And though Héloïse Cerys Raquel is our first born human child, our “first son”, Dudley the chinchilla, has his Facebook page up and running and accepts friend requests. Should he twitter too?
Real blogging returns Monday.
And for those marked as friends or family only, pictures of our Cerys are up in my Flickr account.
You know the rules — hit shuffle on your iPod or iPhone or MP3 players and see what ten songs come up. Bonus track is whatever’s been in your head most this week.
1. “Brilliant Disguise”, Bruce Springsteen
2. “We’re All Gonna Die Someday”, Kacey Chambers
3. “Bang Your Head” (Metal Health)”, Quiet Riot
4. “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos”, Joan Baez
5. “I’m Coming Home”, Robert Earl Keen
6. “Welfare Music”, John Hiatt
7. “Songbird”, Rosie Thomas
8. “Gaudeamus Igitur”, Mario Lanza
9. “My Heart is Free”, Tift Merritt
10. “The Truth About You”, Rosanne Cash
Bonus Track: “One Tree Hill”, U2
Experiencing the steep learning curve of a new father has me thinking again about men and domesticity and the ways in which we carefully inculcate “learned incompetence” in so many of our brothers. (An old post on men and household chores is here.)
As I’ve said several times now, I never changed a baby’s diaper until my daughter was born. Though my younger sisters are more than a decade my junior, I was never invited or encouraged to change them or participate in their care. Growing up, the men I knew were immensely enthusiastic about babies — in short bursts. After some active play, a crying child would be handed by a man to the baby’s mother (or aunt, grandmother, cousin, and so on). My own father was very loving towards me all his life, but the actual care I can remember receiving when I was small was largely from my mother or from other women.
My feminist mother, to her credit, taught her sons how to do laundry, wash dishes, and perform other domestic duties. But we were never given, that I remember, any sort of education about how to care for babies. And though in many previous relationships with women I learned to be scrupulous about balancing out household tasks, small people were never a responsibility. (Pets were, and I’ve always been eager to volunteer to take the lead in caring for animals.) So when Cerys was born, I was suddenly “on” duty in a way I had never been before. Continue reading
Elizabeth Alexander had the misfortune to have the largest audience any poet has ever had, and the misfortune to follow rather than precede Barack Obama’s inaugural address. She deserved better, though I thought she acquitted herself well, far more effective than some critics have suggested.
This poem, typical of her style, is on a subject near and dear to my heart these days.
Neonatology
Is
funky, is
leaky, is
a soggy, bloody crotch, is
sharp jets of breast milk shot straight across the room,
is gaudy, mustard-colored poop, is
postpartum tears that soak the baby’s lovely head.
Then everything dries and disappears
Then everything dries and disappears
Neonatology
is day into night into day,
light into dark into light, semi-
and full-fledged, hyperconscious,
is funky, is funny: the baby farts,
we laugh. The baby burps, we smile, say “Yes.â€
The baby poops, his whole body stiffens,
then steam heat floods the pipes.
He slashes his nose with nails we cannot bear to trim,
takes a nap, and the wounds disappear.
The spirit lives in your squirts and coos.
Your noises and fluids are what you do.
Neonatology
is what we cannot see: you speak to the birds,
the birds speak back, is solemn,
singing, funky, frightening,
buckets of tears on the baby’s lovely head, is
spongy
I am, it should be noted, on a very steep learning curve as a first-time Dad. I have learned so much these past months as I walked with my wife through her pregnancy, through the delivery, and now through the work of caring for our daughter. Having never changed a diaper before a month ago, I’m turning very nearly into a pro. And I’m keenly aware of Cerys’ noises, smell, movements every moment that I’m home with her. My workout schedule — which for years averaged 10-18 hours a week or more — is down to three hours of running in any given seven-day period. Something amazing is happening if I’m willing to forego my beloved addiction in order to get a different kind of high, the “Daddy high” which I’ve been on these past thirty days since her birth.
And I’m learning a lot about parenting theory and styles. Our pediatrician is a big advocate of breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and attachment parenting. And my goodness, I’m as much of an advocate for this as any father (who has a limited right to push his partner to breastfeed) could be! (I try and respect my wife’s privacy on this blog, but the breastfeeding is, blessedly, not the problem that I understand it can be for some folks.) I certainly am a big advocate of the co-sleeping and of picking up Cerys whenever she cries. I’m getting four hours of sleep a night on a good night, but frankly, couldn’t care less. My wife is at home with Cerys all day; at night, when breastfeeding is done, it’s my job to get the girl back to sleep, however long it takes. She’s usually up between 3:00 and 4:30AM, and we sit in the sleigh glider in the nursery, each with one eye on Bloomberg business television and one eye on each other. I sing to her an eclectic mix of lullabies; her favorite these days seems to be (perhaps problematically) “Der Gute Kamerad“, a German song I’ve known since I was very small. I am exhausted much of the day, wired on obscene amounts of caffeine, and deliriously happy. I may be teaching full-time, but by God, every other moment I can give will be with my wife and my splendid bouncing daughter.
We’ve had a doula around to help out my wife during the day while I’m teaching. Today, Mariela told my wife and me about her experience working with families who want to practice the “cry it out” technique of training infants to sleep. With babies as young as Cerys — who is just one month — these parents will let their babies cry in the crib for hours, offering no more reassurance than a simple whispered, “I’m here if you really need me” while standing over the infant. The idea is to condition the baby to understand that there will be no response, and presumably to teach the kid to give up and sleep. Mariela, said in her experience, the babies cry until they are too exhausted — or until, in her words, “they give up hope.” Both my wife and I were frantic at the very thought of our girl “giving up hope.” She never cries for more than thirty seconds before we pick her up, and we’re both determined to have that commitment continue. I may be brutally tired, but — frankly — I don’t care, and neither does my wife. It’s been a month of long nights’ journeys into days, and it’s been the most blessed month of our exhausted and happy lives.
I’m not trying to start the “mommy wars” or the “Daddy wars”. This isn’t about the right or the wrong way to parent. All I know is what I intend to keep on doing, which is answering that plaintive wail at whatever hour it is heard, however bone-weary I may be. Every human being will face a time in his or her life where they need to just “cry it out”, but as far as Cerys is concerned, infancy is not that time.
Yesterday’s post about emotional affairs and betrayal elicited this comment from jennyfields:
I am relating to today’s post on many complicated and vague levels. I wonder how this applies to “entertaining†fantasies that would be an emotion betrayal of yourself instead of a partner. Is it the same thing or is it different? Where is the morality when it’s only to yourself that you have made certain promises?
I know quite well what jennyfields is referring to, both because she and I have corresponded and because it’s an issue I’ve had ample opportunity to consider in my own life. I’ve written before about the issue of feminist men and the problem of heterosexual desire, and that touches a bit on the topic jennyfields raises, but not entirely. What she’s talking about is breaking unhealthy sexual patterns, and how to cope with the intrusive fantasies that often arise as we make our way in recovery.
Lots of us, for example, have a history of being attracted to people who are not good for us. Call it the “bad boy syndrome” or what-you-will, but it’s common enough to be the subject of biting humor and endless reflection. Women and men, queers and straights, a great many folks have struggled to reconcile what our head tells us is healthy with what our libido (informed as it so often is by childhood traumas of one kind or another) or our heart longs for. And a great many of us, myself very much included, developed unhealthy patterns early on in our sexual relationships. To use one classic example, a young woman who had an emotionally distant father may form destructive sexual relationships with inappropriately older men, hoping (whether she’s conscious of it or not) that she will be able to earn attention and validation through sex. Assuming her father didn’t sexualize her inappropriately, sex for her becomes the one missing element that made her invisible to the older man she needed most when she was small — and thus she pushes that sexuality front and center in her adolescence, hoping that it willl be the missing piece of the puzzle. That’s a hard habit to break. Some men may get into the “knight in shining armor” pattern in which they seek out women whom they imagine need them desperately — which often leads them to become the so-called “Nice Guys(tm)”.
I had so many unhealthy patterns that they intersected and wound ’round each other into a perverse patchwork quilt of romantic and sexual dysfunction. With an addictive personality since birth and a drinking problem (well-concealed at first) since I was fifteen, it’s no surprise that the women I was drawn to were often close to my own level of emotional stability. And though my first two wives (the ones I was married to in my using days) were very different from each other, and though some of the women I dated were remarkably stable, my “unhealthy type” was usually the same. I liked my fellow addicts, preferably with a dual diagnosis of manic depression to boot. When I was newly single after my second divorce, a clueless acquaintance, hoping to “get me back out there”, asked me what sort of women I was interested in meeting. Without skipping a beat, a cousin of mine who was part of the conversation said “Hugo likes short-haired brunettes with sex addictions, high IQs, eating disorders, and a bipolar diagnosis.” Continue reading
A friend of mine with whom I’ve had many conversations about feminism and older men/younger women relationships wrote me a note last week about a close acquaintance of hers, a young woman of 21 who is having an “emotional affair” with a man of 44.
I’ve blogged enough lately about age-disparate relationships, and I intend to do much more writing on the subject. Today, I’m interested in writing about this strange and troubling beast called the emotional affair, a phenomenon enormously abetted by modern technology.
I’m not treading on new ground when I remark that when it comes to love and sex, humans are generally very good at deceiving themselves. We are particularly good, as a rule, at justifying certain kinds of betrayals because they don’t meet our own contorted and legalistic definitions of what constitutes genuine infidelity. The paradigmatic example, of course, is that of Bill Clinton. A great many of us believed, and still believe, that our 42nd president was absolutely sincere when he denied an adulterous relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he had constructed for himself a moral calculus in which only intercourse constituted authentic infidelity. In 1998, as the nation watched the Clintons’ all-too-public agony, a great many folks were challenged to think about their own little webs of deceit and justification. If the politicians we elect are mirrors for our best and worst aspects of ourselves, then President Clinton — a man of extraordinary gifts and extraordinarily banal frailties — reminded us of our own capacity for duplicity.
Most people have no trouble labelling oral sex with an intern behind your wife’s back as adultery. Bill Clinton is easy to admire, and easy to ridicule. But lesser men than he — and a great many women too — have shown a similar capacity for self-deception. And we are particularly prone to this sort of self-deception when it comes to affairs that don’t have a physically sexual component. For those of us who define fidelity in terms of what actions we don’t undertake with other people, it’s all too easy to slide into an emotional affair.
For the purposes of this post, I’ll define an emotional affair as a non-physically sexual relationship characterized by mutually intense psychological intimacy, accompanied by words or gestures that traditionally are reserved for one’s romantic partner. That’s a vague definition, of course; emotional affairs are notoriously difficult to define. (One thinks of the perhaps apocryphal Potter Stewart remark about knowing obscenity when he saw it.) The slipperiness of the line between “good friend” and emotional “lover” allows those involved in these affairs a great deal of plausible deniability, both to themselves and to those around them. “We’re just friends”; “It’s totally innocent”; “You’re reading too much into this” are the sorts of things that can be said with genuine sincerity in response to suspicious queries from others. Continue reading
A week ago, I posted a request once again for “older men, younger women” stories. I’ve had several dozen replies, but am still eager for more. In any case, the discussion thread below the post turns to a re-visiting of the old myth about younger women and fertility.
Hector takes the classic traditionalist view: men need to be “older” and women “younger” because of economics and biology. The man needs “time” to grow to the point where he can support a family, while a woman ought to be younger and hence more likely to be fertile. Hector (and the legions who share his views) offer a weird amalgam of evolutionary psychology, biological half-truths, and an unwitting social commentary on how long it takes men to get their acts together in our culture. Hector tells us that he often offers advice to the women in his life to settle down and reproduce sooner rather than later.
“Matey” has a great rejoinder.
I’m in my early forties, my wife in her mid-thirties, and she is on the younger end of first-time mothers in our social circle. We both recognize that there is a very slight decline in fertility for folks our age, along with an equally slight concomitant risk in potential pregnancy complications. That said, we’re also keenly aware of how the “have kids young, before it’s too late” message is one far more rooted in ideology than in biological fact. A culture deeply troubled by women’s independence and ambition has good reason to encourage the young to step onto the “mommy track” as early as possible. Untangling hard fact from misogynistic myth is difficult.
But for the sake of argument, let’s grant that women hoping to have children ought to start early. That still doesn’t explain why they ought to partner with older men (especially given that fertility problems and birth defects — particularly autism and schizophrenia — are much more likely in the children of old dudes). Why not devote energy to fighting the scourge of “guyhood” — the flight from responsibility and commitment that characterizes so many young men’s lives? If you really want your young women married and pregnant early, then push young men to get their acts together sometime before they turn 35. American middle-class male adolescence has turned into a quarter-century project; far too many twenty-something lads are far too hooked on pot, porn, and Playstation to even consider making commitments. A thoughtful social conservative wouldn’t push for age-disparate relationships as part of some divine or natural plan; a thoughtful social conservative would push to accelerate young men’s acceptance of responsibility so that it harmonized neatly with young women’s fertility.
Personally, I think most folks of either sex are better off waiting to have children. One tends to be much more patient, one tends to have worked through more of one’s own insecurities and “issues”, one tends to have more financial resources. (There are myriad exceptions, of course — irresponsible forty-somethings and responsibile twenty-somethings are not unheard of.) It’s also, happily enough, a good way of practicing family size limitation. Extreme experimentation with fertility drugs notwithstanding, women who start to reproduce in their thirties or even early forties are more likely to have only one or two children, thus placing less long-term stress on our planet’s resources.
One thing is clear: whatever you consider the ideal age for reproducing, there is no defensible rationale for arguing that dramatically age-disparate relationships are ideal. Unless, of course, you embrace the lie that men are entitled to enjoy three decades worth of puberty, while their sisters ought to start breeding before the first wrinkles appear.
A deeply misguided story in this week’s Newsweek magazine about my state: Death of the Dream, written by Joel Kotkin.
For decades, California has epitomized America’s economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.
California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence—and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.
It doesn’t get much better. Continue reading