Girls can be robots too: Whither the fembots of yesteryear?My son has reached the dread age where the genders start to separate at school, and he’s not happy. While he likes nominally traditional boy things, such as baseball and basketball and watching cartoon explosions, he also enjoys the company of girls. But the girls at his school mostly play sugar-and-spicy games like princess or Holly Hobbie (which, amazingly, still exists), while the boys run around and pretend to be robots. Given a choice, my son, who’s repeatedly declared that princesses are for losers, would always rather be a robot. But given an additional choice, he’d want the girls to be robots and aliens too. Somewhere in the universe, and certainly in his mind, there are tough female robot and alien role models, but they never show up on the playground. Sadly, the era of pre-school egalitarianism seems to be ending fast.

In my vast experience as an alternative-themed parenting guru, I’ve heard from a lot of parents concerned that our culture is feeding gender stereotypes to their children, almost from birth. They worry about the Disney Princess marketing juggernaut and worry more seriously about Bratz culture, with its makeover parties for six-year-olds and dolls who live only to shop, gossip, and show off their flat bellies. They seem less bothered by the culture surrounding their boys, who, as usual, are playing with trucks and beating one another with sticks, but there’s still concern. An ad for Tonka trucks says “Boys: They’re just built different." This goes along beautifully with an ad for a hideous product called “Rose Petal Cottage,” which features a little girl doing the wash and making cookies accompanied by the lyrics "I love when my laundry gets so clean/ Taking care of my home is a dream, dream, dream!" It would be foolish to completely deny gender differences, but is it really smart to propagandize our children into Stanley and Stella Kowalski? Man as brute and woman as precious subservient flower is so last century.

We’ve all encountered the tomboy who can execute a perfect hook slide and the little guy who enjoys wearing mommy’s pantyhose. We also know the girl who wears princess dresses to school or the boy whose only mission in life appears to be pile-driving other children into the ground. But the rest of our kids, the ones whose tastes and behaviors don’t entirely seem bound by their chromosomal makeup, can occupy something I call the “nerd middle.” Therein lies the solution to gender stereotyping.

Spongebob's friend Sandy: One tough squirrel Beyond the Transformers and Hannah Montana is a rich menu of dorky gender-neutral characters that command fan fealty, like all corporate entertainment products must. But they also confound traditional notions of what boys and girls should be, and how they should behave. The major female character on Spongebob Squarepants is an ass-kicking karate squirrel from Texas, while the show’s titular hero breaks out into show tunes unbidden, can’t drive a lick, and cares for his pet snail like a little girl would her kitty.

The Star Wars movies have Princess Leia (if not much else) to balance out the portentous testosterone. The lead children in the Narnia saga and The Golden Compass are smart, capable, brave—and girls. Dora The Explorer doesn’t seem interested in makeup and boys, and her cousin Diego only has eyes for baby animals. The Backyardigans, a show that’s previously received a whuppin’ in this space, also passes the nerd middle test. Crappy music aside, The Backyardigans teaches girls that they can be pirates, spies, Vikings, or cowboys. Just as importantly, they teach boys that girls can be those things.

Even superheroes, the traditional rulers of the fortress of male dorkitude, can and should be presented to girls in the nerd middle. In the Justice League: Unlimited cartoon series, which many of my son’s friends watch, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Hawkgirl, Black Canary, The Huntress, and several other heroines are presented as the equals, and often the betters, of their male hero counterparts. Kim Possible vaults into action on the Disney Channel, and, while dropping this reference makes me feel old, let us never forget the lessons of The Powerpuff Girls, a show whose central joke revolved around the fact that little girls named Blossom and Buttercup kicked ass.

Golden Compass-Kicker: Lyra Belacqua makes a great role model So the right messages are out there. Why, then, in a world where there’s always a Pink Ranger, has the concept of girl power been so marginalized? Why does it seem radical to suggest that it could be otherwise? For every parent who grumbles about the evils of the Rose Petal Cottage on Feministing, there are a hundred who wouldn’t think twice before taking their girls to the mall to buy Barbie’s Dream Beach House. Even Lisa Simpson, a gender-neutral girl hero if ever one existed, worships her Malibu Stacy dolls. It’s as though we’re willfully ignoring the gender-mixing messages of the media our children consume. Either that, or we never really absorbed the messages in the first place.

From age five on, boys play t-ball while girls take ballet. Coed sleepovers, which really should be acceptable up until age 10, rarely even get off the ground. My wife and I, like good self-righteous urban liberals, try to counteract this as much as possible. Our son plays flag football, but he also takes gymnastics. He likes to peg ants in the backyard with a squirt gun, but he goes to cooking class on Monday evenings. We wrestle in the backyard, and then sometimes on rainy days I take him to kiddie yoga. When he goes over to his girl cousin’s house, they have a gender-free good time: shooting hoops, playing “zoo,” watching Electric Company videos, and staging elaborate High School Musical dance parties. Well, the last activity is pretty girly, but it is her house. Sometimes you must make concessions.

American life, on the surface, has never been more gender-neutral than it is now. Women go to war, and men make dinner. Men win Dancing With The Stars, and there are female American Gladiators. Both genders, apparently, are capable of playing the role of Bob Dylan. The only real gender-exclusive things in the world are the siring of children and childbirth, though recent current events have even called that exclusivity into question. Yet the Bratz persist, and Joe Francis, the pig behind Girls Gone Wild, continues to make millions even as he stews in jail. It’s up to us parents to encourage the gender-neutral side of our culture, and to try and persuade our children that the battle of the sexes need not continue along the same path.

Elijah’s best friend (or second-best, depending on the week) is a cute, smart little girl named Ariel. They’re weird in the exact same way, and it’s obvious that they get each other. Friends like that are rare at any age. Their favorite activity is to play Star Wars, and Ariel always gets to be Luke Skywalker. The fact that a girl is playing a male lead barely even occurs to them.

By the way, the image of the mom in the green shirt is a "before" picture: Isn't she just the fattest fat-ass?Hey parents, concerned that your kids are suffering from too much self-esteem? Does your six-year-old stand to inherit a big Ashkenazi snout, and is she distressingly cavalier about this eventuality? Luckily, a Florida plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael Salzhauer is here to help.

Salzhauer’s new children’s book, My Beautiful Mommy, follows a mother as she explains to her little girl why she’s going in for plastic surgery. "You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore,” the mom says. Then she comes home skinnier -- and with a new nose. Because the only thing kids like better than having a parent in the hospital is a half-assed explanation of what they’re doing there.

Newsweek, reporting on the story, gets a child psychologist named Elizabeth Berger to play the voice of reason.

Then there are the body image issues raised by cosmetic surgery—especially for daughters. Berger worries that kids will think their own body parts must need "fixing" too. The surgery on a nose, for example, may "convey to the child that the child's nose, which always seemed OK, might be perceived by Mommy or by somebody as unacceptable," she says.

 

Yeah, no shit. By the way, the surgeon in the book is named “Dr. Michael” and is portrayed as a teeny head on a jacked-up mega-torso. Body image issues for everybody!

Let's get it on: Pastor Wirth's guide God wants you to have a great sex life—if you’re married, that is. This is the claim being made by Paul Wirth, lead pastor of Tampa, Florida’s Relevant Church.

Pastor Wirth has issued a thirty day sex challenge to his married parishioners, advising couples to have sex every day for a full month. A mission statement available on the initiative’s website describes the plight of married couples (previously best explained by Flight of the Conchords) and the steps they can take to “review the obvious needs of him and uncover the forgotten needs of her.” It says that married couples are letting “dirty dishes, frumpy clothes, and a lack of authentic connections” get in the way of the romance, resulting in “an epidemic of breakups.” The solution: thirty days of sex in conjunction with a detailed guide in which couples are directed to share their thoughts, needs, and emotions (NOTE: don’t leave this in the bathroom when your in-laws visit.) If you have the determination, you will prevail and voila! Magic: restored.

So maybe it's no surprise that this news was picked up joyously on the parenting site Babble, where (presumably married) new parents seem nothing but psyched about the idea of having sex for God -- even if they're Jewish. Non-married couples, on the other hand, need not apply. In fact, singles and dating couples are strongly encouraged to take their own version of the thirty day challenge: to abstain from sex for the same amount of time in order to better understand and appreciate the virtues and joys of marriage.

What would the rabbis say about all this? The Jewish attitude towards sex is not that far from the one Pastor Wirth is preaching. Jewish sex, formally permitted only within marriage, is not only for the production of Jewish babies. It’s also a means for strengthening the love and commitment between two married people. As the Torah frequently uses the verb “to know” to describe sexual relations between people, sex can be thought of as a way to truly and most intimately become familiar with your spouse. Not to mention: it’s a mitzvah!

Maybe Relevant Church is onto something after all.

 

 

My son, now you are a man: The WiiWelcome to Mommyblogging Dearest, your guide to Jewish parenting online -- hipster and otherwise.

What thirteen-year-olds want: Eternal popularity, to be left alone, and the Nintendo Wii. What you should get them for their B’Nai Mitzvot, however, is anybody’s guess. This is that rare parenting issue that’s totally relevant to non-parents as well: People with teenage children definitely get invited to more Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, but anyone with Jewish relatives eventually winds up in Barnes and Noble the night before a big event, wondering if The Catcher in the Rye is a horribly pedantic thing to give a budding adolescent.

This is, of course, why gift certificates exist, but how much should you give? Over in the forums section of Modern Jewish Mom, posters seem torn between $36 and $200. The latter, of course, has the advantage of being twice 18, which is a lucky number in Jewish superstition. Then again, $200 has the advantage of being 2/3 of the price of a Wii.

B’Nai Mitzvot always wind up being a disturbing mix of consumerism and tradition, so perhaps it’s not a surprise that elsewhere in the same forum is a heartfelt plea from a mom whose child has announced that she’s not interested in studying for her Bat Mitzvah and she doesn’t care about Judaism. It’s an old question, but also an eternal one. Shouldn’t the ritual mean something to the kid?

You can stand under my umbrella: Bandmates Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips Good first-person writing online is an endangered species. A personal essay needs at least thousand words to really get into the nuances of whatever probably-humiliating story you’re choosing to share, but the Internet, being full of distractions, doesn’t reward length. And a personal essay needs honesty to be interesting, but the Internet is meaner to personal essayists than a school bus full of seventh-graders to a kid with bird shit on his shoulder -- the more honest you are, the more abuse you’ll take.

So today's roundup celebrates the good, the honest, and the long.

In this Men’s Vogue excerpt from former Luna frontman Dean Wareham's memoir, he tells the story of how he wound up leaving his wife of seven years for his band’s high-cheekboned bassist. His recounting is the opposite of cavalier, and reading it, you wind up sympathetic to everyone involved. (NB: I’m pretty sure I was at the Philadelphia show where Dean and Britta first made out, but I’d eaten an entire bag of Valentine’s Day candy hearts and spent most of the night outside trying not to puke. Rock and roll!)

There's an exceptionally weird story on Fresh Yarn – always a font of weird stories – by a theater kid whose crush on her fellow Gypsy cast member ended when he stabbed a friend of her parents. OK, yes, total spoiler, but aren’t you curious about the road from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” to murder in the first degree?

The Morning News has a lovely, simple, raw tale about the overpowering urge to protect one’s children, and what happens when that urge leads one man – an author of kids’ books, no less – to kick a stranger’s dog.

OMG I just want to EAT his little FACE: Keep the baby-talk indoors, pleaseSex, as Jaime Lynn Spears has recently reminded us, sometimes has consequences. Once a week we analyze what’s going on in post-nookie, post-partum circles.

This week: TMI! Holly Vitale at Babble hits a nerve with her diatribe against parents who drool all over their babies in public. I always sort of thought this was only an opinion held by callow, childless youth, so I’m pleased to discover that some parents are equally grossed out by having to witness scenes like this:

It's like they're having a moment, but the moment goes on and on. I look down at my six-month-old son and wonder if I've depressed him by not cooing enough; by not wrestling him enough; by not generating enough hyperbole around him.

Sandra and Kelly finally rest, panting like — dare I say it — spent lovers. And I kind of feel like I've been trapped in a honeymoon suite watching friends make out.

Vitale doesn’t really get into the reasons why excess babylove grosses her out, but she hints that it’s a competition she doesn’t want to get into: Who loves their kid more?

Speaking of PDA, over at Offsprung Hipster Handbook author Robert Lanham looks at what he calls “Peakers”—parents who publicize how totally fulfilling their sex lives are now that they’ve reproduced. Lanham thinks it’s a generational problem: All these thirtysomethings who came of age in the 90s spent their unencumbered years too busy being ironic to have sex, so they’re making up for lost time.

Which raises an important question. In which of the following conversations would you rather be a third wheel? Your options are:

A) "I think you're the most KISSED baby in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD!” and

B) “Thank God I got a c-section. I would have hated for my vagina to lose any of its elasticity!”

Friend of Jewcy Harlyn Aizley on what to do during the High Holy Days when you’re a non-practicing Jewish lesbian and your wee daughter has just developed an interest in the Russian Orthodox church next door:

The thing about my people is going to temple during the high holidays ain’t easy. You need to belong or you need a ticket or you need someone to invite you. It’s easier to go to church and for a moment I thought maybe we should just go to a church where we could mumble things in Hebrew and secretly be celebrating the Jewish high holidays.

 

I’m going to write more about parents tomorrow, but I wanted to start the discussion today with a look at one of the Pslams that we say a lot this time of year. It’s Psalm 27, and during the month before Rosh Hashanah we say it both in the morning and at night. Many people say it through Sukkot, though some stop at Rosh Hashana. Anway, you can find the text to Pslam 27 here. I linked to the King James Version, but there are plenty of more interesting translations available as well.
You've Been Forsaken: and what does that even mean?
Here’s a rough synopsis:
Verses 1-3: I can do anything because I have God on my side.
Verses 4-6: It’s really great to be in God’s company.
Verses 7-10: Be nice to me, God, because I do what you say and I need you.
Verses11-12: Don’t let my enemies get me, God.
Verse 13: God rocks here and now.
Verse 14: Be patient and hopeful and God will show up.

Verses 7-10 are often thought to be the centralized theme of the psalm, and I want to look specifically at verse 10, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.”

It’s kind of a terrifying idea, when you think about it. My mother and father are going to forsake me. I have to be honest here: I don’t think I’d be all, “Oh, I have faith in God. It’s cool,” if my parents forsook me. When you think about it, it’s a strange concept. Why is there an assumption that parents are going to forsake their kids? What’s this all about?

Yeshivat Hamivtar has a nice little discussion of this psalm on their website, and it cites three of the classical commentators on this verse, and one not-so- classical commentary (the Twilight Zone):

First, Rashi comments that when parents have relations they turn away from each other afterwards. A sign that the act is a selfish, pleasure-oriented one. Rashi is explaining that parents never wanted the child for its own sake, rather for their own purposes. For many parents a child is the mere result of their lust, or is viewed as a commodity. The abandonment is immediate. A pessimistic observation.

The Radak says children go off on their own at some point. The "abandonment" is the natural way of life after adolescence. The Ibn Ezra gives the most obvious and, I believe, the truest literal explanation. Parents may love you and help out as long as they can, but the way of all flesh is to pass away. All too soon parents die, leaving children bereft.

This last idea first was brought home to me in a Twilight Zone episode many years ago. I was probably about 12 when I first saw "To Sing the Body Electric" (Ray Bradbury, the author, was into Walt Whitman and the perspective of the robot. I would have called it "My Mother and Father have Abandoned Me" after King David from the viewpoint of the child.). It is about a robot company that provides very humanlike products to order. A widower orders a replacement mother for his children. The perfect nanny. One daughter refuses to accept the interloper. We find out her fear was of becoming attached to another mortal mom who would also die, abandoning her.

Well, the nanny is hit by a truck and bounces right back. The young girl is convinced that she has nothing to worry about. The nanny is immortal. This l'havdil is the message of Elul. Hashem is eternally there for us.

So okay, I agree that the larger message does seem to be that God will be there for us forever, but I wonder what else is in this verse.

It seems to me that parents, be they good or bad, are what we always go back to mentally. The first few years aren’t called formative for nothing. They give us the most basic template for life, and so it makes sense that we return to our parents for guidance over and over again, because from the beginning they have sent us off on our journeys. Especially for those of us with generally good relationships with our parents, there is a risk of being overdependent. Not only in the way that was recently discussed in the New York Times, but in a spiritual way. It’s so easy to simply perpetuate your parents’ customs and join the synagogues that your parents joined and just generally have a statis relationship with faith because it’s how you were brought up, and it’s what you learned from your parents. But many of my friends have found that at some point this is no longer sufficient. Just as your parents’ political affiliations may no longer make sense to you as you get older, the same works for ritual and spiritual practices. At some point, they may no longer speak to you—it can be as if you’ve been abandoned by your parents’ faith.

And so this line makes sense again. Even when it seems as if the traditions and practices of your childhood have abandonded you, there’s plenty of room for you to still find God in some other ritual, prayer or community.

It still kind of scares the shit out of me, though.

We were having some trouble with the boy again. In an argument with a classmate, he’d thrown a block at the other boy’s forehead. The block connected. According to reliable observers, a geyser of blood erupted. The other kids in the class screamed.

It wasn’t a serious injury, just a messy one. The other kid sported a Band-Aid for a couple of days, and then it was forgotten. But a point had tipped. That afternoon, the preschool director called us in for a conference with Elijah’s teacher. They didn’t know what to do with him, they said. When he got upset, he stood in the middle of the schoolyard screaming. If, for some reason, his shoes got wet, the freak-outs were even worse.

Discipline and punish: This method not recommendedThis felt familiar: Elijah had already been kicked out of one preschool for biting. He’d also thrown public temper tantrums, usually resulting in him hitting an unsuspecting stranger. Months would go by without behavior problems, but then they’d re-emerge, more powerful than ever. When he acted up, we made fitful, incomplete attempts to keep him under control. Sometime we’d propose punishments, but not follow through. Other times, we’d punish without warning. Regina would punish and I would rescind. Or vice-versa. This happens to a lot of parents when they’re suddenly faced with a child, as opposed to a baby. When kids learn how to think rationally, they go on the attack. Parents must be ready to counter this with love, but also firm discipline. We weren’t ready enough.

“He’s always been an emotional child,” I said.

This, they said, goes beyond emotion.

They referred us to a child psychologist.

*****

Before she met with our son, the psychologist wanted us observe the boy’s behavior and take notes of any patterns. We mentioned his wet-shoe phobia. Also, sometimes he tried to hit his cousin when they argued over toys. This hardly seemed like a behavioral crisis. There hadn’t been any more serious incidents at school. We’d spent $600.

Even in a place like L.A., where it can seem like therapy is required by city charter, people don’t publicize their psychoanalysis. Therefore, it’s hard to find reliable statistics on what percentage of kids actually ends up in counseling. But in a country where 7.8 percent of children were diagnosed with attention deficit disorder as recently as 2003, I’d assume the percentage is pretty high. What if your kid isn’t mentally ill, though? What if you’re just having discipline problems? Sometimes a shrink can help. I’ve seen one myself on and off throughout my life. But therapy can be a crutch. Easier and far less expensive solutions abound.

Honor Thy Parenting Guide: Mogel's bookWendy Mogel had the same thought. An LA-based child psychologist dealing with educated urban liberals, she’d grown frustrated at her inability to help her patients. These children should have been perfectly adjusted and happy, but weren’t. Parents complained that their children were rude, spoiled, and out of control.

In her search for answers, Mogel found surprising solace in the Fifth Commandment. Children were simply not honoring their father and mother, as she explained in her parenting guide, The Blessings Of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings To Raise Self-Reliant Children. The book sold more than 100,000 copies and earning her a flattering profile in The New York Times Magazine. She began filling seminars across the country with Jews and non-Jews alike, all of whom were ready for her eminently practical message.

One afternoon, The Blessings of the Skinned Knee arrived in our mail, sent by my mother. She and my Aunt Estelle, who’d raised eight kids between them, had gone to see one of Mogel’s lectures. I ignored it, since I only tend to read parenting-themed books that involve the narrator getting drunk all the time. Regina, on the other hand, refused to deny the fact that we still had some trouble at home. She tore through it in two nights, proclaiming, when she was done, that she had the answer to most of our problems.

So I took to the couch with a beer and soaked in some wisdom. Mogel writes that parents need to be respected by their children, who should treat them as “honored rulers” in their own homes. Parents should demand this respect because children crave authority figures. ”Your children don’t need two more tall friends,” she writes “They have their own friends, all of whom are cooler than you. What they need are parents.”

I didn’t agree with everything Dr. Mogel was saying. For one thing, I am definitely cooler than any of my son’s friends, and I found the opposite assertion a bit disingenuous coming from someone who’s raising her own children with the man who wrote The Player. There’s no way some random teenager is going to be cooler than that guy. But everything else in the book hit Regina and I like lightning bolts of Jewish common sense. Our son didn’t respect us enough.

It was time to implement a new regime.

*****

We took three of her suggestions particularly to heart. The first involved chores. In Judaism, Mogel writes, “the path to holiness lies in human activity. Judaism values deed over creed and learning by doing.” For a four-year-old, this means a chore chart. Elijah woke up one morning to find that he had responsibilities. There were four: He had to feed the fish twice a day, he had to help Regina feed the dogs, he had to put his shoes on the shoe rack when he came home from school, and he had to clear his place after dinner.

Child labor: Judaism values doing the dishesThe second involved dinner itself. Judaism teaches that the family table is a sanctified place, so from now on we would eat dinner together.

The third involved discipline. Everything that Elijah treasured—his toys, his sugary treats, his television programs—were now “privileges” that we could take away if he misbehaved. These misbehaviors could involve major offenses, like repeatedly hitting the dogs, or minor ones, like repeatedly ignoring us when we were trying to talk to him. We’d be fair but consistent in implementing our judgment.

Initially, Elijah met us with howls of disbelief. But within a week, he was performing all his chores happily, without complaint. He was sitting in his place at the dinner table, not trying to eat in front of the TV or in our laps. And he was learning that if he got out of line, he’d lose his Spongebob or popsicle privileges.

We had become more authoritarian, but were we more Jewish? Mogel recommends keeping Shabbat, but our interest in Shabbat, and in all religious ritual, is minimal. We send Elijah to a Jewish day school that stages Passover plays, has a weekly Shabbat sing-along, and celebrates Israeli Independence Day, but many of the families at the school—like many of Mogel’s followers—aren’t Jewish. In the New York Times profile, a non-Jewish woman argues that Mogel’s methods are “about raising good people, not just good Jews.” After all, the Fifth Commandment is important in a certain other major religion, too.

But while we hadn’t tapped into any latent religious fervor, we were discovering one reason traditional Jewish methods have lasted for so long—because they work. In fact, we were raising the boy exactly the way my parents raised me. Growing up, it had never been perfect around my house. I didn’t respect my parents all the time and they weren’t always totally fair. But we ate dinner as a family, I did my chores, and I generally accepted the punishments they doled out. Here I sit, without a prison record, and I’m trying to raise my son using the same time-honored Jewish family methods, with slightly greater emphasis on musical taste.

***

One morning, I took Elijah to school. The director approached.

“I don’t know what you’re doing at home,” she said. “But keep doing it. He’s been absolutely wonderful.”

“We’re teaching him to respect us,” I said.

She nodded in total approval.

“Very good,” she said.

Go, Talmud, go!

The Jewish Housewife: Does no "work"A few months back, I got to thinking about work.  About Shabbat, and how we're all supposed to rest. About how our religion is VERY specific in its prohibition of labor on Saturday...

 But our definition of what work is... bugs me. A lot.  39 Melachot?  WTF?

I don't know why I never got around to ranting about this back when it crossed my mind, but the issue resurfaced yesterday, popped into my head as I was cleaning my house (finally!) and so I'm ranting now. Thank goodness it's never too late to rant.

Unlike a lot of people I know, the contempory extension of "work" as defined long long ago... is not a problem for me.  Of course, it seems silly to root our definition of labor in a long-gone temple.  It makes little sense to me that one is supposed to keep from lighting lights, and hence can't open the freezer door to get a friggin ice cube.  But I'm usually okay with random and arbitrary rules. I'm okay with anachronism. 

I'm not going to observe a rule like that anyway, so what do I care if someone else wants to drink warm soda?

What DOES bother me a lot is that it seems like the work that women (traditionally) do does NOT count as "work."   Childcare, basic housekeeping, picking up...

And if that's not bad enbough...  there's this handy stipulation (which I don't fully understand) that the "home" is a kind of free zone, and in traditional families, "home" is the domain of women... so...

If on Shabbat you carry a feather outside the private area into the public, you've "worked" but if you move a piano from the first floor to the second floor you have not "worked." Thus, it is not work as we understand it in English and use it most often.

  Which means, I guess,  that hubby can't go out and mow the lawn... but wifey is totally allowed to fix hubby a nice meal (so long as she doesn't turn on the stove), clean up the table after dinner, get the kids into jammies, etc.  Hubby gets to sit and read his Torah, and rest... and wifey gets to enjoy hubby's enjoyment, surrounding by a bazillion kids. 

 All this after cooking all DAY friday so she wouldn't have to turn on the stove.  Because she can't "work".  Lucky wifey.

This chaps my hide.

So I want to issue a little challenge.  I'm calling it the "Second Shabbat Challenge".

Basically, in homes that observe the tradional celebration of Shabbat... we need to create a second Shabbat. A special chunk of time, a day of rest set aside for the ladies.  Because while the way we observe Shabbat may be beyond religious reproach... there's no halachic reason you can't create a whole new secular day of rest, to show your wife you appreciate her.

See, if wifey is going to make you a nice dinner while you sit and read... you should cook HER dinner on Sunday. Maybe you should take the kids to the park so SHE can read the fucking Torah for a minute.

Just a thought.

Razr Makes For A Good Paper ClipA routine weekend BBQ with the kids turns into a near fatal tragedy for one divorced father of two boys.

A word of advice to parents everywhere: Never let your kids swim after filling them up on hot dogs. Oh, yeah. Also don't let your younger kid into a pool unchaperoned if he can't swim and turn away from him to assist your older son with the hot tub jets. It's a recipe for disaster.

Before I even touched the timer I looked back and Ben had kicked himself away from the wall of the pool and was underwater blowing bubbles with his arms out to the side, motionless. How could he have gotten that far into the pool in such a short time?

I ran back to the pool, jumped in the water and carried him down on the edge of the pool. He had a look of surprise on his face, spit a little water out of his mouth and rubbed his eyes. I climbed out of the pool.

"Wow, dad, you saved Ben's life."

"I don't know if I'd go that far."

"Were you ever a lifeguard?"

"No."

"Can I take a picture of you with those wet clothes in your cell phone?"

Sure, I thought, its right here in my...pocket...oh...s&*%

Sure enough, it was there, my nearly new phone, only one month old and wet as we can be. I took it out of my pocket and there were little drops of water in the screen. It didn't turn on.

In the remainder of the post, the father must deal with his understandably pissed off ex and come to terms with the loss of his new Razr phone. We feel bad for dad, but honestly, he's got bigger concerns up ahead. His younger brother almost dies and the first thing big brother thinks is, "Hey dad can I take a pic of you in your wet clothes?

 

When my son was 18 months old, my best friend from high school came through town on his way to California. He’s a respected physician and my most trusted medical counselor. We went back to my office and looked over my stash.

More Useful than a Bugaboo: The Silver Surfer“Dude,” he said. “You’ve got to stop smoking this shit.”

“I know,” I said. “With the kid around…”

“You need to buy a vaporizer.”

“Oh.”

“You get really high, and you don’t mess up your lungs. Also, there’s no odor. It’s awesome.”

My 35th birthday was approaching, and I needed to get myself a present. So I went vaporizer shopping online. I found a website for a sleek, gorgeous ceramic contraption called The Silver Surfer. New terms entered my stoner lexicon: “heat source,” “mouthpiece,” “whip,” “wand.” It would be the greatest present I’d ever give myself. No more apple bongs for me. I had to consume my THC wisely. I was a dad now.

*****

I’m a man of few vices. Alcohol doesn’t appeal to me, except in very limited quantities. I don’t play a lot of cards or smoke cigars, and I’m really not that into porn. My naughtiness all goes into the herb, and it’s as low-level as naughtiness gets.

Before my son was born, my hobby went like this: When I had weed in the house, I’d do it a lot, and when I didn’t, I wouldn’t do it at all. I could go two months without it, or go two months with daily use. Usually, it moved in cycles. It never really occurred to me to give it up just because I’d become a parent. It didn’t even occur to me that anyone would expect me to give it up. If anything, parenthood meant that marijuana became a larger part of my life. Whereas before the boy’s arrival I’d often leave the house after 9 PM for a party, or a bar, or a movie, now my social life had contracted. By the kid’s bedtime, I’m often exhausted, and even if I’m not, babysitters run $10 an hour these days. A hit off the Silver Surfer and a night of Turner Classic Movies has become, for me, an acceptable middle ground.

Then the morning comes, and I have responsibilities. I don’t Silver Surf when I have to drive Elijah somewhere, I don’t do it when I’m going to be alone with him for any extended period of time, and I’m very rarely baked before sundown. Since all that put together comprises 97 percent of my parenting time, there’s very little crossover with the weed. Occasionally, I’ll be stoned at the wrong moment, which will lead me to misjudge children’s entertainment, like the time I told my wife, “Dude, 64 Zoo Lane is so trippy.” But as far as I’m concerned, weed, in very limited quantities, just improves the parenting experience. Everyone knows that TV is better when you’re high.

Anyone who says it’s impossible to be a stoner and a parent has either never been a stoner, or never been a parent. The dominant attitude among stoner dads—and moms—goes like this: Consuming pot is something, like watching college football or masturbating, that you used to do all the time, but now will do only if it’s convenient and appropriate to the moment. Still, there’s a kind of secret, unspoken society. I’ve been to many backyard family barbecues where another dad and I will discover that pot is a shared habit. The discussion will quickly veer into the familiar. We discuss our favorite varietals. We recount great pot-smoking moments of our past. Someone tells a story about a dude he knows who’s got a medical marijuana prescription. Then things invariably wind down the same way:

Newly Controversial: Time Magazine on pot-smoking parentsDad: So do you have any?

Me: No. Do you?

Dad: Nah. I had some a few weeks ago.

Me: So did I. Give me a call if you ever get some.

Dad: Cool.

Me: Cool.

Pot-smoking parents didn’t use to be controversial. My parents never consumed anything stronger than box wine; my dad was the only soldier in Vietnam, other than maybe John McCain, who didn’t do drugs. But even if my parents had stashed a half-ounce of Maui Wowie in the underwear drawer, I can’t imagine it would have been a big deal around the house. The country was loose about weed then. No one gave it much of a thought.

When I was a kid, a Time magazine cover like the one on Dec. 9, 1996, would never have been possible. An aging Michael Doonesbury sits on his daughter’s bed, while Garry Trudeau’s talking joint character stands in the background. The text reads, “You tried pot when you were young. Maybe you even inhaled. So now what do you say to your kids?”

Even though I wasn’t to be a dad for six years, and hadn’t even met my wife yet, I knew then that the culture had turned. Parenting, rather than just being a natural, if challenging, byproduct of biology, had somehow become a sacred act. And smoking pot was a violation of its sanctity. Well, I never bought into that, and I’m not alone. Society is right to demand that parents treat their kids with respect and love, and provide them with food, clothing and shelter. But sainthood shouldn’t be a requirement.

In a perfect world, or at least a better one, smoking pot would not carry any cultural meaning at all. My casual little habit doesn’t prevent me from fulfilling my parental duties, and no matter what DARE and the DEA might say, it has little or nothing to do with the crack epidemic or the spread of crystal meth. I think that weed should be legal, and I’m not going to lie about that to my kid if he asks me. Someday I’ll have an intelligent conversation with him about the pros and cons of legalization, and about the politics of prohibition. But he’s not ready for such a conversation yet.

In the meantime, I’m downplaying my marijuana use. There’s a little water closet off my office that I use as a peccadillo repository of sorts. The other day, Elijah used my bathroom because the other one was occupied. He spotted the Silver Surfer on the floor.

“What’s that, daddy?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just something daddy uses to help him with his breath.”

“Good,” he said. “Your breath stinks sometimes.”

“Yeah, well, so does yours.”

Before my son, Elijah, was born, in the fall of 2002, I went around trumpeting that I was going to be a “cool” dad, though I had no idea what that meant, exactly, or what effect my determination to be a cool dad was going to have on my increasingly uncool life.

Well, now I know. Over the last year, I’ve become one of several unofficial spokespersons for a social trend that some people find annoying, and others find even more annoying.

I’m talking, of course, about hipster parenting, because as the author of the soon-to-be-published Alternadad, I’m currently incapable of talking about anything else. Here’s the crux of what I’ve been saying: As a generation, we’re gradually moving toward an understanding of parenthood that’s laid-back but not permissive, strict but not authoritarian, involved but not obsessive. In other words, we’re going to fuck up our kids in our own special way. I hope to help that process along.

While I became a dad deliberately, I became an “alternadad” very much by accident, or at least unwittingly. After the critical and commercial failure—which I could not possibly have seen coming—of my satirical novel about dueling rock critics, I flopped about for subject matter, a bylined grunion looking for a place to lay my next batch of literary eggs. Metaphors like the previous didn’t help me much. The publishing world proved indifferent to O,Timeless City!, my novel about a 19th-century Irish-American superhero who traveled through time on a flying pig. A baseball parody called The Balls of Summer also went nowhere. My agent, who had enjoyed my amusing complaints about fatherhood during the disastrous process of not selling those two projects, pretty much ordered me to write a parenting book.

I put together a proposal, which sold. It was, if I may say so, clever and energetic, if a bit scattered and soulless. At that point, Elijah wasn’t yet two years old, and thus my pre-fatherhood self hadn’t been completely eviscerated. The editor who bought the book was wiser than I, though I suppose that’s damning with faint praise. He said I’d grow into the material, which was nearly half about teaching my son to “rock,” and that the book would deepen as Elijah grew older.

“Sure it will,” I said.

I don’t know whether my perspective deepened or not. But I suddenly found myself paying a lot more attention to the parenting world into which I’d inadvertently stumbled, where kids did yoga at Sunday clothing bazaars thrown by a coalition of independent artisan mothers, where fathers straight-facedly proclaimed that their three-year-old son’s favorite band was Devo, and where people came up with their own organic baby-food recipes and posted photos of the results on Flickr. My wife, Regina, and I received, as a baby gift, a black onesie that bore the words “Born to Raise Hell” and featured, as an illustration, a flaming bottle that was spurting little drops of milk. It didn’t just resemble a phallus. It was a phallus.

The gilded era of ironic parenthood had begun. Having already put a Hatch Print Shop poster of Johnny Cash in my son’s nursery, I fit in perfectly. By the time Elijah was two, I was having conversations with him like this:

“Daddeee!”

“Yes, son?”

“I want to hear Ja Cash!”

“Johnny Cash?”

“Yeah! Train song!”

“Which one? Folsom Prison Blues or Orange Blossom Special?”

“Orange!”

“Look over yonder,” I sang to him, as I lifted him out of his crib, “Comin’ down those railroad tracks …”

I gradually started making my hip fatherhood public knowledge. When Elijah got kicked out of a lousy Montessori preschool because he wouldn’t stop biting a little girl—with whom he was in love—I wrote a tortured, somewhat tongue-in-cheek article for Salon about the incident, revealing the horrific fact that Regina and I were a little annoyed with him for doing this. The only other time I ever received such vile hate mail was when I dared state, in a different Salon piece, that Led Zeppelin may not be a relevant rock band anymore. But I’d rather piss off Zeppelin Nation than a million parents with access to email. Letters to the editor attacked us as “people who shouldn’t have children” and worse. Yet not everyone reacted so badly. There were other people who said they appreciated my honesty, that I should keep going, keep writing, keep telling the truth about what it means to be a parent, even though truth in parenting is deeply subjective, and probably impossible.

So then, like every other new American father between the ages of 27 and 40, I started blogging. Only gradually did I discover that I was part of a vast blog network, including Dadcentric, Daddy Types, and The Blogfathers—a network which paled in size next to the even more vast universe of mommyblogging. Meanwhile, a weird, locally based indie rock culture for kids had begun to spring up. In San Francisco, The Sippy Cups played psychedelic hits of the ’60s and ’70s to audiences that reached into the hundreds. A dancer and new mommy in Philadelphia started a party afternoon for families called Baby Loves Disco, which quickly spread to a half-dozen cities. Kids’ clothing boutiques started sprouting on every corner of every gentrified urban neighborhood in America. Hip parenting had arrived, and it was my destiny.

And so I’m going to write about this culture, in this space and anywhere else where I can get paid. My goals with this column aren’t really political. There are other people who understand the “Mommy Wars” much better than I do, and the ethics of nanny hiring are far away from my reality—we’re lucky if we can afford a sitter two Saturday nights a month. Instead, I’ll simply be chronicling, critiquing, and possibly providing a guide to negotiating this neo-parenting culture—and by calling attention to its existence, doubtless destroying it.

That destruction may already be underway. I was quoted as an expert (or “unhinged egomaniac,” depending on how you look at it) in an article in New York magazine a few months ago that described this generation of parents as “Grups,” sort of Peter Pan types in expensive sneakers who refuse to give up youth culture even as it’s passing them by.

There were certainly some truths in the piece, but I think that “alternaparenting” has a lot more depth to it than a trend piece in New York might indicate (shocking, I know). But even if alternaparenting turns out not to be a trend after all, I’ve always got that novel about the 19th-century Irish superhero. Ill-conceived cartoon ideas have a certain timeless appeal, and often make millions of dollars for their creators. On such profound observations will I build my career as a professional parent. I hope you enjoy them.

 

N E X T

Do: Are you an Alternaparent, or do you think Neal Pollack’s definition is way off? Post your comments below.
Go: Pollack's alternaparenting not your bag? Then drop by the Orthodox Union’s Positive Jewish Parenting Seminar in North Jersey on January 10. It’s at the Rosenbaum Yeshiva!!
Read: The New York magazine article that started it all is pretty de rigueur. And Neal Pollack’s blog has cute pics of the Alterna-tyke.