How to be a fellow parent, or not, in New York

This past weekend, my wife upheld an 18-year tradition she has of working at the Super Saturday charity event to benefit ovarian cancer research. That left me to look after our three small children by myself.

The weather forecast called for rain, so I took my three girls to the NewYork Hall of Science, which is a great place to take children. It has a dedicated indoor play area along with tons of other hands-on educational fun throughout.

“Wow, you’ve got three kids. Respect,” said a guy in the bathroom as I was shepherding my girls to the sinks to wash their hands.

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say. A few hours later, as I and the kids were finishing up our lunch, another Dad come over and offered to give me some beverages from his cooler, saying we looked low on drinks (we weren’t). I thanked him but declined the offer.

There seems to be a common thread among any comments that strangers make to me when I’m out on my own with my kids that since I am a Dad it’s a miracle that my children are not dead from disease or living as feral savages five minutes after leaving the house. I have no cause to think that I can do this job better than my wife, but keeping children alive is not a rarified art form.

It wasn’t that long ago that people less education and lower-paying jobs had many more kids. My father is one of seven. There are people in New York today with giant families. When I worked at JFK Airport, I met an immigrant who was bringing his 13 children into the U.S. on immigrant visas. His wife was in a wheelchair and looked very tired.

My wife gets a different comment: “I see you got your hands full,” is what people say to her. It doesn’t matter if they are male or female, old or young. That’s what everyone says to her that feels the need to comment on her managing our superior offspring.

I got that comment only once, at the supermarket, after one of our toddlers threw a temper tantrum that must have been heard by all of College Point, Queens. It was an older woman, her voice filled with schadenfreude, and cigarette smoke, and the sickening crackle of base stupidity. I ignored her and went about my grocery shopping.

Tantrums elicit the most unwelcome attention from armchair parents or bad parents who need to feel superior. On the 7 train recently a woman was struggling to contain her young son who was in the middle of throwing a blood-curdling tantrum when I got on at Grand Central Terminal. By the time they got off the train many stops later, the kid had calmed down, but not before a dozen people spent an inordinate amount of time staring at her. One of the slack-jawed gawkers was a father who had kids with him. He had the chutzpah to bring a double-wide stroller onto a crowded 7 train, plowed into several passengers trying to squeeze out of the train, and then cursed us from the platform for not helping enough. A loser Dad to beat all loser Dads.

If you see a child throwing a temper tantrum and a parent is handling it, let them handle it. Don’t stare at them or made sarcastic comments. If there was a cure for the terrible twos (and threes and fours...) someone would have had a vaccine for that long ago. The kid’s screaming is nowhere near as annoying to you as it is draining and mortifying for the parent or parents involved. If you sincerely have something positive to contribute or do to help, then thank you tenfold. You are the rare gem among a sea of self-satisfied and smug breeders that love to torment their fellow parents.

And unless your comment is actually helpful and important, like “Excuse me, I think your daughter in the pink dress just pooped on a street corner,” or “Your baby just picked up a large knife,” then no one needs to hear your comments about our (relatively) large brood. Thank you for noticing our amazing virility and the ability to keep all of our children alive.  Please leave us alone. 

New York is full of adult children

One day I was on my way through a part of the Lower East Side that used to be tragic because it was filled with open-air heroin markets and abandoned buildings that were once beautiful. Now the tragedy came from the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction. I was walking by the playground of a public school and it was filled with grown adults playing kickball.

People are free to do whatever they want to with their time, but it’s hard not to be embarrassed for people who are full-grown adults doing things designed for children.

Adult kickball is the least of it. Washington Square Park recently hosted an adult pillow fight. Grown people will now pay money for summer camp for themselves. Biological adults have even held big-wheel races for themselves. There is now a Night at the Museum sleepover at the American Museum of Natural History for adults instead of just children.

If it were only stunted teenagers or adults who were developmentally disabled who were participating in these kinds of events, I’d understand. But people who are involved in these childish games are often educated adults with good jobs, who are old enough to be mature. Adults will spend thousands of dollars to dress like elves or witches or Star Wars characters and not just on Halloween.

There’s something deeply wrong with wanting to revert back to childhood. Even if you had a happy childhood, why live it again? The things we did as children were fun, but they were always a substitute for the adult things we wanted to do more at the time. At least I did. I thought kickball sucked when I was a kid; I wanted to read books and shoot real guns instead. Why should we want to go back to a time when all of our decisions were made for us and we had only limited access to the real adult world? If grade school was the best time of your life, you have failed miserably somewhere along the line. No one should peak at 10 or 12.

The adult privileges we have come at the price of the responsibilities we inherit. Older generations partied hard when they were in their 20s and 30s, but they were working jobs to support families. There’s nothing wrong with being a late bloomer in life. I didn’t get married until I was 40 and became a father at 41, but I retired from the big wheel racing circuit before the second grade.

Our educated adults should feel free to party, but not at the expense of their dignity. There’s a danger to clinging to the past and wanting to act like a child; it stunts your development as an adult.

It’s sad to see people bragging about doing things as an adult that they should have mastered decades ago. There’s even a cute term for it: “adulting.” People who use ‘adult’ as a verb deserve to fall into the same vat of acid as people who use ‘summer’ as a verb.

I understand wanting to keep the party going and avoid responsibility, but if you have a clear mind and the courage to face reality, you won’t feel good about yourself if you avoid life. Accepting major adult responsibilities can be a daunting undertaking, but you will feel better about yourself knowing you didn’t run from the challenges of life.