Roy & Silo & Me: The Shocking Truth About America's Most Banned Book

My life doesn’t seem very radical most days: I teach my students how to write, come home for family dinner around the table, put my daughter to bed, and then start picking up the abandoned Barbies, empty water glasses, and half-read magazines that comprise the domestic detritus of my house. But the American Library Association’s newly released list of “Most Frequently Challenged Books” confirms that I am a rebel--I’m the proud owner of the single most banned book in America last year: And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about penguins.

Of course, Roy and Silo, the true-life leads of this troublesome tome, are not just any penguins. Like me, they’re gay, and that makes them dangerous. Their very existence threatens the sanctity of the arctic pool—other penguins, good penguins, might find their own feathers bent, if they don’t watch out.

Also like me and my husband, Roy and Silo became parents, which makes them rare. When word spread about the new family at New York’s Central Park Zoo, crowds gathered around for a look at Roy, Silo, and Tango, the kind of novelty you just can’t see at Six Flags every weekend. As gay dads, The Hubby and I know the feeling of being an unusual species—two-dad households account for slightly less than 3 of every 1,000 families. This does make us something of an object of fascination. My family has never been on exhibit formally, but we have, more than once, been stopped so that well-intended strangers could gush about how much they support us, or at least have no problem with us, or once had a gay cousin. (Maybe we know him?)

Family-structure uniqueness landed Roy and Silo a book deal—and, actually, it landed me one, too. But no one protested my book, Homo Domesticus, because it was a grown-up book, the sort of thing you’d actually have to purchase yourself, and the word “Homo” was a dead giveaway to its contents. You couldn’t accidentally read a few chapters and only then discover that the missing bride was never ever going to show up.

But And Tango Makes Three is a children’s book, which means it must be meant to recruit innocents, or at very least to inure them to the vagaries of penguin affections. Worse, the title doesn’t shout “gay” in any way, so that you might think you were getting a book about dancing or counting or both. The cover illustration shows three penguins but with no helpful genitalia to distinguish their genders and thus reveal the awful hidden truth.

You must actually open the book and read it to discover the deviance lurking within. And it’s pretty sick: there’s rudeness (the boys ignore female penguins), mental delusion (they think a rock is an egg), and child abandonment (another penguin has too many eggs to care for). Such dark themes for a children’s book!

But it’s the positive themes that rile critics: the boys find love, they want a stable family, and they nurture a child. What is objectionable is that this teaches children that gay people can be loving, healthy, and well. Even if families like mine live out this truth every single day, what the fevered critics of this book—and of us—really want is to only allow for representations of the gay lives that they imagine. If a childless Roy and Silo went clubbing, took ecstasy, and made bitchy comments about puffins while redecorating their expensive nookery, the book might not only fall off the banned list—it might well become a key fundraising tool for a certain stripe of politician not long on intellectual gifts.

Instead, the book tells what actually happened in that zoo, and does so in language even a child can understand. That’s the real problem: sometimes, the simple truth is uncomfortable for grown-ups who’d rather all our children stick to made-up stories about magical worlds that none of us (including them) live in.

Childrenfreude--Why I Take Pleasure in Other Parents' Pain and You Should, Too!

My daughter, Diva, and I were at a friend's house for a playdate and Rose, her buddy, was in fine form. Just before we got there, Rose's mom had given her one explicit instruction: Stay out of the hair care products in the bathroom, which Rose had been treating like playthings.

Naturally, Rose disappeared with Diva the instant we arrived, returning moments later to show that they had frozen their tresses into sticky Aquanet sculptures. This set the tone for a day which included explicit disobedience, tantrum-throwing, a bold-face lie or two and weeping when criticized for any of the above.

I have to admit my immediate reaction was this: Oh, thank God! My daughter's not the only one! Indeed, the whole thing warmed my heart with what I'll call childrenfreude: the secret pleasure of watching bad kids happen to good parents.

Read the rest here at AOL ParentDish.

Diva goes national--AOL ParentDish features my tale of our Chicken-turned-Princess

I'm thrilled to be the first gay dad ever writing a same-sex parenting column for a national mainstream media outlet. Alternating weeks with lesbian mom Valerie Rhodes, I'll be chronicling adventures with my diva at ParentDish.com, an AOL site. The first column is up and begins below. Follow the link for the whole read.

When my daughter was not quite 3, she told my husband and me that she wanted to be a chicken for an upcoming costume party.

We thought this was hilarious and I found myself snootily proud of her choice. See, my kid's no joiner. Let every other girl be Cinderella; mine is going to be a chicken. I did what any self-respecting gay dad would do next: I bought feathers -- lots of them -- and began sewing the bantam costume of her dreams. But then, the unthinkable happened: She came home the next day saying she wanted to be a princess, instead. How did this happen?!

She'd gotten the idea from day care, though it was never clear whether the mastermind had been a teacher or playmate -- toddlers can be so vague! Either way, I was outraged and disappointed that she'd been led away from her perfectly original first idea and steered down the conformist path. So, as excited as she was about her new choice, I didn't exactly run to a fabric store to make her a fabulous ball gown.

We live in the liberal Northeast and move in circles where princess culture is viewed with deep suspicion, as the embodiment of old school sexism mixed with naked consumerism. My husband and I boasted that our daughter wouldn't be the princess type -- we were raising a strong girl with independence and spunk, not a damsel in distress waiting to be saved.

So, I put off her costume request, hoping it would go the way of the chicken, soon replaced by something else. Instead, she dug in deeper -- and so did I.

My husband broke the stalemate. He pointed out that if we'd had a son who wanted to dress like a princess, we'd have said yes in a heartbeat, proud of ourselves for supporting his self-expression. Yet, we had trouble supporting a girl who wanted the very same thing. What sense did it make for gay dads to tell their daughter she couldn't be whatever she wanted?

Read MORE HERE

Coming Clean

“Who’s coming over?” My daughter asked this question innocently enough, and when I answered that we weren’t expecting anyone, her reply was telling: “Then why are you cleaning the house?”

It does not seem like a good sign that my daughter believes one never cleans if guests are not imminent. But she’s displaying a clear sense of cause and effect: if Papa’s hands are seen clasping a broom handle or dustpan, 95% of the time this means our doorbell will be ringing with a few hours.  If Daddy busts out the vacuum, too, the odds increase to 100%. And if the kitchen floor gets mopped? Well, that’s as good as writing “Grandmother coming” on the calendar.

In between visits, when we’re fairly certain no will see how we live, the various cleaning tools languish locked away in the closet. Magazines pile up haphazardly like glossy stalagmites, rice from Chinese take-out forms a floor-level halo beneath Diva’s dining room chair, and kitchen counters disappear under the detritus of family life: lunch boxes and drawings and mittens and phone chargers and Japanese erasers and 0% interest offers.

Let me assure you: we’re not actually rolling about in naked filth; no will ever walk in and find houseflies buzzing around a sink full of mold-encrusted dishes or walls smeared with dog poo. But should a Cheez-It fall out of Diva’s lunch box, or an errant grape escape the fruit bowl, it’s not impossible that the fallen item could enjoy a few days liberty before I ever get it swept up—and I’ll only notice it then because I’m preemptively seeing the floor through the eyes of whatever person is arriving later.

Growing up in my grandmother’s house, I enjoyed the pleasures of clean living despite doing little to help keep things that way. In preparation for every Sabbath, Grammy engaged in an hours-long  top-to-bottom sweeping-dusting-vacuuming ritual. During the week, she mostly concentrated on her continual fight against clutter—never letting me or my brother leave toys, clothes, or books just lying around the living room or dining room, the places company might see.  

When it came to our shared bedroom, all bets were off.  My brother and I didn’t have a lot of toys, but those we did have—a plastic octopus, for instance, or a train that made real whistle noises—ended up on the floor because we had no shelves or bureaus. We didn’t ever make our beds—they were as rumpled when we crawled into them at night as when we crawled out of them in the morning. This was only allowed because our room was upstairs, a part of the house that guests never saw. I believe my grandmother’s exact words were: “If you want to live in a sty, you go right ahead, but I’m not gonna.”

She meant for this statement to express disapproval of our slovenly behaviors, but she inadvertently sent a different message: The dirt no one can see won’t hurt anyone. I so internalized this maxim that, as a grown-up, I instinctively fill the little-used porch with random junk, pile objects on the hidden-away stairs leading up to the second level of our condo, and generally turn our bedroom into a free-for-all of clothing items I don’t feel like putting away. Indeed, the entire house becomes fair game in this logic: on any day that no one but us comes through the front door, then everything inside qualifies as unseen, and can thus be a mess.

Fortunately, all of us in my little family are social creatures—which means people are coming over a lot. The steady stream of arrivals gives me impetus for cleaning and keeps me from sinking beneath the clutter most of the time. Truly, having friends saves us from our own worst impulses. But in that rare week when no one is expected and our housekeeping slowly devolves, even I—a guy who worries as much about the illusion of being clean as actually being clean— can reach my limit. When all countertops are lost to view like sidewalks under this year’s snowdrifts and the couch looks like a doll version of the Jonestown massacre, I sometimes do the unthinkable: I clean just for us.

That’s what got Diva so confused: she caught me sweeping for no obvious reason. I explained that, despite how it sometimes seems, I do actually believe that it’s healthier to live in a clean house. I wasn’t talking about epidemiology so much as mental health. I confessed that when our house is too messy for too long, it makes me feel a little crazy.

Only after the words were out did I consider what lesson I’d just taught my daughter. Having already demonstrated that the primary reason for cleaning is to fool others, I’d now told her that housekeeping is something you save until you’re on the brink of insanity.

So you can imagine my surprise when one of her old teachers told me that Diva was the neatest kid in the room, often goading her classmates to pick up the play area. “My daughter?” I asked, eyes wide—and the teacher assured me that yes, Diva was a bit of a nudge when it came time to clean up. I was grateful, relieved, and baffled all at once. And then I considered that her school persona was the public antidote to one more lesson she’d learned in private: Home is where the mess is.

Battle Hymn of the Fairy Papa

(In response to the enormous wave of discussion that accompanied Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua's exaggeratedly stereotypical explanation of why Chinese mothers believe that you can raise the best concert pianists by being cruel to them for years, I offer this humble reply.)

A lot of people wonder how Fairy Papas raise such stereotypically fabulous kids. They wonder what these gay parents do to produce so many dance show winners and Broadway legends, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I'm doing it. Here are some things my daughter Diva is always allowed to do:

• host playdates with playmates of her choice

• maintain a costume bucket the size of a Hummer

• perform self-choreographed dance shows in the living room

• make her playmates participate in dance shows in the living room

• dress her playmates up in costumes for dance shows in the living room

• complain about their deviations from her choreography

• refuse extracurricular activities so that she may stay home dressing up and dancing

I'm using the term "Fairy Papa" loosely. I know some straight, bisexual, and transgender parents of both genders who qualify too. Conversely, I know some dads who are gay in orientation who are not Fairy Papas at all. I will also use the term "Manly Dads," and I will use that loosely, too, as they come in all varieties.

All the same, even when Manly Dads think they're being playful and inventive, they usually don't come close to being Fairy Papas. For example, my Manly Dad friends who consider themselves good at pretend play can keep up with their children perhaps 30 minutes at a stretch. An hour at most. For a Fairy papa, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three—when you’ve exhausted Barbie AND Polly Pocket—that get tough.

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Fairies and Manlies when it comes to parenting. The vast majority of the Fairy Papas believe their children can be "the best" actor-singer-dancer triple threats, that creative thinking reflects successful parenting, and that if children don’t know any of the lyrics to Annie, then there is a problem and parents are not doing their job. Compared to Manly Dads, Fairy Papas spend approximately 10 times as long every day doing gorgeous paint jobs on their children’s nails. By contrast, Manly kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

Fairy Papas and Manly Dads just don't speak the same language. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was flouncing around in one of my mother’s outfits, my father called me "trash" in his somewhat slurred drinking voice. It worked really well. I felt deeply ashamed of him. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how big a jerk he was. I didn't actually think I was a piece of trash, not with that fabulous red silk blouse on.

As an adult, I once used similar language with my daughter, whom I’ll call Diva, saying her outfit—not she herself, mind you—looked a little trashy when she paired a mini-skirt with a mesh top fashioned from a bag that fruit had come in, an outfit inspired by my husband’s Madonna collection. My choice of language wasn’t the issue, but when I mentioned at a dinner party that I had done this, we were immediately ostracized for having exposed a 5 year-old to Madonna in the first place. One guest named Amy got so upset at my parenting that she left early to make her children learn a complicated etude even if they had to stay at the piano all night. It was up to the host to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

I wasn’t bothered. Fairy Papas can care less about all sort of things, such which gender their kids grow up to love (or even be). Manly Dads can only ask their kids to remember slogans like “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Fairy parents can say, "You're five--you don’t have to know if you like boys or girls yet!" By contrast, Manly Dads have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about gender and orientation, and try to persuade themselves that they will not be disappointed about how their kids turn out.

I've thought long and hard about how Fairy Papas can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Fairy and Manly parental mind-sets.

First, I've noticed that Manly Dads are extremely anxious about their family reputation. They worry about how they will feel if their kids fail at conforming, and they constantly try to reassure themselves about what good dads they are, notwithstanding a child’s mediocre performance in a ball game or while pledging a fraternity. In other words, Manly parents are concerned about how their kids make them look. Fairy parents aren't. They assume their own fabulousness is unquestionable and, as a result, they behave very differently.

For example, if a child comes home with a grade less than was expected, a Manly parent might sit his child down and express mild disapproval, but then hire the best Kaplan instructor that money can buy. In contrast, no matter what grade a Fairy child gets on a test, a Fairy Papa will ask the child how the grade feels and then (regardless of the child’s gender) chirp “Lets’ play Barbies!” Perhaps the Fairy Papa would even be tempted to get dozens, maybe hundreds of Barbie outfits for his child as reward or consolation depending on the grade.

A Fairy Papa responds to all homework with more play time because he believes that his child is a child. If his child doesn't get play time at school, the Fairy Papa assumes the school’s value system is warped. The solution to a substandard school day is always to play dolls, do dress-up, or have a dance party. The Fairy Papa believes that his child will be creative enough to take the playtime and learn a valuable lesson from it.

Second, unlike me, Manly Dads believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this belief is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of watching too many TV sitcoms and the fact that these Dads work soul-sucking jobs with terrible hours to provide for their children. The understanding is that Manly children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.

By contrast, I don't think most Fairies have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband actually has the opposite view. Once, he said, "Parents who make everything about themselves really crush a child.” And I said, “Don’t I know it!” And then we both laughed and snapped our fingers the way we Fairies do.

Third, Fairy Papas believe that self-discovery is best for their children and therefore capitalize on their children's desires and preferences. That's why Fairy daughters can get tattoos and facial piercings in high school and why Fairy kids know the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” But it's also why no Fairy son would ever dare say to his Papa, "I have to join the college Chastity Club because sex is dirty and immoral and I cannot experience it outside the sanctimony of marriage.” God help any Fairy kid who tried that one.

Don't get me wrong: It's not that Fairy parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They just have an entirely different parenting model. Manly Dads worry a lot about their children's success. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child is to define success by the miserably ceaseless pursuit of finite goals you set for them. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than a child learning she can make life joyful and still succeed at something her parents never even imagined.

All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. We Fairies just do it better. Snap!

Don't "quote" me on that.

“Because he’s the ‘Daddy,’” said Diva, as she held up her tiny fingers to make air quotes. The Hubby and I were thunderstruck, not by whatever point she was trying to make, but by the fact that our 5 year-old was using air quotes. We burst out laughing, partly from shock, partly from nervousness as we both wondered: What have we created?

Ask any parent and they’ll tell you: kids come out of the womb with personality. You can try to channel their innate gifts and work with their temperaments, but you cannot actually change who they are for love nor money. Parents who try to make a child in their own image are doomed to disappointment and chagrin. (Just ask my mother.) The single bit of child-rearing advice that I’ve most repeated to new parents is this: Love the one you’re with.

Diva has been a Diva since she was born. She spent the first six months of her life wearing one of only two expressions: her brow furrowed as she eyed each new thing like someone sizing up an opponent; or her eyes sparkling, as she beamed a double-dimple smile that attracted the praise of complete strangers and seemed to net her endless freebies (in restaurants, in stores, even on airplanes). There wasn’t much middle ground in her personality, which was offered a hint about who she’d become once she skipped by crawling and started walking at 10 months. Since then, she’s always either been fully on or fully off. “On” means ceaseless running, climbing, dancing, singing, bouncing, or—in the quieter moments—directing whoever is nearest in elaborate pretend play scenarios. “Off” means sleeping so deeply that we can pick up her slumbering body (which may well have made a loop around her bed) and move it into safer position without her even noticing. Even asleep, she’s in motion.

That is all nature, not nurture. I’m not athletic in any fashion, despite my brief career in Little League as a player so bad the town let my coach assign me a fake position (deep right field). And my summers as the world’s most overweight lifeguard are now two decades behind me. The Hubby is a cyclist, which even he admits is the way nerdy guys make themselves feel butch and cool, but he not only plays no sports, he cannot follow the rules of any. But Diva could hit a baseball and kick a soccer ball by age three, and now claims to like basketball best, which is grand since she’s a beanpole. (Clearly, she got none of my DNA.) I still remember the moment The Hubby realized how sporty she was and turned to me, horrified, moaning, “Oh my god—are we going to have to go games?” (Yes, dear. Bring a book.)

Accepting her as she is and embracing that does not mean we have no influence on our own child. Nurture does actually rear its head from time to time, as in the case of her musicality. I started singing in public at age 5—my grandmother being the church choir director—and was a self-styled singer-songwriter all through high school, a budding balladeer who sang mostly about love or the coming apocalypse. I even went to college on music scholarship—a deal which lasted three semesters until the department finally noticed I wasn’t actually a music major. The Hubby is also musical: he plays piano and sings (in lusty, key-defying fashion) all the time: in the car or while cooking or doing laundry or at the beach or [fill in the blank]. Between us, we are perpetually making up lyrics to songs about the minutiae of our lives.

I am doubtful that there is a strand of DNA with a Sondheim marker, but this is where nurture kicks in: Diva has lived all five years of her life hearing improvised songs about the mail, her meals, the weather, the poodle’s behavior, and even her dad’s gassiness. The girl grew up in rhyme and you can tell: she’ll sing us her opinions and complaints, make up elaborate songs with hooks and refrains and bridges. If Daddy starts a song about kibble in the kitchen, Diva is likely to usurp my old role, throwing in her own verses from the dining room, and woe be to the dad who does not make the next line rhyme. This, I love.

But I am less crazy to discover how well we have modeled another behavior pattern: sarcasm. A five year-old does not learn air quotes from PBS—she learns them from listening to her dads as they mock politicians or fake people we’ve encountered (and who knows what else). And sarcasm comes with more than just hand motions. This girl can already say, “Fine”—air quotes implied—with such irritated fatigue that she sounds like a true pro. Until Diva began saying the word this way, The Hubby hadn’t realized how often he uses “fine” to mean “it’s not fine but I’m sick of discussing this so I’ll just give in if it means you’ll shut up.”

What can I say? We’re not cruel people and our hearts are not at all shriveled, but, really, sarcasm is pretty much like breathing for liberal northerners with advanced degrees earned in the irony-soaked 1990s, which may well have been the Golden Age of Air Quotes. That was the time period in which you could practically major in eye-rolling, with a specialty in double entendre, and graduate summa cum snarky. Parenting (not to mention turning 40) has helped dull the cutting edge we Gen X’ers once honed so carefully, but sarcasm is still built into the way The Hubby and I tease each other or wage arguments. And now it’s part of daughter’s vocabulary.

We had to hold a family talk about this around the dinner table (where most capital-T Talks take place). In so doing, we admitted that sarcasm isn’t the nicest way to express an opinion and that sometimes it’s downright hurtful. Diva, of course, leapt on this: it’s very exciting when one’s dads acknowledge that they’ve been misbehaving. Now that we have shared language with her to describe when she is being too mocking or rude, she can do the very same thing to us when we are. I guess this is progress: we’re all going to have to watch our mouths. We’ll see who learns fastest.

Hopefully, as nature and nurture battle to shape the girl who will someday be a fully-grown Diva, the things we do right will outweigh the things we do wrong. And when she looks back on her childhood, I hope she thinks it really was fine (air quotes not included).

Why Diva Can't Read

Diva stood in a line of classmates, looking at the “Word Wall” board, knowing that she was supposed to be able to decipher the assembled letters in front of her—and she panicked. There was a “t” but no “h” so she knew it wasn’t “the,” but feeling the pressure of eyes upon her, she couldn’t solve the problem any further. The word might have been “went” or “to”—she couldn’t remember which it was when she told me the story at bedtime. “I got so scared,” she said, her face hidden by a pillow. “I almost cried.”

She’s 5.

That a girl so young feels embarrassed that she can’t read well enough is a reflection both of our time and of our location. We live in one of those towns people move to for the “good schools.” By “good,” many people mean that students test well. In fact, just a few years ago, the elementary school Diva attends had the highest average standardized test scores in Massachusetts. For some parents, those results are reason enough to desire this particular district in our town above all the others (and it’s not like the other schools are chopped liver).  But we didn’t buy in our neighborhood with an eye toward testing; we snapped up our condo mostly because it was the first place we could afford. Only after we moved in did we learn how “good” our school district is.

Our school earns its high marks by being fairly rigorous from the word go. Just four months in, Kindergartners are expected to be able to read and write an array of words, and by the end of the year they will be writing narratives. They’ve had written homework since week one, a practice meant to establish a pattern that will ready them for first grade, which will involve daily homework, a much faster pace of new language acquisition, and nightly reading. In theory, standards like these will help keep the children of our town statistically on par with, say, the children of Shanghai, while yielding a smarter, stronger workforce for our nation’s future. But in practice, it means that a single kind of learning—outcome-based academics— determines all things, while other modes (social development, citizenship, creativity) can be valued only insomuch as they do not impede progress in more numerically-measurable areas.

This emphasis is a problem if you are a five year-old with terrible memory. For several years, Diva grouped all her friends in categories named for the first member of each whose name she learned: all blonde white girls were Tess, all Asian girls were Emmeline,  and both her young cousins were Alice. She routinely refers to her favorite toy as “My American Girl Doll,” a moniker which is three words longer than its actual name, which she can’t remember no matter how much we use it. Her own birth date escapes her most of the time and she cannot tell a story about something that happened yesterday without first being reminded of the context. Not surprisingly, we were nervous in advance of this school year about how it would go.

Don’t get me wrong—we weren’t nervous because we think that she can’t learn or won’t read. She’s a smart, creative kid, and she’ll get there when she gets there, even if not on the school’s timeline. We were nervous only because we didn’t want her to feel badly about learning at her own pace and thus end up associating school with failure—yet there are hints that this is already happening.  In the first week of school, her class was told that none of them could ask parents for help with spelling words and that the teacher would know if they did. The idea behind this approach is that it should force the students to be more independent and to do their own problem-solving. Yet when Diva couldn’t sound out a word she needed for her initial homework assignment, she burst into tears and hid under the table.  From the beginning, then, the very theory meant to empower her to “do it for herself” instead taught her what she can’t do.

Her teachers, I must be clear, are not villains. They are neither whip-cracking fiends nor developmental alarmists.  They simply know what waits for Diva in first grade (and second and third…) in our school system, and, beyond that, the greater expectations of the age we live in. In this particular cultural moment, many teachers like hers no longer have the old-school luxury of  adapting instruction to allow for the needs of different learning styles; they must ever teach with an eye toward the quite-inflexible tests which will eventually come.  With so much federal money dependent on those tests, high scores drive the engine of public education, no matter how teachers or families may feel about it.

As Diva’s dads, we’re doing our part at home to soften the fear created by the pace of learning our daughter faces. We’ve made a memory game out of the “World Wall” words, and we let her figure out the words her own way when we play. But, even more, we’re trying to remind her that every child is different, that reading doesn’t have to be her thing right now. Sure, some of her classmates are good sight readers and some are great at math, while others are better at drawing pictures or scoring goals in P.E. We love her for who she is and want her to feel good about her own skills and talents.

But she’s no dummy: she already understands that no one but us values her song-writing ability, or the speed with which she is mastering skiing, or her fabulous pretend play scenarios.  No one will ask her to stand in front of her peers and answer a question about doll-houses or fuse beads. In her five year-old way, she’s already learning a tough lesson: her school wants one thing from her, and it’s something she doesn’t yet have to give.

               

The Most Wonderful Lie of the Year?

Out of the blue, three weeks before Christmas, Diva suddenly had a terrible thought. “We don’t have a chimney!” Both Daddy and I knew exactly what she was saying, but we let it play out. “How will Santa get the presents in without a chimney?”

Lit by the dangerous glow of the same hot, colored light bulbs that adorned the Christmas trees of my husband’s childhood, I maintained my nonchalance, barely glancing up. “I guess I always thought he came through the window nearest the tree,” I said. “I mean, that’s where the presents end up.” A pause. “What do you think Daddy?” He concurred, of course. And thus, once again, lying to our daughter came as naturally as breathing.

Funny thing for those who celebrate Christmas: during this season of grace and love and human kindness, it’s like lie-a-palooza, at least where children are involved. Santa as we know him is a hybrid beast—a Coke ad overlaid on top of a German myth sprinkled with the legend of a Greek monk, and the whole thing wrapped in flannel. If you think about it, he’s kind of a creep, really: a leather-booted stranger who sneaks into your house at night with a list of family members he likes to observe in their sleep. If that story was invented today, there’d be a restraining order involved. The part that wins people over to Santa is presents—people like presents.

In theory, it’s not the gifts themselves but the spirit of giving that Santa represents. Our children, we hope, will want to give to others because they have been inspired by the best—the man who practically invented the art. But methinks there’s more to it for parents: Santa allows us to give more than we should, more than our kids actually need, the kind of toys we always wanted and maybe didn’t get but now have an excuse to buy. And we all know that no present from Dad and Dad is ever as good as one delivered by reindeer direct from the North Pole.

So we lie. And lie and lie. Last year, Diva asked about all the “extra” Santas. She had seen the real one at Macy’s in Times Square—she knew he was real because they said so on TV at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—and had stood in a long line for the privilege of sitting on his lap and whispering her request for a robot dog (a toy she had never once mentioned to us). To then see ersatz Ole St. Nicks at malls and banks and the local cable company lobby was confusing, so she turned to the expert, Papa, who loves Christmas like a pig loves muck. “How can they all be Santa?”

I know, the honest and intellectually-sound approach might have been to use this as the first window into easing her out of the Santa myth, and we have at least one friend who would have jumped at such a chance if she’d been his daughter. But I turned her query back around and asked if the Santas all seemed real. No—she was firm—the true item was the one she’d met. So if they weren’t all Santa, why did she think they dressed like him? She came to a peaceful resolution herself: These guys were his helpers because he couldn’t be everywhere at once when all kids needed to get their requests in. I praised her powers of reason. And thus was the lie of Christmas preserved another year.

This week, a friend’s 7 year-old daughter grabbed her mom’s face and pulled her startled mother in close for a piercing look. “Mommy,” she said, teeth bared like fangs. “Are YOU Santa?”

The mom didn’t hesitate. “Of course not! He brought you nine presents last year! I never buy you that much!” The mom later confessed to me that she'd known she needed to stop there, but hadn’t been able to contain herself, and had overshot, goading her daughter, “And you know who is friends with Santa? God. God is!” (I would like to hazard a guess that she has now pretty much guaranteed a two-for-one faith collapse sometime within the next few years.) The mom, red-faced as she recalled her overzealousness, explained to me, “I just want another year, you know?”

I do know. We hang on to this story because it’s a touchstone of too-brief childhood, something special truly just for kids. Yet we know that the outcome is the eventual revelation that not just one’s own parents but, by extension, all grown-ups know how to lie with straight faces. This can occasion any number of reactions from a child, from a shrug to horror to anger, but we roll with it because we think even a bad reaction will be—as are all things with children—short-lived.  In this way, we make a permanent contribution to the process by which the proverbial blinders fall off; our children will never again implicitly trust everything we say, nor will they think that lying to us in return is inherently a problem. I may recall this ruefully when Diva is 16 and throws out a claim like, “When I said I was in my room, I meant a room which felt like mine, which is true in a way, right?”

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine another myth so widespread, so well-embraced, which is designed to be proven untrue as one’s rite of passage into maturity. As far as I know, there is no Amazon jungle tribe which tells its young that there is a Guardian Bird who brings good boys and girls an invisible cloak that makes them impervious to fire, a story the kiddies love right until they burn themselves on an open flame for the first time, only to be told that the blistering welt is proof that they are now so much smarter than those silly little kids with unblemished skin who still believe.

I don’t want to Diva to get burned by Santa—really, I don’t.  At least not this year. Maybe next year or the year after she’ll have thick enough skin for that. But this Christmas, Santa’s bringing her a Barbie dollhouse the size of a Smart Car, a purchase her dads might be somewhat embarrassed to admit they’d made. And if she asks how the jolly old elf got such a big present through the window, I’m sure to have a good lie ready. Tis the season after all.  

To Still a Mockingbird

           Diva: “I don’t WANT to go to a tree-lighting!”

           Papa: “I don’t WANT to hear any more whining!”

           Ah yes, the fine art of mimicking one’s child with horrible sing-song precision. It’s such an elegant parenting strategy, that I can’t imagine why more experts don’t recommend it. Oh sure, it’s rude, juvenile, and patently ineffective but you can’t beat it for ease! Or so it seemed when the mockery popped out of my mouth during a long car ride just after Thanksgiving.

            It was late afternoon on what had already been a full day. We’d woken Diva before the sun was up, earlier than she has to rise for school, so that we could bundle her in the car and head four hours north from Boston to where my mother lives in a small Maine town. Diva, a go-go-go kid, hates to ride in the car; all the stillness plucks her last nerve. Even videos—the opiates of the backseat masses—will only tide her over for so long. She gets a little crazy and the crazy rubs off.

            If the travel issue itself wasn’t enough, there’s the fact that we were headed to an Assisted Living facility, which is not exactly a kid-friendly place. To be honest, my mom isn’t entirely kid-friendly to start with. Even with other adults, she can only handle conversation in limited doses, and it’s been decades since she knew how to engage a child. More than a year had passed since the last time we’d brought Diva to Maine. On that visit, she’d immediately seen my mom’s collection of stuffed animals and had eagerly picked one up.  Mom had panicked; her first words to my four year-old were, “Can you put that back down?” This greeting had made Diva clam up for the rest of the visit, and when a neighbor stopped by, my mother complained—within Diva’s earshot—that her granddaughter “was good at not talking.”

Not surprisingly, we did not have high hopes for this recent excursion. But I had come up with a strategy to take the edge off: after we finished our visit, we would make an overnight stop in a city halfway home. I had booked a place with a pool because hotel pools are nearly an obsession for Diva; she’s a girl who would choose a visit to Trenton over Disneyland if Trenton offered a pool and Disneyland did not. On the way to the hotel, we would stop at a Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony, because I am a helpless Christmas fiend. (I finished this year’s holiday i-pod mix a month ago, back when store clerks were still packing away their skeletons and witches.)  The plan was to end the evening at a restaurant with poutine; for the uninitiated, poutine is a dish of French fries topped with brown gravy and cheese curd, which sounds a little disgusting but is like crack for The Hubby. In my mind, all these eventual treats would make the day feel less like a slog, and I assumed Diva would feel this way too.

The Hubby and I shuffled our increasingly-bored gal from locale to locale: first the Assisted Living facility, then to a restaurant that caters to elderly Mainers who like their bland food served in very large portions, followed by a trip to Wal-Mart to buy sundries for Mom, and then a stop at the home of even older relatives whom Diva has never before met. By midday, my daughter was rightly feeling that no one was especially paying attention to her interests. Unfortunately, my mother and I were having such a terrible time finding things to talk about that my own tension was rising as steadily as mercury in July. So even though I could sense that Diva was unhappy, I couldn’t make myself feel any sympathy for her and, indeed, I resented her inability to be more long-suffering. I was thinking things like, “If she had been a pioneer child, not only would she have gone willingly to whatever wilderness we dragged her to, she’d have had to chop down trees once we got there!”

When at last we parted from my mom, Diva didn’t want to give her a hug, or a kiss, or even a wave. She actually hid inside The Hubby’s coat. This pushed me over the edge. Because my mother has never accepted the validity of my marriage, it has always been insanely (and pointlessly) important to me that she recognize the goodness of my parenting. Instead, here was proof that my daughter had been raised by boors: she was a girl with no manners and a heart so hard she wouldn’t give an old lady a kiss.

As would have been clear to a rational person, what was really transpiring was that a tired girl, largely ignored for hours, felt shy around a woman whom she barely knew and who had said little more than “hello” to her all day. But I wasn’t feeling rational. As we headed south toward the mini-escape I’d planned, and Lily said she didn’t want to go to any tree-lighting, my mocking reply was instantaneous—which only ramped things up. She said she WASN’T going and I couldn’t MAKE her, and I replied that she was wrong on both counts. I may even have said something like, “Just try me, lady.”

When I said to The Hubby that I thought Diva needed to get better at doing whatever her dads told her, he admonished me, gently. “Maybe we didn’t do our job as dads today.” He pointed out that we’d never warned her that so much of the day would be un-fun, that hours of driving would be followed by hours of tension before more driving. We hadn’t explained how many boring things she would have to suffer through before getting back into the car for another dreaded drive. And after holding out the carrot of pool time all day, we’d never conveyed that the tree lighting would have to happen first. The Hubby was right and I knew it. In essence, I had expected my five year-old to be more grown-up in the face of the same long day that had taxed me to the point of acting like a bratty kid. When I came to understand this, I let out a long sigh as something unwound inside me.

But there was still the matter of what to do next. We could have just skipped both the tree lighting and the dinner, letting Diva revel in the long-delayed pool time and calling it good. And that would have been a defensible choice in many ways.

Instead, we did something else—everything else, actually. We’d already blown one chance at good parenting that day, no need to blow the next. Rather than suddenly backtracking, so that only her wants and desires were going to be met, and thus sending a message that whining (even if understandable) was indeed the way to get what she wished, we decided to stick to our original plan. But this time, we talked it through.

We had a conversation with Diva about the whole day, how we knew it hadn’t really been that much fun so far, but how important it was to look out for each other. Most of the day had been about the needs of her grandmother, but now we were going to focus on each member of our own little family, not leaving anyone out. We would go to the tree lighting for Papa, then to the pool for her, and then to the restaurant for Daddy. We talked about how all of us needed to do our part to make sure each person truly enjoyed the event that they’d been looking forward to, on the premise that making each other happy as individuals was a way to make us happy together as a family.

She sang lustily all through the tree-lighting, swam like an especially splashy nymph in the pool, and then mowed her way through a cone of French fries like a high Belgian. As we walked back to the hotel, she exulted about our triathlon of fun. “We did EVERYBODY’s thing!” she crowed, happily. And when she announced that she had LOVED this night, I didn’t mimic her—I simply agreed: I loved it, too.     

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It's On the Tip of My Tongue

The stranger purses her lips and then shakes her head sadly. “Well, I guess I didn’t make an impression on you.”

When she says this, we are standing in the busy playground across from Diva’s school. I’m happily passing a sunny late fall afternoon chatting with other parents I don’t yet know. Except that this one insists that I do know her. I suppose she may even be right.

Diva’s bumpy transition into kindergarten is long behind us; in fact, she now has so many friends that she somewhat intuitively splits them into camps, playing with one set one afternoon, and another set the next. But as she ricochets from swing to slide to playhouse and back, a ping pong ball of joy, I find myself playing a game of my own. I call it “Who Am I Talking To?”

In theory, I should be good at this game. I’ve always been a people person by nature, the boy who joined eight or nine clubs in high school and spent as much time socializing as studying in college. To this day, I’m a living Chatty Cathy, maintaining running jokes with the barista at my local Starbucks and making sure to ask my favorite cabbie how his kids have been doing since I saw him last six months ago.

So why am I so nerve-wracked now as The Hubby and I dive into this community of elementary school parents? Because I can’t remember any of their names.

Maybe it was after I turned 40, or maybe it was about the time I taught my 2,000^th  college student, but some kind of fullness has overtaken my cranium. If doctors were to do an MRI of my temporal lobe, I’m convinced they’d find it illuminated with a blinking sign: NO VACANCY. I can get around this problem with my students more easily, because the university provides me a handy list of their names, accompanied by teeny little photos. But I have no such cheat sheet for my fellow parents, nice folks whom I’ve presumably met at my town’s playgrounds, libraries, concerts, puppet shows, matinees, flu clinics, and fireworks displays in the five years leading up to Diva’s entrée to Kindergarten.

I’m not entirely hopeless; I can do reasonably well if I meet someone with an unusual moniker, like the mom I know who has an apostrophe smack dab in the middle of her first name. But the Susans and Mikes of the world have a significantly harder time claiming their places in my mental rolodex. If you’re a Bob, I’m just as likely to call you Scott or Paul, unless you have some helpfully memorable disfigurement for me to cling to. If I can associate a name with a particularly vivid visual—say you have a third eye, or an exoskeleton like a lobster—I’m sure to remember it forever. Otherwise, not so much.

I have tried discreetly typing the names of fellow parents into my i-phone as soon as they walk away, but I find that when I later review the list, some of my clever notes call to mind no picture at all. It’s like my brain is mocking me: nice try, mister.

What makes it worse is how many parents seem to remember my name. I try to tell myself that there are good reasons for this discrepancy. For one thing, I’m a Room Parent (one of three who organize fundraising events for Diva’s class), so the other parents all get e-mails from me. Moreover, The Hubby and I are the only two-Dad pair in our daughter’s school, so we do stand out a bit—and not just because we attended Parent Night with him clad in a leather biker jacket and me sporting a Parisian scarf.

Some folks, of course, are in the same recall-deficient boat as I am, and there are others who simply don’t mind at all, wisely not taking my forgetfulness personally. But because there are just enough people who do mind, I’m always a little on edge when I approach the playground. There’s Hip Mama, for instance, who makes sure to greet me by name every single time she sees me…and then every single time adopts a slightly wounded look when I don’t use her name in return. In longsuffering fashion, Hip Mama reminds me who she is week after week, yet I’m always so busy cringing, I go deaf with embarrassment and miss whatever she’s saying. In the end, she hasn’t taught me her name at all, but has inadvertently trained me like Pavlov’s pups: at the mere sight of her, I gorge on my own shame.

At least Hip Mama seems forgiving—not everyone is. This particular afternoon, the stranger/not-stranger, who insists that we have in fact met more than once, isn’t going to let me off so easily. “I don’t look at all familiar to you, really?”

She sees me struggling and reluctantly trots out her name, though she clearly feels I should have been able to come up with it on my own. “Now, does that ring a bell?”

In the ensuing silence, I swear you can hear a whistling wind right out of a Western. Cue tumbleweeds.

There is a part of me that wants to list for this woman all the details claiming the spot where her name would go: what time we need to leave the playground in order to be home for a playdate, what size Diva’s feet are now, which snack she no longer likes and will refuse to eat if I put it in her bag, which tights she’s outgrown and thus need replacing, which friend’s birthday party we have to get a present for by this weekend, which grandma sent a present for which we still haven’t written a thank-you e-mail, and how long it will take to get today’s homework done, once we factor in tears and supper.

Instead, I rack my brain—trying to place the pretty face and elegant clothes, envisioning this woman at parties or Diva’s recitals or maybe Groovy Baby Music Class 2007. Nada, zip, zilch.

For a moment, I consider faking it, going with something like, “Oh, right!” followed closely with “How are you?” the emphasis masking that I still have no clue. But then I ask myself: is false cheer any less rude than true forgetfulness? I decide to fess up, abjectly admitting my own failures. “I’m sorry,” I say, because I am.

Pained expression marring her lovely features, she repeats her name and I vow to remember it.

It’s Laura.

Or maybe Lauren.

Lila? Lois? Lee? Just one little name and still!

NO VACANCY blinks the sign I can’t see. No room left at all.