A Crice-mas Story

It's Christmas 2010. Susannah and I, we're cruising the aisles of a mall parking lot that, while not packed, is crowded for this holiday season. We have been taking turns picking songs on the iPod: she going with some of her standards (Green Day's "Know Your Enemy," Ben Folds' "Trusted," a Party Ben mash-up of "Chasing Cars" and "Every Breath You Take" called "Every Car You Chase"); me, I'm sticking close to the predictable holiday playlist, which she has little patience for. So it's no surprise that during The Blind Boys of Alabama's "I Pray On Christmas" that she chimes from the seat behind me:

"Jesus Crice!"

This is the first time I've heard my not-quite-five-year-old swear. I suppose I should be grateful that I made it this far without hearing something like this or far worse pass her lips, but the truth is, she's breaking this ground earlier than Piper did: it was only a few short months ago that I heard Peach drop something and exclaim "Dammit!" At that moment, much like this one, I was grateful for my calm-under-pressure demeanor: I didn't react outwardly at all. No shock, no dumbfounded jaw-drop. No, on that occasion, I simply let it go. For two reasons. Firstly, making a big deal of it with Piper would most likely have resulted in "charging" the word and setting her up to use it again in the future. Secondly, because if I tell her to never use "dammit" again, I just know I'm going to look hypocritical the next time we're all belted in the car and some asshole in a BMW tries to turn left from Ridge onto Dempster, even though there are eight (I've counted) "No Left Turn" signs posted, along with a "straight-only" arrow painted on the road.

My approach with Susannah is different, because Susannah's personality is different: she's less likely to seize upon a "forbidden word" and use it to her advantage in the future. She's more interested in pleasing grown-ups, in following the rules. So after I pass through a short period of "detached bemusement," as if I just overheard some other father's 4-year-old take the Lord's name in vain, I give a slow internal count to five and I respond to her cuss thusly:

"Is anything wrong, sweetie?"

Are we ever going to find a parking space?" she exclaims. "We've been looking for an hour!"

No point in changing the focus to her extremely warped perception of time right now. After I pull into a spot and collect all my Christmas lists together, I purposely don't open her door.

"Sweetie, you probably shouldn't say 'Jesus Christ' like you said it."

"Why not?"

"Well, it's a bad thing to say that way. Kind of like the 'B' word."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

Oh, right: the "B" word. You don't know about that. See, that was the first "naughty" word the girls learned about, courtesy their former-grade-school-teaching grandma. Grace could not stand to hear her first-graders say that something was "boring" or that they themselves were "bored." She taught her students, and later her older grandchildren, never to say these words in her presence, and she continued the tradition with ours. "Only boring people are bored," she says. Peach and the Bean have picked right up on this: on those moments when the words escaped their parents' lips, before we'd learned the new regimen, we would get that gasp and those big eyes that only a child can master, sometimes accompanied by an "I'm telling Grandma!" (Laura and I were thrilled when we found a shirt at The Gap with "Only boring people are bored" emblazoned across the front. Zuzu wears it with great pride.)

At some point late in Laura's pregnancy with Piper, it occurred to me, as it occurs to so many new fathers sooner or later, that I was going to have to severely limit—or, ideally, eliminate—swearing around the house. I liked that I had some time to get used to it, that it would be months before I had to watch what I said. Laura would regularly remind me when I let a four-letter word fly that I was going to have to curtail that. I think she thought it would be hard for me. I think I thought the same thing.

As it turns out, dropping the cuss words from my everyday vocab was easy as pie. Something about being around the innocence of a child brings out the inner Mister Rogers. If you have a heart, anyway. I mean, I wouldn't imagine that Deadwood's Al Swearengen (can't spell his name without "swear!") would mind his mouth in the presence of preschoolers. But I had no problem assuming two identities: I was the sweet-voiced father from sunrise until the kiddies were tucked in ... and then, while they dreamed their innocent kiddie dreams, I became the foul-mouthed oaf on the couch, cursing Ryan Murphy's pissing away of perfectly respectable premises on American Horror Story with his over-the-top hogwash. (For example.)

The duplicity was frighteningly easy. Sure, there were times I slipped up—like the time that Piper shoved a twig deep into the lock of our back door, the only door into our house for which I had a key. The girls got the "full monty" of my secret lexicon that afternoon. But my tongue was clean a good 92.6 percent of the time.

Piper, the oldest, was the first, to learn that there was a different 'B' word that the rest of the world used. This was followed closely by introductions to the "D" word and the "S" word, courtesy some male classmates. It's a pity she ever had to come in contact with other kids her age. But she maintained a good, healthy fear of the words and didn't try to ever use them. As parents, we continued to "protect" the girls' innocence as best we could, carefully choosing media with both appropriate themes and language. (Word of warning: I don't care what commonsensemedia.org says, Back to the Future is decidedly NOT a family movie! At least not for kids 6 and 9 years old. I had not remembered Michael J. Fox's potty mouth!) But Piper is in 5th grade now, and she is coming to realize that adult language is a natural part of the world. She is currently obsessing over the soundtrack to Eastland, Lookingglass Theatre Company's recent production of the 1915 Chicago River boat disaster. It was the first Lookingglass production she saw, and she fell hard for the play, the company, and the story of the Eastland. The musical's lyrics are filled with "shit" and "piss" and "goddamn," and she has handled it all with great maturity. We talked in the car one night about how the language is used for purpose in the play, to establish qualities of characters and to heighten the stress of the situation, when people naturally reach for words that match the emotions they're feeling at that moment.

Still, it's strange to think that these words are going to be part of my daughters' everyday lives soon. I think they are learning the proper respect, the proper "place" for it. And that's really the best we can hope for, under the circumstances.

But part of me still wants to beg: can't we just freeze them at this simple age?

I mean, Jesus Crice.

Mr. Mom, Day 4.

I hear another scream from her bedroom. I've learned the quality of the screams, their tonality, and I can tell that this one doesn't need my assistance. But the next one definitely will. You see, she's having another bad morning. Sometimes it's Bad Hair, sometimes it's Bad Clothes; this morning it's both.

I go find Zuzu, who is happily playing with dolls on our bed. "Sweetie, do you know what you're bringing to school yet?"

"Uh huh," she says with a sharp nod, but in my head I give a slow count to five as I pretend to put away some clothes, and before I finish counting, she pops off the bed with just what I was expecting: "Actually, I need to get an animal." And off she heads to one of the two giant baskets of stuffed animals to choose today's lucky winner in the Who Will Accompany Zuzu On Her School Day sweepstakes.

A louder scream from the other bedroom, this time followed by crying. This one is my cue.

Cracking the door: "Are you okay, sweetie?"

She's crumpled on the floor, holding her shoulder. "I hit my arm!"

I crouch, rub it. "I'm so sorry, sweetie. What can I do to help?"

"None of them fit!" she cries. Her shirts, she means. You see, she's in between sizes, and while the hems still barely reach her waist and the sleeves just touch her wrists, this is not acceptable for her. "Look!" she says as she raises her arms over her head. I can see a sliver of her tummy. For Piper, this is unacceptable.

"Okay, let's think this through," I say. "Solve the problem." I'm keeping my calm even though I know now we'll be late to school. With Laura out of town, my goal each day is that when I kiss these girls goodbye, they're smiling. This is easily achievable with Zuzu, but Piper's takes more ... let's say finesse. At her closet door, I pick some sweater dresses. "How about this one?" I propose. "I've always loved this one. We'll find some leggings to go with it." I get a furious shake of the head.

I pick another. "You know, this one would even work with jeans underneath!" I have to admit that I'm stretching for this one: I'm remembering a girl I had a crush on in 1978, junior-high days. Jeans under a skirt were all the rage then. But this is thirty years later, so I get yelled at for this bizarre suggestion. "Honey, you don't need to speak to me that way," I say, lowering my pitch but still keeping it level. "I'm helping you here." Eventually, we find a shirt in a drawer that is acceptably long. We even walk away happy because in the process, we also discovered what she wants to wear tomorrow for Mom's homecoming. I push away the thought that she'll have changed her mind by tomorrow morning and choose to live happily for a few minutes in the fantasy of victory.

Laura is in southern states this week. Business trips like this are going to become more prevalent, and they seem to be especially hard on Piper. She broke down on the phone with Laura the other night, asking her why would she ever take a job where she has to leave her kids at home and listen to them cry on the phone. (Peach is perfecting her guilt-making skills.) Susannah, ever the calm breeze but also wanting to mimic the ways of her big sister, wrested the phone from Piper, summoned tears from her deepest soul, and bawled to her mom the same complaints (almost verbatim!) that Piper had said moments before. "On Friday," she sniffles, "every time the doorbell rings, I'll run to the door—even if we're in the middle of a TV show!" I wonder if Laura appreciates the level of that honor. The Woeful Child act continues for some fifteen minutes after we hung up ( "I hate that we're a broken-down family!" Piper exclaims at one point), but they still fall asleep in my bed remarkably quickly. I move them to their own beds later when I finally retire.

Our school mornings are nothing if not hectic, with both Laura and me handling a huge number of responsibilities. She primarily takes care of the hands-on kid duties while I handle all kitchen-related tasks, assisting on dressing and bed-making when possible. Picking up both tasks as a solo parent has meant rising earlier in the mornings and mentally preparing for the trick of getting the girls dressed and out the door. 8:10 a.m. is the goal; then we have a fighting chance of crossing the school's threshold by 8:29. We aced it the first two days. But yesterday, Piper lost it when I told her she couldn't wear the same thing she'd worn the day before—she'd been crawling all over the floor of a classroom in those clothes at a potluck the night before—and I let go of the concept of "being on-time" in favor of "being happy:" carefully working through the problem, complete with hugs and mopping up her tears. We were late, but that was okay.

And she's only 7. I can't wait to see what's in store in five or six years!

Susannah, meanwhile, skates through her morning once she gets past eating. Which, for some reason, she hates. I would eat breakfast three times a day, and I can't fathom why breakfast—heck, any meal!—is such an arduous task for her. But once we're past that, she joyously does the rest of her morning prep, and then she pretty much sets up somewhere in the house and observes the hot mess of a process getting her big sister to the door with backpack on.

At the door, girls wearing their jackets and backpacks, I check my iPod for the list of things I need to remember for today (prepared by Laura, natch): nothing on the docket but observing Piper's modern dance class tonight. Yay. No swimsuits or paperwork or library books to get to the correct destinations. I could badger PJ to feed the fish, but I decide to let that one go in the name of peace and feed them myself; she sees me doing it and pitches a fit that I'm doing her job. I hold my tongue, tempted to snap that I've already mentioned twice that she needed to do this. Susannah sings a song by Elbow.

We're ready to go, except that Piper has disappeared. I hear her scream in the bathroom. She's standing in front of the mirror, her hair mussed like a bird's nest.

"I hit my head with the brush!" she cries.

I wrap my arms around her. What's the quickest way to do this? I kiss the top of her head. "I'm sorry, honey. Would you li--"

"No, I mean I did it on purpose!"

I don't react on the outside. On the inside: Holy shit. Red flag!... We'll talk about this later, she and me. For now, I just say: "Everyone's hair looks horrible right now, honey. We're all getting haircuts on Saturday and then we'll all look great." I remember her phrase from the night before and say it to humor myself: "We'll look like a less broken-down family. Now, let's head out, you'll feel better when we play some music in the car." I don't know how, but this works. She hugs me and we're on our way.

Things do get better with a little Shantel, a little Natasha Bedingfield, a little Swell Season, all of them songs that I am more than sick of but the girls sing along, and we laugh at the trombone riff in "Disko Partizani," and by the time we're in the school parking lot, Piper is hopping out of the car, "walking as if on air," as one teacher described it in a progress report a couple years ago. When she heads upstairs to her classroom, she gives me a big kiss and a cheery "Bye, Dad!" And I feel as accomplished as I ever felt after completing anything else in my entire life.

A few minutes later, as I'm heading out of Zuzu's classroom, I hear her cry outside. A teacher is bringing her in: she pitched forward while running. Her hands are dirty, scraped. She buries her face in my shoulder, her sandy hands on the back of my neck. We gently wash them in the bathroom, I kiss them, and I carry her back outside. I do one of her favorite Daddy Tricks: I lift her higher and higher and tell her to stop it—she's floating away! She laughs and asks me to do it again and again and again. One more floating balloon and then it's time for sandwich hugs: Zuzu and her best friend Isabella trap me and squeeze until I play-choke to death.

I'm off to the car. As I sit in the car and watch her shooting across the monkey bars, I pull together my work to-do list. It's been a good week, but I can't wait to have Laura back tomorrow. And I certainly know I'm not the only one.

Does George Carlin have kids?

Too bad if he doesn't. With philosophies like this, he'd be a kick-ass parent.

What kind of empty people need to validate themselves through the achievements of their children?... Here's a bumper sitkcer I'd like to see: "WE ARE THE PROUD PARENTS OF A CHILD WHOSE SELF-ESTEEM IS SUFFICIENT THAT HE DOESN'T NEED US PROMOTING HIS MINOR SCHOLASTIC ACHIEVEMENTS ON THE BACK OF OUR CAR."

Squishy entry, but deal with it, it's my birthday.

Dads are so easy.

I'm in the shower this morning. I'm not awake yet, though the hot water hitting the back of my neck is doing its work. Through the frosted glass of the shower, I see the bathroom door open. This is highly unusual. Laura never gets out of bed until she has to.

But she apparently did have to: Someone wanted access to me.

Laura cracks the shower door, and says, "Someone wants to say something."

I see the tousled blonde hair behind her, at waist height. I bend over.

She is beaming. The glee in her face -- her entire body -- is all because of the message that she is practically shaking to give me. And she delivers it with a devastating smile:

"Happy birthday, Daddy!"

"Thank you, sweetie."

And she whirls around and returns to the bedroom to snuggle with Mom for a few minutes. Laura and I exchange sleepy smiles before she leaves.

Shortly, dried and getting dressed, I approach Piper, who sits up in bed. She repeats her salutations.

"Honey," I tell her with a hug, "if no one mentions my birthday for the rest of the day, this will still be a great day, after that greeting."

It's not bad to be reminded -- not just on your birthday but on a daily basis -- how important the moments that have become innocuous to us as adults are still as thrilling as a roller-coaster ride to some younger than us. It's not bad to be reminded that we should strive to recapture that thrill of the mundane of another birthday. I've had 41 of them. It doesn't mean I shouldn't remember the thrill of my fourth.

Things never calm down.

I suggested I'd be back in July. Here it is mid-September and I can't seem to shake free of the ever increasing workload.

I had my fortieth birthday last Tuesday. A lot of people have asked if this is a big deal to me. I suppose it is, but not nearly as big as it used to be. The difference? Having children.

Life Before Piper™ included lots of obsessing about my age and about missing "benchmarks" I had set for myself. Now, with Susannah growing up fast as well, I see time passing not through my ever-increasing gray hair, but rather through the rapid changes in the girls. Piper is beginning her second week of school. (Well, pre-school ... but you explain the difference to her.) Zuzu has been pulling herself to a stand for two months now, and is desperate to do and have everything her sister does.

And me, I'm misquoting my age all the time -- not coincidentally, I seem to still think of myself as 37, my age when Piper came on the scene. Time seems to stop -- or at least move into stealth mode -- when your kids show up. And it's not that I'm grateful that I now seem to be ageless ... It's just that age now seems to matter less to me. Now, ask me how I feel about this as I'm driving back from dropping my second daughter off at college, in 18 years.

I'm sitting in my basement ...

... working on some stuff for my "night job," and I've left the monitor on. The other end of the monitor is in Piper's bedroom. She has not made noise for an hour, since Mommy put her down. But all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she begins singing in a clear (and surprisingly in-tune) voice several verses of "Old MacDonald Had A Farm." I'm not sure if she had fallen asleep and woke up to sing this song, or if she's just been lying there thinking about things and decided she needed some music to accompany her thoughts. (The Justin Roberts CD that was playing has long since died out.) The real entertainment comes when she runs out of animals. Not that that should ever slow down a determined late-night "Old MacDonald" singer.

Old MacDonald had a farm, E - I - E - I - O
And on this farm he had a daddy, E - I - E - I - O
With a "Hi, hi" here, A "Hi, hi' there,
Here a "Hi," there a "Hi,"
Everywhere a "Hi, hi"
Old MacDonald had a farm, E - I - E - I - O.

It doesn't stop there: She continues with verses about Mommy, Gammy (Laura's mom), Gammy Jean (my mom), and Penny (Gammy Jean's dachshund). Penny doesn't get a "Hi, hi;" she gets the more apropos "Woof, woof." After a few more minutes of silence, "Rock-A-Bye, Baby" starts up, but I can already hear her starting to fade again. She barely gets out the last line — the one I modified to remove some of the morbidity of that song:

When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall And Daddy will catch you, cradle and all.

One of the greatest rewards of parenting is the knowledge that — for a few years, at least — there is one soul out there who believes you to be omnipotent. I certainly don't want her believing it for long. But it's good for her to feel that now, and hell, it certainly makes me walk an extra foot off the ground.

Look.

My daughter spoke a new word last night: "Look." And I found this worrisome.

What's the big deal? Any 22-month-old child can handle one-syllable words, and most (including Piper) have far more extensive vocabularies. My issue was the way I know she came to discover this word. She came to it via the television, albeit indirectly.

The Tournament of Roses Parade is a longstanding New Year tradition for both Laura and me, dating back to our respective childhoods. I remember waking up in various southern California households in which my family lived, always feeling the refreshing start-overness of January 1st, and running to the television to turn on the parade. I often slept through the early start of the parade. It was no trouble finding it on the television: Every local network affiliate and many non-network stations in southern Cal cover the parade live.

Then, as now, I loved the floats the most. The marching bands were fleetingly interesting. The various horseback brigades were downright boring. I would invariably lose interest long before the parade was over, and by 10 a.m. I was looking for other stuff to do. Barely hours old, the new year was beginning to feel an awful lot like the old year. The Rose Parade is just one of many examples of how having a child lets me to re-live my own childhood. Piper was too young to watch for more than a few seconds last year, much less appreciate it. I expected this year to be an "improvement."

A few things have changed since I watched the parade as a kid. It has become much more overcommercialized, with many floats' corporate sponsors using flowers, grasses, and natural foodstuffs to exploit (to greater or lesser degrees of subtlety) some aspect of their company. Luckily, a work-around appeared last year when the cable channel Home & Garden TV began covering the parade (sans commercials!) with intelligent broadcasters avoding the corporate America shill with product-placement voiceovers. HGTV's folks talk about the materials that made each float and the arduous work that goes into creating them.

Another change: Now I live in the central time zone, so my (and Piper's) rising at 8:30 yesterday morning meant we still had an hour-and-a-half to kill. (Dad: Prep work on the evening's feast. Piper: "Watch Elmo?") The most exciting change by far is my ability to TiVo the parade and skip the damn horses. Time for a little overdue media justice, Mr. Palomino!

"Look, Piper!" I exclaimed. She was busily watching her Bitty Baby doll's eyes open and close as she rotated it from a vertical to horizontal position. I tried to ignore the wearied, practiced expression she had on her face as she lifted her head from her activity to look at the TV. I said "Look," and she looked -- not at me, but at the television. She studied the screen for a moment. I made some comment like "Do you see the lion?" in an overly excited voice, and she said "Yep," and went back to her Bitty Baby. Just another year.

Later that night, as I was hurrying to finish the hoppin john, the kale with red pepper and parmesan, and the yeasted corn bread, Piper took one of her running tackles into my knee, screaming: "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" And when she had my attention, she pointed back to the living room and said: "Look!" I was at a critical point in my cooking, so my friend Ed went instead to view her completed puzzle achievement, but as I reheated the kale with olive oil, I asked Laura, "Have you ever heard her use that word before?" She said she hadn't. "How did she learn that?" I wondered. And then a moment later: "Oh my god. I tell her to look at the TV all the time."

When Laura was still pregnant with Piper, we discussed many issues regarding not only logistics of a new human being but the philosophies behind raising it. We agreed on almost everything, but I was awfully quiet when Laura made suggestions about television habits. Her radical take was that she wanted the television gone, period. More generally, she wanted a much less time spent in front of it. Her one demand was that certain shows with a good deal of violence -- Oz, The Sopranos, and NYPD Blue come to mind -- could not be watched when Piper was in the room.

I mentally shuffled my feet about all of this. It's not that I didn't agree with her; I just couldn't imagine letting many of those shows go. And yet, there HAS been a reduction in grown-up TV time. I had some help: Oz finished its run, and a couple of other shows were cancelled. (Frasier will end soon, and I can't imagine Dennis Franz hanging in too much longer with his stale show.) But I also made a concerted effort to not pick up new shows last fall. Lo and behold, my 30-hour TiVo has a lot of space on it. It's kind of nice.

But Piper still "atches Elmo" (she's not too good with her W's yet) and occasionally catches a Teletubbies episode. We limit her TV watching to an hour or so a day. What's scary is the trance she goes into. You've seen it, even if you don't have kids. I ask her a question and she may as well be deaf. She has disappeared into Elmo's World.

In a lot of ways, I feel like in my life I "look" more than I "act." I don't want my daughter to be like this. I mean, she's clearly pretty sharp: She completed every one of her puzzles yesterday afternoon, and some of them are rated for 5-year-olds. But the "Look!" episode last night got me thinking a lot about steering my little girl toward a life more active rather than passive.

My mother-in-law is fond of reminding me regularly that the best teaching method for Piper is by example. Maybe more television will go by the wayside in 2004.