Fathermucker (5 page)

And so it does. In New Paltz, pretty much everyone drives a Subaru with at least one sticker of leftist sentiment crookedly festooned to its bumper. This is a bluer locale than even Manhattan, which is, at last, a city of bankers. Where better than Crunchtown to wait out the last days of Bush-Cheney? To wit: in the election returns last November, Obama smoked McCain by 5,360 to 1,274. Had Gore gotten anything close to those results in a few precincts in Florida or Ohio, the world would be a vastly different place.

But it was not to be. The alternate reality where Gore takes the White House feels as distant and foreign as the alternate reality where Stacy and I are childless residents of the East Village. The former never existed, thanks to the Supreme Court; the latter may as well not have.

“D
ADDY,” COMES
M
AUDE's STENTORIAN VOICE FROM THE MONITOR
, just as I'm about to step into the shower, “I want to watch TV.” She has the personality of a despot, at times, and the voice to match.

Although Maude speaks well for a three-and-a-half-year-old—her prosody and vocabulary are excellent—she resists dropping the vestigial whine of her toddlerhood.
Daddy, I want to watch TV
is delivered in a voice halfway between a baby's bawling and the King's English, as if her native and preferred tongue, Crying, manifests itself in an accent she can't quite shake, like Keanu Reeves trying to play an Englishman in
Bram Stoker's Dracula
. As with Reeves, the effect is grating.

Another facet of Maude in the morning: she doesn't wake up gradually. When she comes to, she's as alert as I would be after three cups of coffee. She's like a laptop on sleep mode—flip it open and the applications are still running, Firefox displaying the Facebook feed, iTunes paused in the middle of “Rehab,” unfinished Solitaire game going: just how you left it. If you tell Maude before she goes to bed that she can have a lollipop if she has a good night's sleep, the first thing she'll say when she opens her eyes ten hours later is
Where's my lolly?
Nothing gets past her—nothing. She could work the homicide desk with McNulty and Bunk. This is in stark contrast to Roland, who will put a
Lamps Plus
catalog on the table in front of him, pause to look out the window, and then start crying because he can't find the
Lamps Plus
catalog.

I jump back into my sweatpants and run up the stairs. By now, Maude's whine-accented speech has reverted to outright crying, and Roland is banging on his door to get out (we have these child safety thingamajigs on the knobs so they can't open their doors, or the lunatics really would run the asylum). I open Roland's door, switch off his noise machine—he bounds into the hallway—open Maude's door, switch off her noise machine, and scoop her up.

“Daddy,” she says, and her eyes meet mine so directly, her gaze so intense, she may as well be trying to hypnotize me, “I want to watch TV.”

“Good morning to you, too. What do you want to watch?”

“Ummm . . . ummmm . . .” She does this a lot, filling in the space as she decides.

“
Yo Gabba Gabba!
?”

“No! Not
Yo Gabba Gabba!
I don't want to watch
Yo Gabba Gabba!
ever again
.”

Kids have no concept of time.
Ever again, forever, yesterday, tomorrow, last year, next month
—none of these terms have any real meaning to a child, especially a three-year-old. Sometimes you can use this to your advantage.
Sure,
you can say,
we'll go there tomorrow
. Or,
We'll buy the new Lego set next week
. So few arrows in the parental quiver—important to use the full comportment of weaponry at your disposal, however meager their power (and however deceptive their advertising).

“But Daddy,” says Roland, “
I
want to watch
Yo Gabba Gabba!
What's for me?
What's for me?
”

“We'll watch something you both want to watch,” I tell him.

This isn't good enough. He spins around, rage ruddying his cheeks, and swats at me with both arms. “No! I don't like that. I don't like sisters. I don't want Maudes. No Maudes allowed here. I'm
mad
at her!”

He swoops by her like a bird of prey, arms extended, smacking her on the head as he races by.

“Roland,” I holler. “Stop it. Jesus Christ.”

My swearing has increased both in frequency and severity with each day of Stacy's absence. Today's over-under on “F-bombs With a Child in Earshot” is five. Especially if we drive around a lot. The whole “blinker” concept is not much known in these parts.

“Stupid Christ,” he shouts, as I suppress giggling at his botched attempt to swear. Then he gets one right: “Stupid Daddy.”

Ignoring him—this is, after all, not unusual behavior—I turn to Maude. “
LazyTown
?”

“No. I want to watch . . . ummm . . .
Max & Ruby
.”

Figures she'd pick the show I dislike the most. That's her job as a kid, right, developing tastes antithetical to mine? Rankling my sensibilities? I shudder for the teenage years. I really hope the whole tattoo fad is done by then. “Does that work for you, Roland?
Max & Ruby
?”

He lets out an exaggerated sigh, but calms down, like a possessed villager post-exorcism. “O-kay,” he says.

Catastrophe averted.

“Let's go down. I'll make bagels.”

“I don't like bagels!”

N
OGGIN, THE MORE OR LESS COMMERCIAL-FREE CABLE STATION
programmed for little tykes
it's like preschool on TV
, in an apparent attempt to assuage your guilt for plopping your pride and joy in front of the zombie box, displays, before each offering, info-graphics that extol the educational virtues of the show you're about to suffer through.

Max & Ruby
, for example, which concerns the diurnal goings-on of a pair of corpulent bunnies, a bratty two-year-old (the former) and his prissy seven-year-old sister (the latter) who doubles as his de facto legal guardian,
enhances preschoolers' understanding of
INTER-
and
INTRAPERSONAL DYNAMICS
.

LazyTown
, featuring the athlete/superhero Sportacus, Iceland's second most important export after Björk,
enhances preschoolers' understanding of
KINESTHETIC SKILLS
and awareness of
HEALTHFUL BEHAVIORS
.

Yo Gabba Gabba!
—the title refers to the incantation D. J. Lance Rock, the orange-garbed host, intones at the top of each episode to bequeath life to his five deformed playthings—
enhances preschoolers'
SOCIAL SKILLS
and
SELF-AWARENESS
and uses interactive games to expand their
MUSICAL
and
KINESTHETIC SKILLS
.

And
Olivia
, a show about a family of pigs whom I can't tell apart, and who look, to my jaded East Village eyes, like the blown-up photographs of late-term aborted fetuses the pro-life crazies used to wave around at tourists in Washington Square Park . . .
Olivia
, for the love of God,
enhances preschoolers' understanding of the
CREATIVE THINKING
and imaginative
PROBLEM-SOLVING
that support imaginative play and the development of
INTER-
and
INTRAPERSONAL AWARENESS
.

I've heard the porcine program also turns loaves into fishes and helps O. J. find the real killer.

There is a pervasive belief among parents, particularly crunchy parents, which constitute an overwhelming majority in New Paltz—mommies who subscribe to both
Mothering
magazine (
Judgmental Mothering
, as Stacy calls it) and the doctrinaire philosophies therein; mommies who eschew diapers for Elimination Communication; mommies who practice Attachment Parenting; mommies who “fight through” a baby's natural instinct to wean and continue breastfeeding until Little League—a tenet clung to with such zeal that it may as well be a Zen koan, a papal bull, a lost commandment, that
TELEVISION IS BAD
. High-fructose corn syrup for the eyes. Unfiltered Luckies for the brain.
KILL YOUR TELEVISION
is a popular bumper sticker around here, and an even more popular sentiment.
TV, or not TV: that is the question.
When chatting casually on the subject with other Hudson Valley parents, I find myself qualifying, if not outright apologizing for, our decision to let our kids watch TV. If I permit such deleterious activity, you see, I must at least recognize its inherent and unequivocal evil. (Tacit disapproval is still disapproval, and often harder to counter than the explicit variety.) So, the obligatory caveat: I don't think kids should watch adult programs, commercials especially, and I don't think they should spend all the livelong day in front of the boob tube. But I don't see the harm in my kids catching a little Noggin while I gird up for the grueling day. It amuses me to wonder, when Roland wakes up particularly early—four o'clock, three thirty early, as he occasionally does; Asperger kids require less sleep—how these über-parenting zealots would handle him, without the Athenian aid of the TV. What would these Kill Your Televisionaries, what would Gloria Hynek, do with Roland? A fucking
craft
? She would sit and make beaded fucking bracelets with my boy for the three hours till the sun came up? Really?

The truth is, my kids could spend the next half-hour watching the
South Park
movie, and I wouldn't mind, as long as I got to take a shower and they didn't memorize the words to “Shut Your Fucking Face, Uncle Fucker.” If that makes me a shitty parent, well, alert Child Services.
That's U-N-C-L-E-Fuck-You.
The number's in the book.

O
N THE TOILET
, I
FLIP YET AGAIN THROUGH LAST WEEK'S WELL-WORN
Us Weekly
—the new issue should arrive this afternoon; one of the (sad) highlights of my (pathetic) week—hoping to discover a page that I've missed during seven days of heavy bathroom perusal, but I keep coming back to the same full-page
HOT PIC
of Gwyneth Paltrow strolling down an unnamed London street, hand-in-hand with her two sickeningly adorable kids, that I've seen about a thousand times since last Friday.

Study these pages long enough, and you discover certain trends. For example: although there are a fair number of Tinseltown Ethans and Madisons, celebrities as a rule prefer outside-the-box names for their spawn. And if you read the tabloids as religiously as I do, you know that there's a fine line between
outside-the-box
and
ridiculous
. Like, Nicolas Cage, who was rumored for years to be playing the eponymous role in a Superman movie, has a son named Kal-El—the Man of Steel's name on the planet where he (and, by all indications, Cage as well) was born.

Kal-fucking-El!

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban have a daughter named Sunday; she was born on a Saturday. Jenna Elfman has a son named Story. If Story grows up and has a son with the same name, the little guy won't be a junior, but a Second Story; you might say Jenna's getting in on the ground floor. Jason Lee's little lad is named Pilot Inspektor. Spelling it with a “c”, one assumes, would just be too conservative.

“
Dad
-dy,” comes Maude's trumpet-like voice, all singsong, “another
Max &
Ru
-by
!”

“Be right there,” I tell her, also in singsong. “I'm in the bathroom.”

The daffiest of all celebrity baby names, it says here, belongs to Paltrow's daughter, Apple. Apple! Forget, for a moment, the fact that she's named for a either a monopolistic corporation or a piece of fruit, or that the word itself is ugly; Apple's old man—the father whose eye Apple's the apple of—is Chris Martin, Coldplay's front man, whose surname she shares. What that means is, Apple Martin is one “i” away from being a Happy Hour special.

“Another
Max & Ruby
,” Maude again demands, her tone less musical, more Mussolini.

My (long deceased) grandparents, born before Philo T. Farns-worth's groundbreaking gadget, didn't watch
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
and
Murder, She Wrote
on weekend nights because they enjoyed programs with strong female protagonists and commas in the title; those shows just happened to be on when I was staying there. They watched television
all the time
because, on some level, they were amazed that such technology existed. If you stop and think about it, TV is a marvel—a miracle, really—unthinkable to, say, Napoleon, who was chilling on Elba a mere two centuries ago, a blink of an eye in the history of humankind. My mother has a similar if less reverential relationship with the VCR (already usurped by the DVD player). You can watch movies
without going to the cinema!
You can tape shows,
and watch them again!
You can
fast-forward through the commercials!
This sense of astonishment explains why she and Frank, her husband, rent so many egregiously crappy movies (their Netflix queue is unspeakable). I feel the same awe toward the home computer, my portal to the wonderful World Wide Web. At thirty-six, I'm old enough to remember when computers were not ubiquitous, when correspondence was done by post, when classifieds and want ads were the primary means of communicating for-sale items and job openings and potential romantic encounters, when news came in fixed cycles, when the telephone call was not an anachronism, when you had to stop at a gas station to ask for directions, when you had to listen to the radio to hear that hit song you couldn't get out of your head. Those analog days are gone. TiVo, Craigslist, Gmail, Facebook, GPS, YouTube, iTunes, and CNN.com have made moot the need to wait. Almost anything I wish to know can be found out in minutes, if not seconds, with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks.
That actress looks familiar; what else has she been in?
IMDB will tell me.
What is Tupac saying in the last part of “Hit 'em Up”?
A snippet in the Google search bar reveals the garbled lyrics (“My fo-fo make sho all yo kids don't grow”). And if I want to compare “We Are the World” with “Do They Know It's Christmas,” or revisit old
SNL
sketches, or listen to new bands before investing in the album, YouTube's got the hook-up. To me, this is wonderful, in the pure sense of the word; the novelty might never wear off completely. But Roland and Maude have never known a different world. At a moment's notice, they can watch what they want to watch, hear what they want to hear, read what they want to read, and the longest delays they have to endure are the (interminable) menu intros on the
Thomas the Tank Engine
DVDs. “Again!” Maude will demand when
Little Bear
ends, and I have to tell her that it's
regular
television, not DVR, and therefore I cannot process her request. Which of course she doesn't understand. Technology that seems magical to me is the norm for Roland and Maude, horse-and-buggy stuff, coal-powered machines. Our society places a premium on
not wasting time
. Almost every technological breakthrough in the last century is just another milestone in our eternal quest for instant, if not perpetual, gratification. Brave new world, indeed. How can I teach children born into such a you-snooze-you-lose world the virtue and value of patience? I'm not sure if I understand it myself.