Tag Archives: parenting

NYC, Parental Guidance

Why You Should Never Buy Pricey Toys for Your Children

There’s one block of Flushing Avenue, right around Bedford, that’s completely torn up. And it’s been completely torn up since I started taking the bus to work.

The street is literally ripped open, with a huge, gaping hole cordoned off by an rickety wooden fence. You can see down inside, where months of rainwater have accumulated, leaving a lime green, radioactive scummy pond. Enormous segments of concrete sewer pipe lay on the sidewalk. They once had screens on their open ends that looked kinda like cheesecloth, but those were weathered away long ago, and their remnants flap in the breeze.

None of this crap has moved in at least 6 months. I don’t know who’s to blame: the city, or whatever slumlord started repairs and never finished them. But because of it, my bus gets trapped on this block every morning, thus making my commute far longer than it need be.

So this morning, while I’m stuck at this point, I see some Hasidic kids playing on the sidewalk. They’re taking cardboard box from the kosher grocery store across the street, and they’re trying to bale a puddle of dirty rainwater with it. They range in age from 4 to 8, and they look like they’re having the time of their lives.

I see this is in my own home. My daughter will play with a 10 cent hair scrunchie, or a paper towel roll, and have as much fun as she does playing with expensive Christmas presents. If not more.

So my parental advice is, exploit this childhood window while you can. Forget the Baby Einstein nonsense and get the kid an empty pallet of tissue boxes from behind the local Duane Reade. The kid won’t care, and you won’t have to cajole them to play with that hand-crafted wooden xylophone you wasted 30 dollars on.

Parental Guidance

We Have a New Rude Douche Champion!

A while back, I wrote of a grocery store parking lot incident that occurred when I was still a newish father. My baby clunked her head on a shopping cart, got upset, and proceeded to yak several metric tons of formula on the pavement. And while I tried to calm her down and avoid the puke, some mouthy broad rolled by me. Did she offer to help? Did she let out a sympathetic “I’ve been there” sigh? No, she screamed TILT HER FORWARD!! and kept on moving.

This act was astounding in its cluelessness and willingness to throw gasoline on a fire. It takes a special kind of person to see another human being in crisis, resist the temptation to help or ignore them, and yell something at them.

Rudeness is a fact of life in NYC, but it’s usually simple, impersonal rudeness. When someone goes out of their way to be rude to you while you’re in the middle of something very serious–well, that person must be applauded for their sheer commitment to assholery.

This woman was the champion of Rude Douches in my experience. Until yesterday, that is. Ladies and gentlemen, a new king has been crowned.

I’ve been super busy at work lately, but yesterday I left in a timely fashion. I was looking forward to a quiet evening at home, working on the podcast, hopefully catching 30 Rock, The Office, and the debut of Delocated. My daughter must have sensed this, because she picked this evening to jam a raisin in her nose.

She toddled over me and said “Daddy, boo-boo nose!” I saw the raisin sticking out of her left nostril, and asked her to sit still while I retrieved it. Of course, this caused her to rear her head back and lodge the raisin deep in her nasal cavity, way too deep for me to get at.

We called her doctor, who told us what we feared: she’d have to go to the ER. There are a few hospitals near us, but they’re all closing within months. I have reservations about taking my child to a hospital whose workers know they’re gonna be out of a job soon. I had visions of the doctor saying, “Yeah, her appendix is coming out. It’s not infected, but I’ve never done an appendectomy before and this might be my last chance!”

So we schlepped all the way to Flushing, amidst beautiful LIE traffic, and ran smack into a jam-packed ER waiting room. Despite an interminable wait, the baby was reasonably calm and well behaved, until we went to triage. She picked this moment to have one of her trademark meltdowns, kicking and screaming and going limp like a non-violent protester.

Post-triage, she was still freaking out. I ran with her out of the waiting room and tried to calm her down, but in her anger she kept kicking me right in the stomach. “You want down? Fine,” I said, and let her on the ground. She slumped and whined with her head on the hallway tiles.

This is an act that every parent of a 2-year-old has seen. You just have to wait it out until the kid is tired of acting like a jerk. Doing so can make you look like a jerk to non-parents and other bystanders, but it’s really the best thing to do. Anything else is a waste of your physical and emotional energy.

At this point, the ER doors opened and one of the hospital maintenance guys came through. “You gotta get her off the floor,” he said. “It’s dirty.”

“I would if I could,” I shoot back.

“You gotta do it,” he says. “You gotta be a father.”

And he keeps on walking.

Ok, first off, mind your own business. Second, mind your own business. Third through one hundred and seventy eighth, MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS.

I gotta be a father?! I’ve been waiting in this overcrowded ER waiting room two goddamn hours because my daughter shoved a raisin up her nose. In a few minutes, I’m gonna have to hold her down on a hospital bed while a complete stranger shoves a hook up her nostril to fish it out. If that isn’t the definition of a father, you tell me what is, asshole.

And yeah, I figure the floor is dirty, Einstein. But if it is, isn’t that YOUR FAULT, GUY WHO CLEANS HOSPITAL FLOOR FOR A LIVING?!

I was seriously ready to fist-fight this guy. But he was gone as quick as he appeared, and at this exact moment we were called into the ER. My desire to get the fuck out of this place as quickly as possible trumped my desire to punch a stranger, no matter how much a bastard he was.

Congrats, New Rude Douche Champion! I’m gonna pick out a huge trophy in your honor! And the next time I see you, prepare to have that trophy shoved right up your ass.

Parental Guidance

Unreasonable Anger Theatre Presents: Kids Wear the Darnedest Things

Something dumb that drives me nuts: Kids who refuse to dress up.

This is not an Adult Feeling for me, or a Parent Feeling. Even when I was a kid, it really bothered me when I saw other kids at a fancy function dressed in jeans and sneakers.

Maybe it was because I had to get dressed up all the time to go to Witness meetings. So I’d think to myself, Hey, kid, I gotta put a suit on three times a week. You can’t put on friggin’ tie for Aunt Clara’s 90th birthday?

I don’t come from fancy people, by any stretch of the imagination. But I do come from a family where you know that sometimes you have to dress nice. And “nice” doesn’t mean “expensive”. It just means “not showing up to a funeral in a Budweiser t-shirt.”

It doesn’t take a lot of money to not look like a slob. I wore SalVay suits as a kid. Hell, I wore sub-SalVay suits. I wore suits from this nasty-ass thrift store in our local town that smelled like an armpit. Every time I set foot in that place, it took a few weeks off my life, from a combination of intense fear I would be spotted there and the airborne contaminants inside it. Seriously, I think it was built on top of a former pesticide testing facility.

But you know what? We were too damn poor to turn up our noses at such bargains. After a delousing, the suits looked fine. Plus, there was the occasional pearl hidden within. I once managed to snag a vinyl copy of Monty Python’s rare three-sided record for like a buck.

I’m aware that not everyone has what sociologists would call the “cultural capital” to know how to behave in certain social situations. But my feeling is, if you have enough money to not shop at The Pest Hole Thrift Shop like I did, you also should know how to dress at a fahncy function.

All of this childhood anger hit me anew this weekend at a party I attended. The outfits worn by people at this party ranged in their fanciness. I was at the lower end of the scale, in a nice sweater and dress shoes but also wearing a pair of jeans. Some folks were all decked out, others were closer to me. But no one looked like they just rolled out of bed and put on something that’d been laying on the floor.

Then this one kid showed up in a replica NFL jersey and sneakers, and just like that, I was FURIOUS. Because it wasn’t an old holey football top or scuffed-up Keds. No, it was sparkling, brand-new (or well maintained) Vince Young replica and matching shoes in similarly pristine condition.

So this family had enough dough to dress him in the outfit of his choice. And everyone else he entered with wore appropriate attire. He just didn’t feel like getting dressed up. It really pissed me off, in the kind of blind, dumb way that you can only be pissed off when you’re a kid and you find something WRONG and UNFAIR!

And I see NO WAY in which this post could come back to bite me in the ass when my own child refuses to get dressed up some day!