experience. Show her beauty and magic, on the planet and beyond. Be a kind of tour guide of wonder.

 

Here are colors. Red. Green. Here are shapes. Circle. Square. Star, which is a shape and other things besides. That’s the sun. Bright. Let me shield your eyes from it. Watch it touch your foot. This is a leaf. See how the sun hits the leaf and fills it from behind with liquid light. This is a book. In books is all the wisdom of the world that has only been partially transferred to the Internet and Amazon’s Kindle. And while we’re on the subject, here is the Nook, which, if I am going to support an e-book reader, I am going to support Nook over Kindle, because I want Barnes and Noble to stay in business more than I want Amazon to stay in business, because…

But I am getting away from wonder. The bird in flight. The twitching humility of the bird in repose, as it rethinks itself on a branch and remains assured. The glorious unself-consciousness of the tree. The dewy, sad beauty in the eye of the horse and elephant. The wonder of water. The simple utility of a towel.

Feel this sand on your toes, the shifting and sliding. And over there, look at the ant. How he bumbles in his path. Watch them build their hill. Moving both separately and in concert. The ants at work, it’s a festival of coordination and mass cooperation that humans only know for an hour after a major tragedy, if that, and even then, politicians are spinning and angling, and the media is…but let’s stay focused on the ant, shall we, wondrously carrying a crumb three times its size. The ant is an insect. A little like the termites that we had to call Terminix to spray and get rid of using gallons of pesticide all around the house—

Did you know the ant can lift and carry a load of up to fifty times its weight? It can. The ant is marvelously strong. Fifty times its weight. That would be the equivalent of me lifting five cars over my head, stacked atop one another. Your dad, five cars…the American car industry having radically improved ever since the American-caused economic tailspin that because of subprime mortgages and banker greed—

Look at your skin, so smooth and perfect compared to your father’s psoriatic skin, which is caused by a normally vigilant immune system turning on itsel— Praying you won’t inherit—It’s an autoimmune disord—

I mean, ahem.

And look at this ant from Brazil’s tropical rain forest. How it crawls on the tree. How it drops to the ground. A variation of carpenter ant. Jesus was a carpenter. And beneath the ants on the Brazilian rainforest floor, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus dating back to 1865, you don’t have to pronounce it, stick with Dada or Dad, Mama or Mom, and don’t worry about remembering the date. These ants fall and the thing you don’t have to pronounce, the fungus, lying in wait, gets inside them, travels to their brains, which are amazing things, brains. And once the fungus is there in the ant’s brain, it, well, it takes over. It has the mind-controlling effect of causing the ant to leave its colony, a colony is like a large family, causes the ant to leave and stagger as if drunk until it finds a special leaf. The ant is now acting very un-ant-like, very zombie-like at this point and not in control of its destiny—which is the unfortunate trait of zombies—and the ant bites down on the underside of the special leaf with the final movement of its jaw, because its jaw, scientists have found, is atrophied at this point, the fungus having eroded its musculature, the jaw good for only a hard, final, frozen bite. And now the ant is done, dead and anchored in place, and the fungus slides down from its brain, down into the special leaf that is ideal for the fungi to grow. A stalk then bursts through the ant’s head, like the stem of a flower growing from its skull, and sometimes through its other joints including its knees, and the fungi’s spores, all kinds of little Ophiocordyceps unilateralis—you still don’t have to say it; I no longer want to say it—spray out from the stalks and reproduce themselves on the rainforest floor, and the zombie ant, riveted in place, completely unaware, made it all possible.

I…

…

Isn’t that, um, wondrous?

Our wonderful world, sweetheart. So many—an odd way to make a buck—it takes all kinds to make a w— More things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio—

Your Daddy is just trying to recover from telling you the zombie ant story that has been circulating MSN for a few months now. From imagining telling you.

Let’s just say, not everything’s wondrous.

Some of the rest of it can be kind of a head-scratching bastard.

The truth is, I haven’t told you about the zombie ant yet. Count the zombie ant as something you won’t be hearing about from me. No Internet until you’re sixty.

For the time being, sweet baby, and for a long time after that, we stick to clouds. And psoriasis.

Step 8: Hats…Never a Baby’s Fault

As some may have noted, I am a fan of the long form.

This is one of the challenges I referenced when I began this blog. Bloggers are good at between-meal snacks, Totino’s Pizza Rolls. I am poor at it. I am not satisfied unless I’m stuffing sandwiches.

So, for a break, and for advocates of the short form, I here include a picture of Isabella, not in Paris but in some sort of Parisian headgear that we bought and she wore twice, in her car seat, at the doctor’s office.

I still remember bending down to take three pictures.

I love her pictures. This is a rare one when she is not posing, not smiling.

She is air I was breathing.

As for her strap guard: Puppies kiss babies no matter what their hats look like.

Step 7: Mistakes Are Like Peanut Butter–Chunky or Smooth?

Oh, the mistakes we parents make.

I know, I know. I picked up a copy of Paul Reiser’s savvily-scribed Familyhood and realized, with some chagrin at my own trotted-out parental insecurities on this blog, that the perceived way to a reader’s heart is apparently to make yourself look as bad as possible, glamorizing every stupid decision, poking fun at your own paltry knowledge base when it comes to raising a child. As Reiser says in Chapter One, lamenting his East Coast upbringing that has him running after his kids with sweatshirts on warm SoCal days, “The psychological damage to my children has not been fully assessed.” It’s as if, to be credible, you have to suggest that you are some sort of Mommy or Daddy Armageddon. The scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis melt—they suffered a fate better than the one your own kid is going to suffer at your parental hands. This seems to be the strategy even in water cooler discussions that don’t involve arrogant assholes (or water coolers, since workplaces don’t even offer free water anymore), and I suppose it’s not one I’m likely to give up here.

Even Diablo Cody, screenwriter of Juno, childless herself, seemed proud of the line she put in Allison Janney’s mouth when Jennifer Garner, holding her newly adopted baby, asks, “How do I look?”

“Like a new mom. Scared shitless.”

But even as Isabella’s entire body is now being overtaken by a giant rash/yeast infection marauding thing right out of Roald Dahl, or from that short story in Skeleton Crew where the black blobby mass eats four of Stephen King’s insouciant teenagers, I’m thinking of other mistakes, not just whatever we did to allow this pestilence to overtake our daughter’s smooth white skin. While I’m on the subject, it’s kind of a pisser, isn’t it? I make her wear a hat and sunscreen to go out on the porch for ten-minute increments, shield her from the sun like it’s a sketchy uncle, and still, under her neck, diaper, on her butt, traveling north up her tummy is this red splotchy pustule-laden rash that looks like a Rick Baker special effect in old Fangoria magazines.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t drop my Petri dish full of flour-and-water experimental mold growths in her diaper, or paint her with an admixture of yogurt and anthrax, so what the bloody hell?

Until we figure that out, one mistake I know we’re making is that we’re not fostering her ability to entertain herself at all times. “Self-soothe,” in the parlance. I have this on several authorities. Here’s why:

Pan in on a dark backyard. Move in on a two-story house and up to the second floor window, up over the eaves to the nursery, which in the dim incoming hall light is pink and brown and butterfly-stenciled. In through the window, across the floor to the crib, and—

OH MY GOD! Where is the baby???!!!! The crib is empty!!

Relax. On every evening since her birth she has been in the next bedroom, sleeping in a second pack n’ play, and lately has been planted smack in the middle of her parents, with (a strange habit of hers) a hand on both noses.

Also, don’t relax. As a result of this, we are probably doing untold damage, robbing her independence, creating a reliance on others for her security, generating material for a movie-of-the-week on Lifetime when she grows up and her adolescence goes horribly wrong and she sets a plague of ladybugs on her junior high school.

Her mother said the other day, “They told us the crib would last her until college. I didn’t realize she wouldn’t be sleeping in it until college.”

Touché. Yet that same mother gets her to sleep, at naps and bedtime, by holding her, every time. This strategy has been developed partly honestly: my daughter fights sleep like she’s already working on her bucket list. But then, chicken or egg? Does she fight sleep because she’d overly coddled, or is she overly coddled because she fights sleep?

In any case, at the gym, Handsome Randy Jackson, from the second blog on this site, weighed in on our coddled infant. Even he is assured on the topic.

“You have to let her self-soothe.”

“Self-soothe, self-soothe. I’ve heard that a thousand times. My parents say that. Everyone says that. I say that.”

“That’s because everyone is smarter than you.”

“Did you hear me say I say that?”

“If she doesn’t learn to self-soothe, you’re in for a world of hurt. She’s in for a world of hurt.”

“Isn’t it a world of hurt anyway?” I asked, trying to catch him off guard with philosophy.

“Save that crap for your Maker,” Handsome Randy Jackson says, trying to catch me off guard with spirituality. “Eight months old and still sleeping with you? In the same bed?”

“Look, people do this all different ways. There’s loads of misinformation out there. People in Seattle breast feed their babies in public fountains,” I said, realizing I was quoting satirically from another of my blogs, “and sleep in family beds until the kids are ready for third grade. I’ve read it.”

“Are these people twenty-three years old? Do they sleep on giant flatbread? The younger generations change diapers with an app on their cell phones. They don’t think the same as middle-aged folks.”

“I’m not middle-aged.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“Hate to break it to you, but you’re middle-aged. Stop being such a child.”

“How can you call me middle-aged and also a child? In the same breath.”

“She has to learn to self-soothe.”

“I’m just saying. It’s illogical and robs you of your credibility.”

“Your kid cries like she’s remembering a lost world.”

“You’re no longer handsome.”

“Get back on your treadmill.”

This is the end of most of our debates.

So our baby cries, and sleeps in parental flanked position, and has a rash that would make Job himself hesitate. And yes, childless Diablo Cody is right, we have often been scared shitless.

Here’s the thing I didn’t tell Handsome Randy Jackson:

If I’m honest, I’ve nursed a loneliness my whole life, even when in a roomful of people. I don’t know why. I didn’t even realize I felt this way until my early thirties.

If I am going to err, it is going to be on the side of not letting her cry in a room unattended. Not yet.

I have let her cry, attended. I ate cereal while she did it, and then, frustrated, I ate the bowl.

Weirdly, it is probably a mistake both ways. I know that’s illogical.

Maybe being a parent is choosing one mistake over another.

Maybe it’s rationing your selfishness with hers.

I actually think Handsome Randy Jackson and my parents and all non-Seattle parents whose beds don’t contain tiny baby sports teams are right, she does need to self-soothe. I’m just not sure the best way to carry it out. You should have seen what a hard-ass I was when I was chomping on that cereal bowl. Toughlove with teeth.

In the meantime, she has a rash, so we’re slathering her with white medicated butter. And she’s sleeping in the same room with us. If this makes her future adolescent self consider the potential of a ladybug plague, we’ll deal with that ambition later. I’ll brush them off my cheek during the parent-teacher interview.