A Child Is Something Else Again
By Yehuda Amichai
A child is something else again. wakes up
in the afternoon and in an instant he’s full of words,
in an instant he’s humming, in an instant warm,
instant light, instant darkness.
A child is Job. They’ve already placed their bets on him
but he doesn’t know it. He scratches his body for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.
They’re training him to be a polite Job,
to say ‘thank you’ when the lord has given,
to say ‘you’re welcome’ when the lord has taken away.
A child is vengeance.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I’m still trembling.
A child is something else again: on rainy spring day
glimpsing the garden of Eden through the fence,
kissing him in his sleep,
hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.
A child delivers you from death.
Child, Grden, Rain, Fate.
Parenting is a wonder and a joy and the most difficult job ever. Strangely enough, much of the joy comes from the grindstone. Still, I sometimes wonder: does raising children have to be so challenging?
I’m anxious for the day Ian and I can ride our bicycles through the park, leaves swirling behind as we race side-by-side. That’s fatherhood! But of course that means he needs to learn how to ride said bicycle. We can’t get through one milestone without the kid having to learn something. It’s exhausting! We can’t keep asking Kelly’s folks to handle the burden. It’s just gauche.
Here I am, raising my son like a chump, when clever parents on the East Coast are having and eating cake all over the place. And not having to wipe their children’s mouths. If you’d like to experience parenting at its finest easiest, New York Magazine offers The Outsourced Parent: The hands-free, do-nothing, price-is-no-object guide to rearing a child from conception to college.
I can barely catch a cold. Why teach my son to throw a ball when former Yankees pitcher Jack Aker will do it for $95 an hour?
Why suffer the embarassment of ‘the talk’ when a complete stranger can blush in my stead for $400? Though that seems a little pricey for someone else to say, ‘Ask your mother.’ In fact, why talk to Ian at all when a $149 per session ‘life coach’ can give him more assurance than I ever could?
And the bicylce thing? $130 per session.
Melissa at The Parenting Post estimates that, in a money market account earning 4%, the $4 million outsourcing price tag could grow to nearly $6 million.
Kelly and I left Southern California because we didn’t want to raise our son in a culture that treats children as accessories. That may have been the biggest financial mistake of our lives. I could’ve earned $50 an hour teaching someone else’s kid to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.
I like to talk to tomatoes, and a squash can always make me smile. So, I was pleased to learn that NBC is now showing episodes of VeggieTales on Saturday mornings. I was less pleased to learn that God has been left on the cutting-room floor.
NBC has removed references to God to make the show more palatable to a wider audience. This admission is an improvement on their first excuse (BugMeNot), which was that the show had been edited for time.
‘”NBC is committed to the positive messages and universal values of ‘VeggieTales,’ ” [a network] statement said. “Our goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible with these positive messages, while being careful not to advocate any one religious point of view.”‘
The further editing was done despite the fact that VeggieTales producers had already selected episodes that were ‘less overt in their Christian themes’, and had removed the Bible verses from the end of the show.
The excuse of omission to avoid ‘advocating’ is wearing a little thin. Anyone who’s seen Desperate Housewives or Friends knows that NBC is by no means an advocate for Christianity. If anything, NBC is a champion of all things secular. Was there really any danger in viewers mistaking NBC for TBN?
Simply because a teacher professes to be Christian does not mean that the local, state, or federal governments are advocates of Christianity. The same is true for NBC and animated cucumbers. Regardless of what’s removed, VeggieTales is Christian. God is its focus, no matter what is or isn’t said. NBC knew this in advance; didn’t they wonder, for a moment, that this may have been an important part of its success?
Bob the Tomato used to say, ‘God made you special and He loves you very much.’ Now he bids farewell by saying, ‘Thanks for coming over to my house, kids. See you next week.’
Feel the love.
If NBC removed VeggieTales’ references to God to avoid advocating Christianity, how should we view their decision to broadcast Madonna crucified, and wearing a crown of thorns?
(Thanks, Ed!)
[Update: Michelle Malkin covers this story in a recent edition of Hot Air TV. I knew about Madonna, but I didn't know that NBC's Saturday Night Live had aired an banal spoof of VeggieTales in 2002. Everyone loves sexual molestation jokes.]
Before Ian was born, I once went to a video arcade called GameWorks. In a fit of madness undying love, Kelly encouraged me to splurge on a game that took only five-dollar bills. It was a hot-air balloon race. Players were strapped into seats attached to rails, in front of a giant screen. By means of synergistic hydraulics and gears, I shared the fate of my balloon, rising and plummeting at the whims of my opponents.
Hot-air balloons as weapons, a monument to boyhood.
I sat next to an eight-year-old boy, whose mother (like Kelly) had made it quite clear that she wasn’t going to play. We launched and became best friends, popping each other’s balloons and balancing the thrill of falling with the desire to win. We taunted each other, we yelled. We laughed. He won.
I love my son. Love is the driving force of fatherhood. But, when Ian was born, I won’t pretend that this moment didn’t feature prominently in my mind. Love’s neat, and everything, but, at our most basic level, boys just want someone to play with.
Not that Kelly and I don’t have fun. She likes Star Trek: The Next Generation and Settlers of Catan. She’ll even play Jeopardy on my old, grimy NES. But she’s simply unwilling to wallow in the pathetic and sordid depths in which boys thrive, becoming too involved, taking things too far, and ignoring the little voice that says maybe a little sunshine and social interaction wouldn’t be the worst idea.
She couldn’t care less about the original theatrical release of Star Wars on DVD.
Last year, she found Ian on the living room floor, trying to play Super Mario Bros. 3. Last month, Ian snuggled next to me on the couch and asked if we could watch ‘the space bus’ (i.e. TNG). Right now, Ian’s favorite story is Fixed by Camel, which was my favorite Sweet Pickles book. (Neither Kelly nor I noticed until the other day that it’s Camel who springs the trap, and the doorbell Kangaroo pushes doesn’t actually do anything.)
Am I trying to raise a best friend, or smaller version of myself? (Pause for collective shudder.) In the end, I think I simply like seeing Ian enjoy the things I show him. I like sharing my world with him, and I like it even better when he gets it.
If that means hitting a renn faire or two, so be it.
Zaid Gayle is a co-founder of Peace4Kids, a support and community program for foster and at-risk children in South Los Angeles. As part of a feature on ‘becoming fearless‘, The Huffington Post asked six students of the program to write stories about those who’ve made an impact in their lives.
The kids thought Zaid should write one, too:
‘My dad once explained to me that fatherhood is a quiet surrender to your greatest yet-to-be. For me that surrender has been more than a notion; it has changed me forever in ways I never would have expected.
…I have been a father now for six months. My daughter, Miranda, is twenty-two years old. This is not the family I imagined, not ever.’
Fatherhood is more than changing diapers and reading to our kids. It’s more than biology, and extends even beyond our own families. Zaid’s story is about the responsibilities we face when children come into our lives, and finding fatherhood in unexpected places.
Last week, a group of students in New Bedford, Massachusetts held a funeral for the problems facing them and their friends:
‘Eight youths from the Responsible Attitudes toward Pregnancy, Parenting and Prevention Youth Council [RAPPP] held “The Rebirth of New Bedford: New Bedford Resurrected” last week to bury issues that plague today’s youths.
They held the “unfuneral,” complete with a makeshift casket, eulogy and burial ceremony recently at the city garden where social ills—such as drug abuse, abandonment, racism, gang violence, AIDS and teen drinking—were laid to rest and marked by headstones that will remain in the garden permanently.’
Each student chose an ailment and created its headstone. The students collaborated on a eulogy, and took turns reading from it during the funeral.
The headstones were placed in New Bedford’s Peace Works! City Garden. Michelle Guilbeault, youth coordinator for RAPPP, said that students thought the headstones would be ‘better than just growing flowers’.
Playskool has recalled its Team Talkin’ Tool Bench after two toddlers suffocated from swallowing the toy’s oversized, plastic nails. There is no choking hazard warning on the toy, because none of its parts are small enough to be classified as a ’small part’ by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Parents are advised to remove the nails immediately and return them to Playskool for a $50 certificate. Contact Playskool at 800-509-9554 for more information, or use this contact form.
My Father on His Shield
By Walt McDonald
Shiny as wax, the cracked veneer Scotch-taped
and brittle. I can’t bring my father back.
Legs crossed, he sits there brash
with a private’s stripe, a world away
from the war they would ship him to
within days. Cannons flank his face
and banners above him like the flag
my mother kept on the mantel, folded tight,
white stars sharp-pointed on a field of blue.
I remember his fists, the iron he pounded,
five-pound hammer ringing steel,
the frame he made for a sled that winter
before the war. I remember the rope in his fist
around my chest, his other fist
shoving the snow, and downhill we dived,
his boots by my boots on the tongue,
pines whishing by, ice in my eyes, blinking
and squealing. I remember the troop train,
steam billowing like a smoke screen.
I remember wrecking the sled weeks later
and pounding to beat the iron flat,
but it stayed there bent
and stacked in the barn by the anvil,
and I can’t bring him back.
Everyone knows about the Sydney Opera House. Some people vaguely recall Yahoo Serious. But did you know that Australia has a three-day Fatherhood Festival? This past summer’s was the third, and featured locally produced short films about fathers and families.
Someone should’ve done more research, because, apparently, they’re wasting their time.
‘…psychologists have recently set out to challenge the idea that fatherless boys are bound to fail as men as a fallacy rooted in antiquated and idealized notions of family. Parental gender, they say, is irrelevant. Rather, all kids need is at least one parent who is a responsible, loving and steady caregiver.
…In a 1999 issue of the journal American Psychologist, Louise Silverstein and Carl Auerbach of Yeshiva University in New York published a study called “Deconstructing the Essential Father,” in which they concluded…that the available data “do not support the idea that fathers make a unique and essential contribution [emphasis added] to child development.”
Earlier this year, Peggy Drexler, a Cornell University psychology professor, took this position one step further in her book Raising Boys Without Men. She asserted that, all things being equal, boys often fare better without a male influence in the home.’
Read more →
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There are times in everyone’s life when we rediscover what it means for something to be ‘essential’. College. The year after graduation. The first year of marriage. We discover what we need, and what we can do without. We learn to compromise, and we learn to get by.
I certainly like to think that I play an essential role in my son’s life. The ten million single-mother households in America, however, prove otherwise. As a father, I am not essential. And I thank God for that. If I were gone today, Ian could grow up to be a content, well-adjusted young man. Given his wonderful mother, family, and friends, I’m fairly certain he would. If parents were ‘essential’, our children would have a very hard time of it.
But is being inessential the same as being irrelevant? Perhaps, if we measure fatherhood by the standards of Ms. Drexler:
‘”The boys in my study were not sissies or mama’s boys,” she says. “…They were thoughtful communicators who were caring and sensitive, but they were just as willing to engage in boyish activities like skateboarding and roughhousing.”‘
Motherhood is care and sensitivity. Fatherhood is skateboarding and roughhousing. If these are the extent of a man’s role as father, why do we care when he leaves? If we reduce fatherhood to skinned knees and hand-eye coordination, why are we surprised when he does?
Fathers are not essential, but we are unique. Our role is significant and distinct, and is more than X and Y. If it weren’t, this blog wouldn’t exist. Children can survive without their fathers. They can get by. But no parent wants their child merely to get by.
I think what bothers me most is that the goal of Peggy Drexler and her ilk seems not to be reassuring single mothers that their children will be healthy, but to convince the rest of us that fathers are redundant and, in some cases, malignant.
Carol Gilligan, the ‘gender scholar’ featured prominantly on Ms. Drexler’s website, asserts in her book The Birth of Pleasure that ‘a child’s inborn ability to love freely and live authentically gets thoroughly squelched by patriarchal structures.’
Tell that to my son the next time he gives you a hug.
If, as Ms. Drexler claims, ‘parenting is not anchored to gender’ and ‘not male or female’, if this assertion is the heart of her study, then why isn’t her book called Raising Boys Without Parents?
This past weekend, we took Ian to a movie theater for the first time.
To be fair, this is not—strictly—true. His first movie-going experience was last winter, when we took him to an IMAX 3-D presentation of a South African safari. This was, in every sense, a complete failure of parenting and common sense. I move that it be stricken from the record.
We went to see Cars at a second-run theater, for $3 each. We had enough cash left for me to spend too much on popcorn and soda, because it was a ’special occasion’. (Kelly has a theory that men eat so poorly because, to us, everything is a ’special occasion’.)
It was a rare, stormy day in St. Louis, and many other families had the same idea. The theater was packed with kids. I didn’t mind, because we wouldn’t need to worry about Ian disturbing anyone. He spent most of the movie curled in our laps, quietly watching.
But this is not his story.
I didn’t know this at first, but Cars really is about cars. Everyone, and everything, is a car. The ‘people’, the animals, the insects. All cars. There are no humans, only moto sapiens. This works well, until you start wondering about tools and opposable thumbs.
Cows are tractors, and Mater (a tow-truck) likes to tip them. He demonstrates the technique to his new friend, Lightning (a race car). Mater softly creeps rolls to a stop in front of a cow, and blasts his horn. The cow starts, snorts, and slowly tips backward on its rear wheels. It lands on its back with a thud.
‘Moooooooooooo!’ There’s a ‘pop!’ and a small circle of smoke rises from the cow’s exhaust pipe.
Cars is a funny movie. But, like all Pixar films, a lot of the humor is hidden in the dialogue. Kids aren’t big on dialogue, which is why Wile E. Coyote blows up so often. Until this point in the movie, kids had watched and laughed, but I don’t believe for one second that they understood the genius of including the Tappet Brothers in a movie about cars.
After that cow landed and popped its exhaust, silence also fell. Suddenly a wave of children’s laughter erupted in the theater, every boy and girl giggling and squealing, all at once. Have you ever passed a tree full of peeping and squawking birds? Clap your hands, and the chirping will stop. This was the same, only different.
I forgot about the movie, and quickly turned my head to see dozens of children who were lost in a brilliant example of slapstick. The laughter went on and on, feeding itself, like meerkats on alert. The laughter faded, and kids settled back into their parents’ laps.
Until the next cow fell.
