Bound

Tomorrow is the next official step in the next chapter of our lives. We're going to DC to look for places to live. My new job starts in less than two months, so it's a good time to go and find somewhere we can hang our hats. Already, I can tell my methods for picking places to live have changed. I'm scanning the maps for daycare, proximity to hospitals, school system ratings. I look at monthly rents and immediately calculate whether I can keep up the savings routine for the kid's college fund.

I'm excited for the changes. They're good ones. The new job is a promotion, more complicated work, better pay, better opportunities. Everyone I talk to about the thing is impressed, and more than anything, I feel like I earned this job. Every other job I got before I just kind of fell into. It was the swimming hole next door. I was the boss's kid. I showed up and no one else was interested. I had a degree and a pulse. Now, however, I got into something kind of prestigious because I've got a formidable resume and I interview well. And I'm lucky. Right place, right time.

I've been repeating that a lot lately. I'm lucky. We're lucky. We've been very lucky. With the job, the wife, the kid. Other people say they're "blessed," but I don't think that's where it comes from. My successes are from hard work, persistence, creativity, and just plain coincidence and luck. If the old man didn't have a stroke I wouldn't have gone to law school in Akron, met Carly, all of it. If my sister wasn't already living in Jersey, I wouldn't have applied for the NYC job. And more subtle coincidences.

I have this budding rant about miracles. Everyone says the kid is a blessing or a miracle. I chafe at that, mainly due to my ingrained atheism, but also due to my desire to stay in the land of the real. The fact that my child survived his birth and his first six weeks in the oxygen-rich nitrogen environment is not divine... it's a lucky congruence of statistics and science and the effort of Carly, me, some of our family members, and a long list of nurses and doctors and engineers and inventors, all the way back to Lucy, the australopithecus afarensis. We've been doing this for four million years without books or the internet, and it seems awfully magical, but it's not. Science rules out when it comes to chromosomes mashing around, and our tiny brains are only capable of understanding the smallest smidge.

But I digress. I don't want to mock or belittle those people who believe in some kind of magic or miracle. If it gets you through the night, have at it! Like I said, before, I want my kid to believe in the magic, I just hope it doesn't fog over the lenses of reality. Think in those separate strains, kiddo.

Dad, Baby, and Computer Games 1: A Manifesto

Sparked by a photo and some comments from my wife and a friend, I'm going to start doing a monthly article for a media-consumer website. The article is tentatively titled "Dad, Baby, and Computer Games." Here's the first article draft:

My wife and I recently had a kid. Despite all of our planning, the little bugger decided to come out about 7 weeks early. The first few weeks were rough, visiting the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit; code blue shit for newborns), spending the night in the hospital, not sure if our impatient offspring would really make it… but he did. Our baby boy is now bouncing around and eating us out of house and home like he should. I’m only planning on paying for two years of college, because I figure he’ll quit that on us, just like we did to our parents.

Our kid actually made it into the world before we even had our baby shower. When the sudden posts went up on Google+ and Facebook, all of our friends were as surprised as we were. “What do you need?” they asked. “Everything!” we replied, because, well, we planned on doing our nesting and baby shopping the week AFTER the little bastard actually clawed his way out. So gifts started arriving via Amazon.com and other places. We told people we didn’t want a lot of baby shit in our apartment. We wanted to keep the physical acquisitions low, because we live in a moderately-sized place in New Jersey, and it turns out that we’re going to move soon, so having a bunch of kid toys to pack up was untenable. So we told people: buy books. Children’s books, classics, whatever they want. We want our kid to have his own library he’ll have to complain about schlepping heavy boxes of books from apartment to apartment, just like his folks used to do.

So, sometime around the baby shower, one of the other men in the room asked me, “what is the first book you’re going to read to your son?” My answer was, “whatever I’m reading, I guess.” I don’t particularly like most children’s books or TV shows. Maybe I don’t really understand child development very well, but I generally just want Dora the Explorer to get lost in the desert somewhere. I wasn’t really subjected to that crap as a kid, and I don’t know that I have to subject my kid to it. Sure, I had Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street and a host of Saturday morning cartoons that were targeted at me as a kid, but I was never really restricted from the grown-ups’ entertainment. I read Daffy Duck comics the same year I started reading Stephen King. I don’t think I want to keep my kid in some kind of baby jail for the first 12 years of his life. I just want my child to develop on his own, to become the person he is ultimately going to be. I don’t want to be a helicopter parent or a tiger mother or anything that vests my own success or sense of self on the success or achievements of my offspring. The kid will rise and fall on his own, and I will do my best to guide him, but not control him. At least, that’s the plan.

So, how do I go about this? How do I guide a kid without force-feeding him stuff? How to I ensure that he has the tools to survive and prosper without dictating some kind of program or protocol? I don’t want to be a taskmaster, but I don’t want to be an absentee hippie parental unit. I want to be a guide and example.

So the plan is to just involve the kid in all the stuff that I do. If I’m reading a book, he’ll read it with me. If I’m playing a game, he’ll play it, too. And through our interactions I hope to instill him with creativity, persistence, and understanding. I want him to see the world clearly and learn how to interact with it. And I hope that he can take some of these lessons from literature and film and games just like I did, and I’ll do my best to guide him toward the right and the good, just as my mentors did for me.

This goal has made me examine the choices I make in choosing entertainment a lot more closely in the last few months. I look for the lessons to be taught by the protagonist in House of Cards, the pathos felt in Zone One (by Colson Whitehead), and consider the consequences of my actions in games like Civilization V. I expect that this column will be a meditation on how the entertainment I consume and participate in might affect the development of my kid and the lessons I take away from it. I’ll make a prediction in that I hope my consumption doesn’t change too much. I hope I don’t trade in Game of Thrones for Blue’s Clues or whatever kids watch these days. I hope I can read the Silmarillion to my kid as easily as Flat Stanley. We’ll see how it unfolds.

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