The Art of Fatherhood

All good fathers have certain things in common: they listen, are consistent, show affection, and support their offspring in ways both financial and moral. But what makes a good father unique is his art, that skill which makes him different from other dads. It's the habit that is immediately called to mind in fond exasperation when his kids are alone and talking about him, like the scene the "Christmas Story" when a lug nut lost in the snow calls forth the Art of Swearing, as perfected by Ralphie's father (played by Darren McGavin.)

My father in law, for instance, was a Gauguin of Grass Seed. My husband and his sibling remember seeing their dad, an intellectual man with PhD's in both chemistry and pharmacy, moving slowly around their New York lawn, different varieties of grass seed pooled in a Frisbee that he used like an artist's palette. A little fescue in this spot, a little bentgrass there, a little fertilizer spread meticulously on top. BT's front yard was a testament to the tablespoon by tablespoon care he lavished upon it.

As for my dad, he excels at the Art of the Long Distance Drive. There is no distance too vast nor destination too inconvenient nor route too complicated for him to say no to a road trip. With his travel mug full of coffee, some of my mom's meatloaf sandwiches wrapped in wax paper on the passenger seat, and a country music tape  to pop into his cassette player, my father would probably set off for Mercury without a second thought, perfectly content to be on the open road (as long as he could time it so as to miss rush hour on Mars.)  Our oldest daughter will be attending summer camp 3,000 miles away from us this summer, but only a few hours' drive from my parents' house. I think we were both reassured when I reminded her, "If Grandpa hears you sneeze, he'll pop in the car right away to drive four hours to hand you a box of tissues."

During my college years, my dad always came solo to pick me up in May to drive me home for the summer. Those long, hot, boring car rides with my dad down the Schuylkill Expressway and through the states of Pennsylvania and New York don't deserve to be called some of the nicest memories of my childhood-to-adulthood transition, but indeed they were. 

I was usually exhausted, enervated from the semester and finals, nervous about whatever summer job awaited. But it was always comforting to shoot the breeze with Dad for six straight hours, talk about school, the places we wanted to visit, what was happening with family and friends and neighbors. I’ve read child-rearing books that recommend you have your serious talks with your kids while driving – no one is looking directly at each other, and if the conversation speeds up or slows down there’s no awkwardness, you just blame the traffic.  At a point when I was creating an independent adult life in fits and starts, there was comfort in knowing that until we pulled off the NYS Thruway,  I was totally under the care and protection of my dad.

My meager offering to Dad, in return for his 12 straight hours of driving, was always a mix tape for him to keep. I played him all sorts of stuff that didn't stick, from The Blue Nile to U2 to the Housemartins, but when I brought him  The Blasters' Hard Line, we bonded over the rockabilly twang. Here's "Marie, Marie," some of the glue that holds us together despite all the miles between us.

Here's to my dad,  and to all the others out there who are proud to practice the Art of Fatherhood.

Season of the Swan

Our refrigerator is covered in invitations right now, their brightly-colored edges and fancy fonts like a dusting of leaves from a Disney-fied forest. Each one, held up by its own homemade bottle-top magnet, heralds another junior high school student about to make a major transition in the life of their faith: bat mitzvahs, bar mitzvahs, confirmations. These fluttering cards just rub in the visual evidence that I am fastidiously working to ignore:  my 13 year old daughter, and all her friends, are hurtling towards adulthood.

My daughter goes to an all-girls junior high which my husband and I selected because of its academic excellence, not at all because of the reassuring lack of absence of male distraction in the place, no sirree, not us, never crossed our minds. Throughout 6th grade, she rolled out of bed and into whatever clothes happened to be on the floor under the giant stacks of books she loves to read, plopped her glasses on the bridge of her nose, and pronounced herself ready for school. I congratulated myself for keeping the "child " in "childhood" for her.

But the hairline cracks in my plan to keep my daughter forever young appeared at the start of 7th grade, and have been widening ever since. A co-ed dance here, a co-ed birthday party there, the realization that months of ballet study have given our daughter the long, strong figure of a dancer and the graceful carriage to boot. Who could have seen that coming?

This spring it's just picked up momentum. We sent out our own invitation a few weeks ago, inviting a small circle of friends to witness the culmination of our daughter's confirmation process. Then began a series of changes that could broadly categorized as "Getting Ready for Confirmation," and subtitled "Freaking Out Mom and Dad."

First, there was a haircut that took my daughter's long, straight locks from simple to sophisticated. Then we shopped for confirmation dresses (all her dresses had inexplicably shrunk) and the ones that fit her were in the women's, not children's, department. We found two that were sufficiently cute for her, and sufficiently modest for me, at least if I threw a sweater on her and buttoned it from neck to hip. Months of her surreptitious study of fashion magazines, which I have long pretended were just a kicky way to find collage materials for craft projects, meant that my daughter knew exactly what jewelry and hairstyles would complement each dress to best effect.

We'd agreed that she could wear her first pair of heels, but I insisted on buying the lowest ones available in the department store. Who would have guessed they'd also be the most flattering, nude patent leather slingbacks with little flowers on each toe? They managed to make her long legs look even longer. Backfire.

Then came the contact lenses, something that she convinced me she needed for ballet more than anything else. Until she took them off, I didn't realize how much I'd relied on her old tortoiseshell frames to fix her in my mind as the fourth grader she was when she got them. Without them, her blue eyes pop.

Only one thing to be done: buy more glasses. "The contacts will be uncomfortable when you're reading," I said, scrambling. "Better to have some glasses you like." At the opticians I encouraged her to buy the biggest, most Buddy Holly looking glasses they stocked, almost exact duplicates of David Byrne in the "Once in a Lifetime" video. Did they tamp down her looks? No, they did not. She now looks like a smart girl who has the added sassiness to pull off Geek Chic glasses. 

After her confirmation service last week the older church ladies surrounded me. "She's so grown up!" they said, marveling. "She doesn't even walk; she just glides when she moves!"

I only have one tool left in my arsenal: braces. When I mentioned to her that maybe we should call the orthodontist to see if she needs them, she nodded vigorously. "Because if I get them right now, I'll be done with them before high school," she reasoned. High school. As in the co-ed high school she'll be attending, or gliding through, with actual boys.

Am I crazy for thinking we should bring caftans and poke bonnets back into vogue before next year?

In honor of my daughter and all the girls in her posse who we are about to unleash upon the world (thank or blame us later,) here's the Airborne Toxic Event singing "Changing" from their latest album "All At Once," which I heartily recommend.

Looks like Oakland on a perfect Saturday night.

Mother's Day: Actions, Not Words

So the big joke around these parts is that for Mother's Day, my family is going to take me to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk for the day so they can go on the rides. Yay. What mother doesn't dream of her special day being spent amongst the screaming masses watching her kids getting alternately jacked up on sugar and grease and then reaching the precipice of vomiting as they stagger off each loud and disorienting ride? Let's stop at a bike store and an Abercrombie on the way home too!

If I didn't know they were kidding - and take it from me, Andrew, you are kidding - I'd have to explain that Mother's Day is about doing something for MOM. Something you might not normally do, like attend the big Craft Fair in Napa or take her to dinner at the Beach Chalet in San Francisco. But because you love the mother in your life so much, you can suck it up for 24 short hours and do what she wants.

Those greeting store cards with their insipid poems really get under my skin for their vague odes and promises: "Mother, You Are The World To Me, And I Bless The Day I Was Born to You." "Mother, You Are An Angel To Me." "To A Perfect Mother Who Loves Unconditionally."

You know what your mother would love unconditionally? Not the card, but rather the scenario of waking up on Sunday morning to see her family hard at work putting away the shoes from under the piano and behind the ficus, weeding in the vegetable garden, and sorting through the clothes in the dresser to make a neat stack of outgrown clothes to send to the Salvation Army. Mother loves to hear you say, "We already made our breakfast, and cleaned it up too (emphasis mine)!") Mother loves when her husband hands her the remote and says "I can miss a day of basketball. What do YOU want to watch?" Actions, not words, people.

It is in that spirit that I am giving this week's Music Moment over to my mom, who is an angel to me, loves me unconditionally, blesses the day etc. After considering Marty Robbins and Kenny Rogers, I'm asking Gordon Lightfoot to sing her very favorite song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Gets her weepy, in a good way, every time.

C'mon, altogether now on the "…great lake they call Gitchigoomee…"

I thought it said "Annoying Know It Alls"

Today I've got a guest post on SMARTS Magazine, an online magazine for "Aspiring Know It Alls" who share  nuggets of wisdom about their particular arena of expertise, be it fashion and beauty or cooking or health matters. So what's my particular piece of the pie?

Failure. How proud my parents must be.

Specifically, it's about how being a failure at a big project was actually a good lesson for my kids, in disguise. I hope you'll click through to Failing By Example and leave a comment there if you liked it.

As for the Aspiring part of the tagline, you can just ask my siblings and husband...I achieved "Know It All" status YEARS ago.

Perfect Dog Training

A few weeks ago my husband and kids were at the local farmer's market enjoying their healthy lunch ("there were bananas on my Nutella crepe, Mom!") when they ran into a neighbor with his new puppy. They came home breathless with admiration. "Ron's dog is so well trained already!" the girls clamored. "He told her to sit down, and she DID! And when he told her to stop staring at Dad's food, she did that too!"

I immediately took offense on our dog's behalf. "Achilles is a great dog," I insisted. "And so smart that he's had us trained for years."

It's true. Through consistent rewards and punishments, the dog has us carry out tricks all day long. It starts with the early wake-up call for breakfast; he only needs to do his high pitched nasal whine twice before one of the adults gets out of bed to let him out and feed him. To ignore it any longer just invites it to get louder and more persistent.

That nasal whine - maybe it's only German Shorthaired Pointers who do this?- is as effective on his people as a dog whistle is on less refined members of his species. One blast, issued from the front hall foyer, buys him entry into the backyard for a bathroom break and a nice bracing run at the squirrels. Another, wafting up the stairs at precisely 3:40 pm every day, announces that his workday is done; no more sleeping on his bed next to Mom's desk in the office, he'd like the bed moved into the family room where the children are now hanging out, and make it snappy please. At 5:55 pm the same whine is a dinner bell call telling the children to feed him.

One sharp, short bark is the cue that there is a piece of dog kibble somewhere just out of Achilles' reach - under the couch, behind a chair, on the other side of a closed door. In that instance we are trained to immediately help locate the kibble and free a path for him to pursue it; failing to do so just piles the short, sharp barks one upon the next.

The scrape of the water dish across the kitchen tiles is his cue for some biped in the house to refill said dish, or risk him heading into the bathroom for the other large ceramic water receptacle within his reach. We come running to fill the bowl and he stands, all noblesse oblige, forgiving of our lapse.

For each human family member, there was one incident, and one only, that trained us to clear the kitchen counter of every scrap of food. Mine was the famous "Corned Beef/St. Patty's Day/2009" debacle, wherein I underestimated his countersurfing reach; for my husband it was the top layer of a Christmas cake cooling on a rack that drove the lesson home. Achilles even trains visitors on this one, like our young friend Ben who has finally learned to walk with the slice of pizza over his head rather than gesticulate with it while eating at our house, or my mother in law whose punishment for not knowing the rule was a rotisserie chicken in the middle of the living room carpet.

At night, like trained circus monkeys, we move swiftly through the house flipping up couch cushions into a vertical position, and locking the door to the empty guest bedroom. The price of forgetting this daily chore is to find Achilles curled happily into a ball on the living room couch or on the guest bed in the morning, his little white and brown hairs providing additional texture and scents no one ever wanted there.

Fine, Ron's dog may be well trained. But can she make her owner hide his shoes at night?

Give Working Moms a Break

A few months ago I attended a conference for women in publishing and during one panel discussion, the audience - 90% female - sat rapt listening to Kara Swisher talk about how she gave birth while holding a BlackBerry in one hand. For those not  familiar with Kara, she used to write about the online technology business in the Wall Street Journal and now is a partner in AllThingsD.com, a go-to website for coverage and analysis of what's happening in the digital world. She is whip smart, funny, and no bullshit - if you've never seen her 2010 evisceration of interview with Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook's privacy issues, it's worth a look. 

So when Kara talked about how offended she was when, upon arriving back to the office after giving birth to her first child, her boss offered her extra time and flexibility to complete her assignments, I believed her. "What did I need extra time for?" she roared, clearly insulted at the insinuation that motherhood had changed her ability to do her job.

From across the conference room, a petite young woman stood up and made an observation, one that I would wager 75% of us in the room shared. "That's really great that you didn't need extra time. But me? I needed extra flexibility after I had my kids. And I think we need to talk more about the root cause of why there aren't more women in upper level management positions," the absence of public policy that would support the efforts of women to be good mothers and good workers at the same time.

The woman was Katrina Alcorn, who writes the terrific WorkingMomsBreak.com blog. It seeks to shine a light on all the ways that public policy is stacked against success for families with two working parents, and to open up conversations about how to improve the state of play. Having admired a woman who wasn't afraid to offer an opposing (and, given the room, somewhat un-PC)  counterpoint to Kara, I was thrilled when a mutual friend introduced us, and even more so when Katrina invited me to guest post on her blog.

Of course, I have unique qualifications: when it comes to being a working mother, I can say with confidence that I have tried every arrangement that exists. Full time, part time, work at home, work for myself, and of course, temporarily unemployed. That last state came thanks to what my old colleague Matt referred to as "The Ritualistic Shitcanning of 2000," when 300 of us were laid off by my Dot Bomb employer - though I was the only one who was nine months pregnant.

I hope you'll click through and check out my post on WorkingMomsBreak today, about how some days working "part time" just makes me feel like I'm doing two jobs badly. But hey, at least it's by choice.

The pull of going home

I'm going home this weekend - to see my mom and dad, catch up with my sister and brother, and see neighbors and friends in the town where I spent my first 18 years. I'll eat some bagels, visit the the local tavern with my brother, take my aunt out for a belated birthday lunch, and go to a big Family Camp reunion. I can't wait.

I'm leaving home this weekend - leaving Andrew and the girls, my own bed, my spazzy dog, and some  overdue warm California weather after a long winter. I'm missing a dinner party, neglecting my poor drowned garden again, worrying about leaving the kids who have been sniffling and coughing for a week straight. I'm dreading leaving.

Here's something about being a grown up that no one ever told me. As much as I adore being with my husband and children in the home we've made: it's pretty much the same amount that I miss being with my parents and siblings 3,000 miles away. It's not a deficit but a surfeit of love and longing. Maybe it's different if you live in the same area code as your parents, but maybe not; for people like me who were blessed to grow up in a close and loving family, there is always a pull to return, no matter how happy our adult lives are.

So my song for this week is a melancholy Teddy Thompson ballad called "Home" in which he has the whole situation nailed. As he explains in his lyrics, you go home to see your parents who will feed you, do your laundry, and fuss over you, and you love it. Right up until the minute when you're ready to go home again. I'll be heartsick missing my family while I'm home visiting my family this weekend, and just as soon as I'm back in Cali, I'll be wishing I could spend more time in New York.

Here's hoping that you feel at home wherever you are in the world this weekend, friends -

Auntie Liar

My niece and her college roommate are coming out to the Bay Area this week for a visit, and we are all excited to show her around. I can only hope that Shannon will be a little less skeptical of her aunt this time than she was the first time she came to stay with me.

That was in 1995 or so, when she was four and Andrew and I were still childless and fancy-free, living in Washington, DC. My brother drove his family down for a visit, during which we ran them from the National Mall to the National Zoo and stopped at every museum in between, proud to play tour guide in our adopted city.

Shannon's older brother Zach, age 9 at the time, was totally on board with whatever Aunt Nancy and Uncle Andrew suggested. That's probably because the time he visited before, sans parents, Andrew let him drive our car. Only around the circular driveway of our apartment building, true, but still he was actually operating our Acura before he was legally allowed to sit in its front seat. Zach was ready to follow us anywhere. (The family had yet to be joined by its baseball-announcer-in-residence, my nephew Tristan.)

Huh. Mom, why is Uncle Andrew holding my braids?

Shannon, on the other hand, was at that stage of childhood where there is one authority and one authority only: Mom. Throughout the visit, as she sashayed and skipped alongside us with her Pippi Longstocking braids and purple dresses, she'd see something unfamiliar and ask, "What's that?" or "Why is that?" For instance, "Why are there so many pigeons here?"

I'd take her soft little hand in mine and motion to the sparkling white federal buildings and the food carts along the street, and say, "Well, Shanny, pigeons like to live in cities where they can find lots of food and places to build nests. They're city birds."

To which she would smile politely and say "Huh!" while fixing me with the same wary look you'd give someone wearing scrubs imprinted with the name of a psychiatric hospital: maybe staff, maybe not.

Then she would turn to my sister-in-law and say, "Mom, why are there so many pigeons here?"

My sister-in-law is indeed awesome, but the fact remains that she never lived in DC. Nonetheless, Shannon only wanted her answers from her mother. "What's that building with the white dome?" "It's the Capital, honey, it's where the senators work." "Huh. Mom, what's that building with the white dome?"

It drove me crazy, but how can you be mad at a kid whose parting words, as she departed in the family car, were, "I will come see you again to visit the baboooooooons!" an animal which we had neither seen nor discussed at any point during her visit.

Anyway. Now she's a grown-up college girl studying creative writing, and I am determined to show her the best the Bay Area has to offer: Union Square, Alcatraz, Dave Eggers' Pirate Store, a visit to the ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Oakland hills, City Lights Bookstore, North Beach…the question is whether she'll believe anything I tell her, given that her mom isn't going to be here this time. 

So today's cheery Music Moment, from Philly hip-hop duo Chiddy Bang and called "Truth," is dedicated to Shannon and Sarah. (How can you not love a rap that includes the line "Periodically, I’m in my element, phosphorus," that isn't even by Flight of the Conchords?)  I swear, girls, if you have questions about the Bay Area, like why Happy Meal toys are banned in San Francisco or why Berkeley is a nuclear free zone, I am not making the answers up. The crazy here is for real.