Half Cleveland Dad

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!

 

Discontent

This spring I’ll have lived in Cleveland, Ohio for ten years.  I’ve always been discontent here, so I raise my eyebrows a bit and say, hmmm!, when I picture the number 10 in this context, but I'm accustomed to being rather chronically discontent, and out of place, and I'm aware of my failure to answer the if not here, where sorts of questions regarding Cleveland, Ohio, so it would be inaccurate to say I'm surprised, because, if nothing else, I know I'm still here.  I'm getting a clue, though:

 

The other day Sweet Potato and I were walking around the neighborhood in the snow.  She was watching her feet and listening to her crunchy steps, but stuck up her mitten and said lets hode heands, dad.  Then I was holding hands with a two-year old, walking through the snow, singing Happy Birthday and Twinkle Twinkle, and I had to admit to myself, this is the best my life will ever be.  It wasn’t a Proustian revelation or anything, but more of an admission, or settling.  My general discontent settled a bit with acknowledgment that, yep, this was a dreamt-for moment; a sudden, sweet pool along a crooked, tentative rivulet. 

 

I did thumb through a little Proust after our walk, and Remembrance of Things Past made a new kind of sense.  I used to think it was about love and art, but now it seems like an enlightenment tale:  life is suffering, and suffering is desire, and desire is whining about how you can’t always get what you want, but when you do get it you whine about it even more, until you leave it all behind in order to really think about it, based on a hint of transcendence you get from a chance sense-memory, and then you develop your hint into a meditative practice based on writing that eventually floods you with understanding and compassion for everyone, the result of years sequestered not in a mountaintop hut but in a cork-lined room. 

Funny

Steve Martin’s memoir Born Standing Up is a sweet, controlled book starting basically with Martin's first job in the magic shop of Disneyland and continuing through his explosive Saturday Night Live days.  He writes about developing his act through endless practice, gigging, performing.  He makes it clear that funny is a matter of work, and luck, too.

Sweet Potato’s working on her funny.  She’s disposed to the unexpected, the absurd, and the non-existent (maybe well characterized as a humor of disappointment).  She'll say, I'ne not looken atchoo! and turn away.  The gag is to get her to turn around.  I'll say, Hey big girl, I have a present for you!  It’s a pretty butterfly!  I have another present for you!  It’s a lot of delicious chocolate ice cream, and I’m eating it all by myself!  And on and on, describing all the things she likes, until she turns around; then she has a look of total delight, and laughs her head off.  She also likes laughing in the dark.  Sweet Potato will carry her step stool to the light switch, climb up and turn the light off.  Then we take turns describing ourselves:  I have a big mouth that says SNAP! and rough skin, and pointy feet, and a big strong tail!  Then Sweet Potato flips on the light, and we shout, just pretend! 

She tries to categorize things as “funny”:  I did a behy-fahp -- is deht fah-nee?  She sings a lot of songs, and substitutes words:  Ohd Nik-DEHDEE hed a fohm, ee-ai-ee-ai-DEHDEE!!  She said her favorite daycare teacher is Miss Alice, because szee’s funny and tahlks a lot! 

She’s tuning in to the social side of funny, working on different laughs and sounds, rolling her eyes, making goofy sounds (kazoos, speaking through toilet paper rolls).  When Beeb and I laugh, she asks why we’re laughing, then contributes a laugh to ours.  She also uses her physical shtick defensively:  she sometimes goes into it when we want her to do something she would prefer not to, like put on her shoes or get ready for bed.

I was perpetually interested in funny throughout my childhood.  Part of it was my love of the books, and finding kids’ jokebooks in the libraries of the many schools I attended.  One book that seemed to be in every library was called The Big Red Rock Eater.  Its titular joke was, what’s big and red and eats rocks?  A big red rock eater!  Elephant jokes were a breakthrough for me:  How are an elephant and a grape the same?  They’re both purple fruit, except the elephant.  That’s funny, man.  The tautological joke still gets mileage around here.  Beeb the Mom’s favorite:  What’s brown and sticky?  A stick.  (Cf. What’s brown and sounds like a bell?  Dung.)  Anyway, there’s the internal funny, and the external funny.  I loved the leap and the click of jokes, the way the ideas sparked together.  I also thought it would be great to share laughs with people, but I succeeded less in sharing my funny than in just laying my dorkiness on everyone real thick:  I would just memorize jokes out of books, and tell them to various people, over and over.  You know that knock-knock joke about Amos’n’Andy?  I probably told that a thousand times over the course of my third grade year or thereabouts, and never until a couple of years ago knew what Amos’n’Andy were.  I kept telling it, even though I always knew it couldn’t really be funny.  Same thing with that one that goes orange you glad I didn’t say banana again?  I was just testing the joke -- what was it? -- trying to figure out where the funny was, socially.  Why is this a joke? 

Another bomb was the acquisition of some racist jokebooks, and some Playboy jokebooks, which, with my earnest bookworm delivery and my age (11 or 12?) … actually finally seems funny.

I did eventually learn a great knock-knock joke:  I know a great knock-knock joke; you start it.  The other person automatically says, knock knock.  You go, Who’s there? 

Discipline

Even before Sweet Potato was born I was anxious about how I might handle our clashes.  I imagined that, in a pinch, I would, from the lower part of my brain, adopt the repertoire from my own childhood, which seemed mostly to have been made up of yelling, “spanking,” slamming doors. 

I e-mailed my sister-in-law.  I’d always admired the way Tomoe, a schoolteacher, talked with her students and her own children.  She has a genius for saying the right thing at the right time, and gets a click of understanding from kids.  When I told her that I was looking for some different disciplinary tools in my repertoire, she sent a bunch of books, including something from the Positive Discipline franchise, and something called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen.  In general, the books try to offer alternatives to the impulsive direct-suppression method, and talk about things like fostering autonomy and judgment.* 

I love the idea that child discipline is not merely correction, but a system of giving a child a certain form and guidance for dealing with life, with others, with disappointment, with success, with herself.  So “discipline” is part of a system of support, a structure to grow up in; something a kid can rely on, and feel secure with, and trust.

Another great buzzwordy idea I got from Tomoe’s books was “age appropriate” behavior. 

Anyway, at this point, this is how I actually sound throughout the day:

• Hey man! Wash ‘em! (Hands). Dry ‘em! (tossing towel)
• I’m going to go downstairs now. You put on your underpants and pants and socks, then come down and meet me.
• Come on: red shoes or pretty shoes? Are you going to put them on yourself, or am I going to put them on for you? I’ll count to three.
• Stop that whining, please. Take a rest, and use your words please.
• Uhhhhhh … I sure don’t hear anyone asking nicely!
• You wanna cry? Great. It’s OK to cry, but I want you to sit there and take it easy until you’re ready to say you’re sorry for throwing and hitting.
• All right, look. You put away all your guys, and come downstairs, and we can have a cookie and maybe some candy for snack. All right, then maybe I’m going to have ice cream, all by myself, so ... See Ya!

Sweet Potato likes to ask me and Beeb the Mom to pretend-cry or fuss.  At first, she just laughed.  These days she likes to scold us.  The other day she gave me a time-out, and I felt really cheated!  Now when she’s done crying and pouting, I like to give her a little hug before we move on with our day.  I try to think, is she doing the best she can?  That is, is she processing at capacity?

As an older parent, I think a lot about how Sweet Potato’s going to get along by herself.  Especially, I want her to have what I didn’t have as a child:  social awareness, good judgment, pragmatism, a certain core of shrewdness or savvy.  (I also want to her to have what I do have, but, you know, it’s hard to assess what assets you’re really passing on to your kids, or even whether the shit you’re passing on should be classified as assets or liabilities.) 

_______

*  One of the funny things, though, is that the examples in these books are so self-serving that they seem insane (even Ayn Randish) -- nothing more than fictional illustrations of their own principles working perfectly.  Even the most informative parenting books tend to establish parenting “rules” based on their personal anecdotes.  Now that I think about it for one second, though, that’s how parenting really is:  you were playing with the toaster oven and you stopped when I explained the basics of electricity? -- OK, chalk it up to my parenting genius:  Rule:  electrical hazards can be deflected by pseudo-technical explanation.  Is that rational?  Who cares, because now I see I’ve forgotten to put on a naptime diaper and now my kid is walking into the kitchen with a poop wiggling around in her pantleg, and I’ll think about the god damn toaster oven again when I have to, which, I hope, is going to be never, because I already moved it to a different part of the kitchen.

Yeah, but who cares?

It’s funny what stays with you over the years.

 

In the mid-nineties there was a review of the contemporary reissue of The Worst Journey in the World.  The review began with a conclusion:  that we do not really know what it’s like to go to the moon, because no one who had actually done it has written well enough about it to convey the experience to us.  On the other hand, the review went, the men engaged in the early 20th century exploration of Antarctica were a remarkably literate bunch, and their experiences are a part of us now.  A. Alvarez, the reviewer, liked WJW best, but after going through as much of the literature as I ever will, I like to put Shackleton’s Boat Journey at the top of the pile.

 

So where’s the literary product of parenthood?  Who has written well enough to convey to us the experience of being a parent, a mother, a father?  Writers have generally looked more closely at the condition of childhood than parenthood.  The only author I can think of right now is Oe Kenzaburo.  And maybe Freud.  And the author of King Lear.  Is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about being a father?  Knuffle Bunny also comes to mind, which isn't surprising because I read it twice today, aloud.

 

Can parent blogging contribute?  I assume that blogging or on-line writing, as a minor new form, will eventually foster its talents.  Can blogging convey not just information, but meaning?  With so many parent blogs going now, and blogging being a pretty good form for parents, who don’t have time to write more than five paragraphs a week, maybe there will be a petri dish effect.  I’m tossing my spore in!

 

You know how literature shows you how to live?  What do you read that teaches you how to live like a parent? 

 

***

Now that I’m reading some blogs and thinking of it as a workshop of potential literature, some pre-web authors seem like bloggers to me.  The bloggin’est of all is MFK Fisher.  Man, she’s just a stone foodie blogger.  All her recipes are lousy, too, if you try to make them.  And Beeb the Mom's home page is the most famous work of another pre-web blogger:  early genre pioneer Samuel Pepys.