Half Cleveland Dad

Equilibrium

When you become a parent, it’s a big change.  Your relationships to society, your spouse, and your self are all subject to the interposition of this thing shaped like a humanoid but that’s really part of your soul that’s bulging out.  It’s disorienting, and cool, and lovely, and interesting as hell.

 

You’re adaptable, though, and pretty soon your normal equilibratoritiness smooths you out.  You get habituated to being a parent.  You develop a range of solutions; you avoid unnecessary challenges; you figure out a way of handling things in your own mind.  It’s not disorienting anymore; it’s only a little bit cool, sometimes lovely, and interesting if you think about it.  You get kind of fat.  Change doesn’t pitch you over anymore; it’s incremental; except that sudden change is something you associate with accident, sudden illness, or midlife crisis-style misjudgment.

 

That’s where Beeb and I are now.  Being Sweet Potato’s parents today is sort of different from being Sweet Potato’s parents a year ago … but not really.  It’s still important to us, and even marvelous, but it’s important or marvelous or lovely or interesting in the same way we were used to before. 

 

This is why parents only have friends who are other parents.  It’s a community that presumes stasis, that relies on inertia.  It’s amazing how quickly they don’t grow up.  This is also why it’s hard to craft very many light entertainments in the form of blog posts about parenting.  I was about to tell you about Sweet Potato’s months-long obsession with her tutus and ballerinas and princesses, but got bogged down in my own disdain and exasperation with the princess thing, but it’s really my exasperation with the gross (large) routine of it all.  My own habits have desensitized me to the things that are interesting about being Sweet Potato’s dad (and Beeb’s husband).

Breakfast

Sweet Potato knows that we're supposed to wake up at six a.m.  Once she figured out how to tell whether that first number on her clock is a six, she started coming into our room at 6:03 (my clock must be three minutes faster than hers).  At first, she’d stand next to my bed and whisper, Da-ahd, iss six!, waiting for me to get up.  Sometimes, I would lift her into bed, so I could wake up a little more gradually, without her standing there tugging on the lamp cord and whining.  A couple of times, on weekends, I fell back asleep, and so did Sweet Potato (Beeb the Mom, for her part, does not fall back asleep at six because she is asleep until seven-thirty or so).  Now, Sweet Potato pads into our room at 6:03, bearing three Loveys.  She gives the jingly one to Beeb the Mom, rounds the bed, and hands me one, before climbing in with hers.  The other morning I whispered, dude, let’s just get up and change your nighttime diaper and go downstairs and have breakfast!  She whispered, No I’ne guhnn havva big nap!  Then she started squirm-cuddling, which is her equivalent of a dog spinning around before lying in bed.  I endured the scratching and kicking and nose wiping for a few seconds, and whispered, dude, let’s get up now!  She got still, and whispered quietly and slowly, nohhht yehhhht.  Then she fell asleep.  I got up.  She woke up about 45 minutes later, when I was about ready to leave the house.  She said, noooo!  who’s goh-eeng ta mehk my behk-fiss toast?

We won’t always be able to have breakfast together.  Here’s what it’s like at this sweet time in our lives.

Here's the last few minutes: 

 

 

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.

Lovey

Childhood is a rough and maddening time.  You’re always functioning at the very limit of your experience and competence.  The information you hotly need is ambiguous and out of reach.  Punishing consequences whirl in from every direction.  You have awareness, but no control.  ….  It’s a cliché that society destroys the innocence and spontaneity of childhood, but before that, on a more basic level, it’s gravity that starts crushing your spirit.  When you’re a toddler, it’s your best pleasure and accomplishment to successfully climb rio hy-yup on various things, and you just can’t believe it’s happening again when, for instance, you’re standing on your booster seat and leaning on the window sill to get a better look at a cool red bird and the goddamn seat slides back and you flip over for a clattering header because with your big hapa head you’re basically built like a shuttlecock.

 

It’s best if you can be a good sport about it. 

 

Sweet Potato’s a pretty good sport, but it’s exasperating for her, too, and she’s got to be able get back in the pocket where she can take a breather from collecting the day’s allotment of contusions and tears.  For Sweet Potato, all real comfort and security still emanates from Beeb the Mom, of course.  And I count, too.  But, hour to hour, the most important person is Lovey.

 

 

Lovey helps Sweet Potato be a good sport. 

 

Lovey helps Sweet Potato dust herself off after taking a couple more lumps in her gravitational field testing.  Sweet Potato now even prefers Lovey’s kisses to her Polar Bear cold pack for Big Donks.

 

Lovey’s an agreeable audience.  These days Sweet Potato will spend up to an hour at naptime recounting her best stories and thoughts to Lovey, often sitting up a bit to read some books aloud or sing some favorite songs. 

 

Lovey’s role as sidekick/cheerleader/consigliere is growing quickly, too.  Sweet Potato has been interested in practicing conversational skills lately, and “make lovey tok” is her newest exercise, in which only she and Lovey talk (“NO deddhi!  only lovey!”).  Lovey’s a fickle stool pigeon, though, and she’s just as likely to try and make a pitch for a diaper change, or sing the clean-up song, as to do her Aishwarya Rai schtick or suggest a popsicle.

 

Old Potato’s a two-year old Odysseus, and Lovey is her Penelope.  I hope she always has a Lovey to help her be brave and soak up some of her tears. 

 

Everyone needs a lovey.  When my sister was a kid she had a scrawny, sarcastic pal named Jenny.  One night they had a sleepover at our house, and Jenny brought her lovey, named Weenie.  Jennie and Weenie were about the same age, which was probably ten or eleven, and during their time together Weenie had gotten loved and kneaded into a brownish-grey sock of oily cloth that smelled strongly of old drool.  I think Weenie might have had one eye or button still hanging on, but if you were going to market it as a toy you might have decided it would be one of the worms they rode in Dune.  I was in high school, and made fun of Weenie that night (especially the smell), but Jenny was pretty cool about it.  She grabbed Weenie back, shrugged it off, and said something to the effect of, whatever, dude, you are whoever you are, and that’s my Weenie, and went off.  Years later Jenny moved to New York, where I lived, and we met for dinner.  I remembered her mainly in regard to Weenie, so I had to ask about it.  Weenie had been finely reupholstered (in red, as I recall), and was still the man, as it were, in Jenny’s world.

 

I had loveys, too, but my mom threw them away when I was in the first grade.  My loveys were Rabbit and Bear.  Rabbit was a golden polyester hand puppet, and Bear was a proto-Paddington sewn with a blue and white striped shirt and nightcap.  Rabbit’s neck hole, where your finger went, was scratchy.  Bear was a little smelly (but in a good way), and had a kind of grey shoddy stuffing that was always crumbling out.  Rabbit was good with ideas and had a lot to say; Bear tended to communicate in a more pillow-like manner.  One day I went home after another fucked-up first-grade day, and felt like we unwinding a bit with my pals Rabbit and Bear.  Hey Mom, I asked, where are Rabbit and Bear?  Oh you’re getting too old for them, she said, so I threw them away.  She said recently that she thought I was talking to them too much.  Talking to them too much?  What did she think, we were plotting a coup? 

 

Now I hear Jenny is a kingmaker who rules her industry by raising an eyebrow or clicking her thumb, and I’m still fumbling around and around unable to escape this oubliette of wives, and drink, and chess, and the ukulele.

When's Your Birthday?

Last week was Potato’s second birthday.  We like to imagine that our girl is too young to have an accurate calendric conception of “birthday,” but after a week of buildup (Oooooh!  It’s going to be your birthday!  Sing Happy Birthday!  Practice blowing out candles!) and a couple of preliminary celebrations (the in-room part-time day care cupcake provision; the grown-up friends who stop by for dinner) leading up to the birthday itself (inconveniently occurring on a weekday, with Grandma stopping by in the afternoon and then a rushed dinner at her favorite restaurant, Seoul Hot Pot); followed by a mid-week playgroup convention; then all of it culminating on a Saturday with The Big Event … which was aborted by a family pinkeye epidemic and postponed for a week, I’m now the one confused and toddlerized as to what exactly the birthday day is all about or even when it was or is supposed to be; which reminds me (agh) that then it was also Mother’s Day, with me and Potato scuffling downstairs trying to hack together a card so Beeb wouldn’t give us the silent treatment all day ….

 

Big Potato’s party was lovely, though.  She smiled for an hour and a half, tapped her piñata with the stick, bit into the side of the whole cake like a shark, and gave out lolling spontaneous hugs to everyone the whole morning.