MetroDad

Apropos of Nothing: 3 Thoughts on Fatherhood

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

I am a man well suited for the modern era.

I'm excellent at cocktail party conversation. I have a wicked backhand. And I can make my own sushi.

However, because of those traits, I thank God every day that I wasn't born a caveman. Living in a society where premiums were placed on brute strength and hunting skills would have been difficult for me. Unless I did something drastic like invent fire, I imagine my days as a caveman would have been extremely short-lived.

As the old joke goes...the lion may be the undisputed king of the jungle, but airdrop him into Antarctica, and he's just a penguin's bitch.

Why am I bringing this all up?

Because my daughter is a million times tougher than me. Seriously, she's like from the old country or something.

Unlike her coddled father who requires a steady supply of sinus medication and cashmere blankets to make it through a winter, my daughter is a freaking beast of a human being. She's never cold. She runs faster than Marion Jones on steroids. And I've seen her bounce straight up after taking hits that would crumple a professional rugby player.

And in her 3.5 years on this planet, she has NEVER been sick!

Until now.

Sure, she's had the occasional fever. And a few times, we've had to keep her out of daycare. However, everything she's ever had, she's recovered from within a day or two.

However, ever since Saturday night, the poor Peanut has been sicker than hell. She's had a terrible fever. She's been diagnosed with strep. She's completely lost her voice. And until yesterday, she couldn't even keep any food down in her system.

If it were me, I'd be crying for my mommy and e-mailing all my friends to visit me on my deathbed.

My daughter isn't complaining a bit. She just sits there and toughs it out. Sometimes, it's almost scary how tough she is.

I look at her and I now know what it means when they say certain traits skip a generation. My father is a tough motherfucker. He was physically abused by his parents in Korea until he ran away from home as a teenager. He survived for years as a street urchin, sleeping outside in the snow without a jacket or even a blanket. Later, he got shanghaied into the U.S. Army and even bullets couldn't slow the man down. The Army was so amazed by his toughness, they gave him a Bronze Star.

I used to look at myself and be amazed at the fact that such toughness could leave the gene pool in the span of a single generation. But now, looking at my daughter, I see it never really left in the first place.

Oh well...tennis, anyone?

IT'S THE ABRIDGED VERSION, DAMMIT!

Over the course of the Peanut's lifetime, she has often favored one parent over the other. In the past, BossLady and I used to joke about it. Whoever was most favored at the time could frequently be seen running around the apartment naked, yelling "I'm number one! I'm number one!"

However, with great power comes great responsibility.

The person with Most Favored Parent status is adamantly required to put the Peanut to bed every night. No substitutions are allowed and no one else is permitted into the bedroom. These rules are strictly enforced by the Peanut.

For the past 6 months, I have been Numero Uno. At first, I was completely excited and honored. I hadn't been #1 in almost a year. It almost felt like I'd won an Academy Award. Every night, Peanut and I would go to her room at precisely 8:00 pm. I'd read her books for half an hour. We'd talk about what we were going to do on the weekend. And then I'd lie down on the floor next to her until she completely fell asleep. By the time I'd left her room, it could sometimes be as late as 9:30 or 10:00. Ridiculous, right?

Now, I don't read her books anymore. Or stay in her room. I've got the whole bedtime routine down to under a minute.

What's my secret?

Abbreviated stories and Starburst candy. My daughter will do anything for a Starburst. Natch, make that 1/4 of a Starburst.

Now, at 8:00 pm, we go into her room. I turn off all the lights and I say, "Once upon a time, there was a girl named Cinderella who lost her shoe and became a princess. The end. Go to bed."

Then, like a lion feeder at the zoo, I toss a few pieces of Starburst on her bed and run out of the room.

I know I should feel guilty about this but, shit, American Idol comes on at 8.

FLATTERY WILL GET YOU EVERYWHERE!

What the hell happened to manners in this country?

I know I've riffed on this a million times before (and maybe living in New York makes it worse) but there are times when I find myself gripped by an overwhelming desire to smack our entire country upside its collective head.

You can't get out of the subway in the morning these days without some idiot trying to spawn upstream into the train while everyone else is trying to get off.

Don't even bother sneezing in an elevator anymore. Instead of having people proffer a kind, "Bless you!," you're more likely to hear them utter, "Better not get me sick, asshole!"

And to the lady in my office building the other day?  When I hold the door open for you, the correct reply is "thank you," not "I got it myself."

I always swore that if I was only going to teach my daughter one thing, it would be manners. I don't care if she never learns how to read a single book. She's going to be the best-mannered functional illiterate in the whole damn country.

So far, everything is going according to plan. For a 3.5-year-old, the Peanut is unfailingly polite. I couldn't be happier.

Lately, she's learned the concept of "the compliment."

For those of you with toddlers, it's a fascinating phase. In the adult world, flattery is a lost art. Compliments have become valueless currency that no longer bear any meaning. However, for little kids, compliments are not only a way of being polite but also a manner in which to express their love or admiration.

And because we see kids as being wholly honest and forthcoming, we always take their compliments to heart. We then praise them for being so nice. However, this creates a cycle in which the child seeks praise so she doles out compliments constantly. It can be cute but it can also be annoying.

The other day, Peanut was in full-compliment mode. Those are nice jeans, mommy! Hey daddy, I really like your sweater. This is the best spaghetti ever. You're such a good daddy. I really like your boots.

Blah, blah, blah.

I really started tuning her out when she began complimenting the dog.

However, right before bedtime, she came up to me and said, "Daddy, you have really great hair."

Needless to say, homegirl got two Starbursts that night.

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You guys have sent in some great banners. Keep them coming. I'll post my favorites by the end of next week and we'll decide on a winner. Thanks.

Love in a Backward World

"Whether you see Valentine’s Day as a chance to shower a loved one in gifts or a good excuse to order an extra-dry gin martini, you’re probably going to think about love at some point today. So watching Chris Vincze’s graceful and very clever short film EVOL is a great way to treat yourself to a lighthearted take on the subject du jour.

To shoot EVOL, Vincze had his two leads, a mopey man and a sweetly bookish woman in the middle of busy London, perform all of their actions backward. Then he reversed the film in postproduction — showing us a couple who find each other because they’re out of sync with everyone else. The technique fits the film’s story perfectly: It’s magical, unashamedly corny, a little disorienting, and constantly surprising. Which, in our experience, is pretty much like falling in love." (via VSL)

Quick V-Day story: I headed out to the gym this morning at around 6:15 am. Usually when I get back home, Peanut and the BossLady are either sleeping or just about to wake up. This morning, I walked into the apartment to see Peanut sitting at the kitchen table by herself. She gave me an enormous grin and cheerfully asked, "Hi daddy! You want to share some chocolate with me?" Turns out she had opened one of the boxes of chocolate meant for her teacher and inhaled half the box. She was still bouncing off the walls when I left for work. There are few things in life that are as simultaneously funny and scary as seeing a toddler on a sugar high. 

Happy Valentine's Day, BossLady! You will always be the love of my life. I love you dearly.

Happy Valentine's Day to all of you out there as well. Don't forget to hide the chocolate. And keep sending in those banners! They're great.

Long Live the Asian Leprechaun!!!

Thanks for sharing all your embarrassing childhood family stories.

Not only did I laugh my ass off reading all of them but I also now feel much better knowing I wasn't the only kid with a bowl haircut who grew up riding a girl's bicycle while wearing orange corduroys and eating a kimchi sandwich.

So many of you submitted so many great stories that had me both laughing and cringing at the same time: Crapping your pants in your dad's police car. Boys being dressed in their older sisters' hand-me-downs. Getting your hair cut by your mother in a style that can best be described as Romulan-meets-Caveman. Having your parents show naked pictures of you to all your friends. Watching in horror as your mother comes to your school dressed as a clown. Opening your lunch box in school only to find a giant pig's foot in it. And let's not forget all the shocking training bra stories!

The list goes on and on. It's a wonder that ANY of us ever survived our childhoods, isn't it?

However, as with any contest such as this, there can only be one winner. And like most of you, the clear winner for me was Stephen Joyce's traumatic tale of going to school on St. Patrick's Day dressed like a leprechaun:

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"Wow, this is like reading my life story. Like you, I try to play a bigger role in the raising of my two daughters and I sometimes wonder what kind of impact I'm having on their formative minds."

"Anyway, the story that always brings tears of laughter to my wife is the one of my very first St. Patrick's Day. My family moved from Malaysia to Canada in 1977 and it was my very first year at a public school. Since the tradition for St. Patrick's Day is to wear something green, my Mom thought it would be great if I went to school in an all green outfit, oh heck, how about a leprechaun outfit."

"Yep, that's right, my Mom sewed me a full on leprechaun outfit complete with a little hat and shoes, all made out of felt. Did I mention the green tights. Needless to say, there is nothing quite as hilarious to a group of second graders than a little Asian kid wearing green tights and walking around in the miserable March rains wearing green felt slippers. For added embarrassment, my second grade teacher ask me to stand on my chair so that all the kids could have a good look at my costume. Nice."

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All hail the Asian Leprechaun! Congrats, Stephen. With a story like that, you deserve a great prize. E-mail me your shipping address. You are now the proud winner of (1) a brand-new Phillips Senseo Single-Serve Coffee Pod System (2) a DVD of the hit comedy "Borat", and (3) an autographed poster of Mandy Moore.

Now, for some quick housecleaning...

(1) I've always hated the way that this site looks. Long-time readers may remember that the previous style of this site was even worse and was best described as looking like a pumpkin threw up on a pile of poo. As for this template, is it me or is it really hard to read? The font seems small and it's hard to read against a grey background, isn't it? What's your opinion? All I care about is the writing. How can I make this site as easy to read as possible?

(2) I also would love to have a new banner. However, if you haven't guessed already, I'm completely design illiterate when it comes to anything related to computers. That's why I'm coming to all of you for help. So many of you are so incredibly talented when it comes to this stuff. How about we have a contest? Design a banner that you think would be great for this site. I'll pick my favorites and put up the finalists for a vote.

The winner will receive (1) a brand-new Apple Shuffle, (2) a full ensemble of work-out/casual athletic clothing, and (3) a $50 American Express gift certificate.

E-mail me your entries over the next few weeks. Let's see what you've got! Feel free to pass the word along.

(3) If any of you are interested, here's a brief interview I did with the lovely Karen Cheng, Australia's version of Dooce, Design Sponge, and Smitten Kitchen all rolled up into one. Karen is an amazing blogger who apparently gets more traffic than google. Read her site and you'll quickly see why.

(3) One last thing...Valentine's Day is coming up. For those of you with kids, how the hell do you find a babysitter? And do you think it's true that nothing says "I love you" like a big-ass plasma television for the bedroom? Or is that kind of like the time Homer gave Marge a bowling ball for her birthday?

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Family Dynamics: New Roles for Dads

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time talking to my therapist about my family.

Now, I'm not going to start publicly pulling skeletons out of the family closet. After all, let's face it. Most families are weird. Most families have their own issues. And most families are capable of leaving all of us with our own unique set of baggage.

Personally, I think I’m pretty lucky. I escaped the unique weirdness of my family with very little psychic damage.

As I think back upon my childhood, I realize that although my father was the strict disciplinarian who never hesitated to take off his belt and give us a proper whupping, it was my warm-hearted mother who forced me into all those embarrassing situations that caused the lion’s share of traumatic childhood memories.

Why was that?

When I speak to my friends, it’s clear that almost all of us were essentially raised by our mothers. Times were different back then. Even if both parents worked full-time, it was mom who always made the decisions. Dad was the working stiff.

In my case, my mother was a newly-arrived immigrant. Therefore, I'm not quite sure whether her cruelty stemmed from ignorance of prevailing social norms in America or a penchant for embarrassing the hell out of her children.

How else to explain the fact that she bought me a girl's bicycle for my 6th birthday?  While all my friends were sticking baseball cards in the rims of their Huffy or BMX-style bikes, I was cruising the streets in a sunflower yellow banana-seat bicycle with a white wicker basket and a cute little bell out in front.

And did my mother really not know how to make a bologna sandwich or did she think it was going to be really funny to send me to school with densely-packed bowls of stinky Korean food?

Did she truly think that orange corduroy pants with bell bottoms and plaid vests were normal attire for 8-year-olds?

And don't even get me started on the haircuts! While our family wasn't always flush with cash, she certainly could have afforded the $5.00 to have my hair cut by a professional.

Instead, she always insisted on cutting my hair herself. Unfortunately, her home haircut kit consisted of a pair of meat scissors and a wooden bowl. She'd always finish and say "well, how does that look?" I'd say, "Looks great, Mom. Because in case my school does a stage production of Sling Blade, this haircut makes me look like Karl's stupider friend who couldn't get laid if his life depended on it."

"Now, where are my orange corduroys? I have to ride that girl's bike you bought me to my piano lesson."

I wish I could say that things changed as I got older but then I think about that time in college when my parents took me and my girlfriend out to dinner and my mother regaled her with stories about how difficult I was to toilet train.

Aaarrggh! Mothers!

Now, don't get me wrong. I love my mother very much and these are certainly not the issues that I've been speaking to my therapist about.

It's just that the whole process makes one realize that the mother-child relationship has always been a complex one, fraught with more ambivalence and misfires than American politics. Mothers can work a 30-years-gone umbilical cord like Roy Rogers working a lasso.

In some ways, the relationship between a mother and a child never changes, and that's because your mother still remembers when you were three and shoved all those Cheerios up your nose.

Do you know why cult leaders always force members to cut off all contact with their families? Because they know that their spell will be broken and all the mind control will disappear the instant you hear your mother saying, "And I suppose that just because your new thetan friends are hooking their testicles up to a cattle prod so they can go on the spaceship, you have to do it too, right?"

I’ve been thinking about all this lately because recently I’ve been interviewed by several journalists and authors about how this generation of fathers is so much more involved in raising their kids than previous generations of dads. While studies show that children benefit greatly from having their fathers involved in their lives, I find myself always pondering the impact of our increased involvement.

See, even though my wife and I work full-time, my hours are much more flexible. So frequently, I'm the one getting my daughter dressed for school. I'm the one cooking all of her meals. And I'm the one picking her up in the afternoon and taking her on playdates.

Holy crap, I'm like a mom!

If that's the case, I can only wonder how I’m psychologically scarring MY daughter.

Will she be ostracized at school because I always pack Japanese eel and rice in her lunch box?

Will she look at old photos and be mortified that I let her go to school in red tap shoes, green corduroys, and a Mets jersey?

Do you think she'll hold it against me that I like to kill two birds with one stone so I sometimes give her and the dog a bath at the same time?

Will my daughter grow up with a weird sense of gender dynamics because I sometimes yell, "Alright, kiddo. You're in big trouble now. Just wait until your mother comes home!"

I don't know. At the end of the day, I guess none of us ever know how our parents impacted us or how we're going to impact our own kids. Whether it's the mom who runs the house or it's the dad who stays at home, do we ever know exactly how much we're influenced by each parent? Like I said, all families have their own weirdness. And so I guess part of the fun is in seeing how it all turns out.

As Dennis Miller once brilliantly said, "Families keep everything in perspective. You can grow up, get out in the world, become a big success. You can control fortunes, corner the market, forecast financial trends, steer your company into the 21st century and beyond, but you go home to your family and you know who you are?"

"You're the kid who got tricked by his brothers into drinking a glass of pee."

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Your turn now:

What's the most embarrassing childhood memory caused by your parents or family?  Or what's the most embarrassing thing you've ever done to your own kid?

Special prize to the winner who makes me laugh so hard, I snort Diet Coke out of my nose!