Half Cleveland Dad

Metrodad

This post just about fixes Metrodad back at the top of my list of favorite bloggers.

Cool and Pretty

This weekend we got a kiddie seat that attaches to the back of my bike.  With Sweet Potato in it, the thing basically rides like my previous aftermarket haulage accessory -- a milkcrate -- when it would be filled with groceries or beer. 

We got a helmet for Sweet Potato, too.  She went for the purple and pink flowers.  She says, Dhe-ehd, yohr hehw-meht is cooh an mine is pwhetty.

It’s great Sweet Potato thinks I’m cool.  One of the reasons I liked my daycare job in high school was that one of the five-year olds said, You’re strong!  Yeah, kiddo!

In fact, I look like a cross between Junichiro Koizumi and Bert the Muppet; my belly button is deepening; I dress entirely in off-price “irregular”-grade clothing, faded and bleach-stained, preferring to layer four old shirts rather than wear a jacket; my helmet is a garish blue (sale bin color); I ride a 25-year old bike that I picked up at a hillbilly yardsale for ten bucks; my beloved two-year old daughter is wearing a flowery helmet, an SF Giants hoodie, froggy galoshes, and a tutu.

But yeah, it’s great being cool and pretty.  Plus, it was pretty god damn cold to ride (high 30s and windy), so we yelled all the way down the street, It’s NOT WARM!  AT ALL!  AT ALL! AT ALL! 

***

In the fall I helped my six-year old niece learn how to ride a two-wheeler!  It was one of the most terrific times in my life, and I just wanted to wake up every morning and go out and help her practice.  I remember so clearly the moment I learned how to ride -- I realized I was in balance, by myself -- and I’d always wanted to help someone else learn.  Throughout my childhood, my bike was my key to quietude, adventure, and independence; an experience of the world through motion, wind, and smells.  The key to helping someone learn is to hold the seat and keep running; don’t be lazy and pull on the handlebars. 

Our motives aren't knowable, and our selves are not fixed

As we live our lives together, you add so much enjoyment and dimension to my life, but I’m probably a relatively flat figure to you -- a limit, a wall, a source of rules and unexamined habits -- a thing that shapes your own presence, that provides you with a certain area to grow up in.

Parents are mysterious.  My parents are mysterious to me.  In a fascinating book about the mystery of parents, the unbridgable gap of unknowing, Family Romance, John Lanchester suggests that the substance of the mystery is the inability of people to tell the truth about things. 

Parents are people who can’t convey the truth about things, not only because they often just don’t know the truth, but mainly because the parent-child relationship is just not about conveying the truth of the parent’s experience -- it’s about behaving like a parent, about creating the child’s grow-up space. 

Who knows what you’ll want to know about your mom and dad when you grow up, but at least these little bits will be floating around and you’ll get an idea of what it was like to be us when you were two.  And what it was like to be you!

 

Friends

When you were about two, maybe in the fall of 2009, David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote out some thoughts he had for a speech he was giving at his old high school.  It was an Advice for Young People that You Won’t Get in School-type of speech.  I recall two points:  (1) that the most important decision you’ll make is whom to marry; (2) the most important skill you’ll learn is how to make and keep friends.  Now that’s interesting advice, I thought; I’ll have to point it out to my Sweet Potato.

Just remember that, as far as the marrying part goes, my best advice is probably that you should follow someone else’s advice.  My approach to marriage has been largely … aleatory.  My real advice regarding marriage probably only comprises two points:  (1) being married to someone is a lot different from not being married to that person, even if nothing else changes; (2) the everyday dynamic or habit of kindness is a subtle but all-powerful force in marriage.  Of course, I’ll try to help you be a person who can make good decisions in love, but, uh, I hope your mom has some ideas, too. 

On the other hand, my grown-up life has been beautifully rich in friends, and I have a lot of ideas about how to be a friend.  I’ve practiced a lot at friendship, largely because I’ve needed my friends a lot (in no small part, perhaps, owing to my Ionesco-like romantic life), and because I have been curious about different things that have brought me in contact with interesting people, like refugees, chessplayers, boozehounds, perverts, jazz buffs, readers, eaters, talkers, birders, blowhards, monastics, violists, printmakers, jewelers, and they've each been able to show me or tell me something about how people really are. 

My early, received ideal of friendship was that of the “best friend.”  But I never had a best friend, so for a long time I thought I had no friends.  In fact, it only takes a little ability to exchange something to bring someone into the realm of friendship, just a few grains of cross-pollination.  Like a person with whom you exchange a nod in passing, or who shows you where the Indiana waterthrush is.  There are all kinds of friends, and they each make your world bigger; it helps to understand your spectrum of friends as a whole.  Like a work friend, or a would-be lover, or a complicated friend who is cool or funny but also needy or dismissive or too wasted.  Accepting all these kinds of people as friends means being able to accept the limits of friendship, of accepting “partial” friendships, and letting them grow or fade as appropriate.  Your friendships lead you to understand differences between people and the range of feelings and affections that make up your personality and your society.  The spectrum of your friends fluctuates as you change and move; friends fade in and out, but old feelings remain, and one day something -- a note falling out of a book, or an old photo, or a message on Facebook -- will freshen your feelings for the life of friendship. 

Friendship is a sort of agreement, that begins with an offer or invitation to spend time togther, or some other way of offering something of one's self, like correspondence or other entertainment. 

I had a great and gracious friend, who in effect was my mentor in friendship; for years the chief expression of our friendship was in letters; we were pen pals, but I spent many holidays with her family, too.  When one of my less auspicious romantic complications accidentally slipped into marriage, our friendship weakened.  Later I was able somehow to marry more appropriately, and although we tried to speak more, I was far away, and she was sick. When our Sweet Potato was on the way, I called my friend, but she was too weak to come to the phone.  I wrote her a letter to tell her about you, but she died before she could read it. I hope I can pass on to you the treasure of friendship and compassion I learned from her.  Not sure I can do it, because I'm kind of a dick and Edith wasn't, so I just want to make a note of my good intentions here.

The Dawn of Friendship

The point of toddler play, at this moment, for Sweet Potato, is to negotiate “fun” with some other toddler.  It’s the rudimentary dawn of friendship.  Peak success is to be able to agree on some coordinated, simultaneous physical activity (usually running, jumping, or singing either Happy Birthday or If You’re Happy and You Know It) that leads to squealing and laughing gleefully.  It’s not easy, because you have to figure out how to coordinate the activity; that is, you have to agree to do something that’s fun for all of you, then work out the timing. 

Last week we sat for friends, and had their 2-year old Zydrunas come for dinner at five.  Z is a big, beatific toddler.  He’s always wearing something special; for a few months it was his bat ears that his mom had sewn for Halloween, but maybe now it’s a pair of sunglasses.

Sweet Potato had taken in the news of Z’s visit very quietly the day before, but by the time Z came over, she had developed a program of sharing and making friends; to wit, she would first share her bumpy balls with him (he would play with the green one, and she would have the red), and then she would show him her easel.  She was tremendously excited to implement her plan and was delivering the whole instruction manual as Z walked in the door with his parents.  Z you pay widt dhis bhall um gween won an dhen um an dhen I’w pay widt dhis won, ohkay, bhat ohkay you stehn oveh deah ohkay puddout yoah heands!

The ball sharing was easily negotiated, but the actual playing activity was never quite established, so the parties adapted the game by jumping and laughing in Sweet Potato’s fire truck together.  While they were jumping on the bed, Sweet Potato said, less hode heands.  Then they were holding hands, jumping, and laughing.  Then they climbed on the front of the bed, and jumped off, singly, then together.  The success of reaching an agreement -- doing something together -- creates more glee than parallel play does.  It’s also amazing to listen to toddlers talk and understand each other!

The easel idea kind of fell apart because the parties failed to reach agreement regarding the occupancy of the opposite sides of the easel, and simultaneous use of either side of the easel overloaded Sweet Potato’s capacity for sharing. 

The evening ended several hours later with all toddlers crying, but I mean that in the best way. 

***

This week we went to a birthday party in some unbelievably remote suburb.  The toddler social experience peaked when they ran together with balloons across the living room.

It’s interesting how the peak only lasts a couple of runs.  Then, you know, someone cries, or something breaks, or some parent says it's time to go, or something else throws off the rhythm, the vibe, and you can’t get it back.