Time

Why do we change the time? The days are getting longer anyway. The whole point of time is that it is time. You change things around it. You move a meeting forward, not push the time back. It shouldn’t be allowed. Daylight saving is the apotheosis of human arrogance. It’s a sin.

I didn’t care about this until I had small children. An hour is an eternity for a small child. 15 minutes can be the difference between serenity and meltdown.

Ones view about many things change after having children. I’ve noticed this in myself. Anything that makes life difficult for you becomes a moral emergency. “Daylight savings is anti-family.” Necessities are quickly made into virtues: sobriety, equanimity, self-denial. These things came late to me BUT YOU MUST FIND THEM NOW!

But truly, daylight savings teaches children the wrong lessons about time. It teaches that we don’t respect it: no respect for the past (e.g. ancestral sacrifices) and no respect for the future (e.g. climate change). Only the timeless present. This is where I draw long bows as part of the philosophical denouement. But I am late for work.

Mobiles

Lionel has two mobiles hanging over his cot. I just realized how stupid they are. All he can see from below are vertical lines. He likes these, but why pay so much for these beautiful mobiles if all he can see are vertical lines?

Letting go

Lionel sometimes gets upset when I leave him in the care of strangers. Some days there’s no fuss , but daycare drop-offs can still be fraught. The literature says it’s normal. He is only two. But I’ve not met a parent who isn’t happy when their child starts to show signs of independence.

But when is it ok to let them out on their own? The socially acceptable age is much higher than when I was a kid, but it’s hard to find any clear legal guidance. In NSW, there is no actual law that states at what age children can be left alone. The law is says you’re responsible, so I guess that means you’d be in trouble if something bad happened. But there’s a point in a child’s life where every parent starts to take those risks.

So it might not be two. But we do try to expose children to dangerous things incrementally. Otherwise the sudden exposure after years of protection results in pathological weakness, like the Buddha before he got his act together. The world is full of dragons that get bigger if you keep ignoring them. We believe this stuff, right? Humans flourish with the right balance of chaos and order. The Yin and the Yan. We struggle all our lives to live in the paradisal garden; equal parts nature and culture. Gardens. The perfect place to be. You never hear anyone say, “I’ve been spending too much time in my garden. It’s keeping me from my phone”.

As a child I wasn’t immersed in religious myth. Not explicitly. But I got some of the stories that said much the same. They may or may not have been enough to guide me as a parent. I saw The Shining when I was quite young. Probably too young. I remember Danny, the six-year-old boy outsmarting the axe-wielding Jack Nicolson in a hedge maze during a blizzard. Fictional. But it had the ring of truth about it and may have informed my beliefs about how well children can perform on their own under pressure.

Good stories are important.

Here’s my stop.

Commutes

I probably have one of Sydney’s more sympathetic commutes. In fact, I’m probably part of the elite, so far as commutes in this city go. 40 minutes, door-to-door. 50 minutes, with Lionel if all goes smoothly.

It’s a multimodal trip; a bike ride and a train, some walking. Two of those days the bike part includes dropping Lionel at day-care.

Today is not too bad. The departure from home and the daycare drop-off were smooth. Lionel has only been at daycare for a couple of months, so the drop-offs are distressing. For me. Erskineville might be Sydney’s most densely populated suburb, but Lionel’s daycare center is built around a small forest that on days like this swarms with mosquitoes. There is a bucket full of RID and Aerogaurd at the center’s entrance and today I remember to spray is chubby white legs. I set him down and say goodbye. He battles back the tears. He’s just gone two years but he wants to be brave.

The rolling stock at Erskineville is Tokyo-full and over 50 years old. Another 100 thousand people or more to this city in 2018. I’m not concerned because the department of transport has a large social media team. Everyone sweats, but no one sweats more than me.

By Central the train starts to clear and I begin to realize just how easy I have it. By Wynyard I’m almost happy. Once upon-a-time, Wynyard was the Circle’s ugliest station. Now it is the tourist gate-way to Barangaroo.

How do working parents of young school-aged children do it? How will I get my boys to school in the morning? Will they be at the same school? Do parents let 6 year olds walk to school on their own? I remember hearing that the age at which children must be accompanied by an adult has risen to 13. Maybe by then we will have driverless cars. Maybe by then we will have teacherless schools. We are working hard enough at making it an unpleasant job.

My coffee is ready. Go again.

Potty

The age at which toddlers toilet independently is rising. Potty training is hands-on and people are busy. Nappy corporations have responded with elastic-waisted toddler nappies. I don’t know the upper age limit for these, but the time spent between wearing toddler nappies and the adult variety is getting shorter.

Who is to blame? This morning I’m blaming capitalism. Free Markets are brilliant at solving problems but it’s never entirely clear whether the problems they solve were really that helpful in the long run. If the only option was cloth nappies, or if I had a moral commitment to them, I would be making a greater effort to potty train him. And I would find the time. Do everything with love, my mother says. Even when you are covered in shit.

Standing up while you piss is the best thing ever and other stuff about gender

Lionel modelling his range of boyswear

I honestly believe that. It’s the best thing about being a man. In fact, I’ve always thought that the best thing about being a man was the toilet deal. Whenever I’m at an event – or any public space – and I need to wee I celebrate my masculinity. It’s true, sometimes you get pissed on – usually by yourself – but the shorter queues and relative ease of the sneaky behind the tree option more than makes up for that.

Until quite recently, that was probably the sum total of my entire life’s thinking on the subject of going to the toilet. A quite impressive body of work.

But then there’s this baffling transgender bathroom debate in the medja again over the weekend. President Trump has revoked guidelines that instructed public schools to let kids use the bathroom that matches their gender identity (i.e, kids born as boys but who identify as girls can go to the girls toilets).

I guess it’s baffling because I wasn’t aware the problem existed. And it had the stench of a bullshit culture war issue; it wasn’t a thing until someone made it a thing, but now that it is a thing, it’s quite a big thing.

For what it’s worth, I think existing laws are adequate to deal with people who go into bathrooms to do nefarious things, and I’ve never heard a woman complain about men dressed up as women hanging around in their bathrooms. But if people felt licensed to start looking, or even policing for this, then it would probably end up badly for genuine transgendered people.

I say genuine because I admit to not fully understanding what transgenderism is even after looking into it some. I thought I had something of a handle on sex and gender. At university, feminists – and there were different kinds: liberal, radical, socialist, etc. – taught me that gender was “problematic” (I remember first hearing the word problematic and being very impressed; some things had problems, but some things had problems that were also -matic). It was problematic because gender roles were imposed externally by the patriarchy which meant that women got the shittier deal. Justice demanded less rigid definitions of these roles and now I have to look after a baby.

Now we can argue about how well all this is working, but in our societies it’s fairly mainstream to regard the distinction between biological sex and gender as useful. Sex is fixed, but gender – the cultural expression of sex – is a bit more dynamic. I’m not saying that sex and gender are independent of each other — they’re plainly not. But it’s clear that the social meaning of man and women changes even if our bodies do not.

Lots of people find their gender more or less limiting, but there were always a small number of people who found living in their gendered body intolerable or dysphoric. Some of these people would “transition” to the opposite gender, sometimes even having medical treatment to make their bodies resemble the opposite sex. This process can be rough, but if someone, say, a man, goes through this transition and then presents as a woman, then it’s decent and respectful to treat that person as a woman. No dramas, everybody lives.

We used to call the people who did this “transsexuals” and I thought, until recently, that transgender meant more or less the same thing. But transgender, I learn, is a much broader term, covering all sorts of non-conforming “gender identities”.  It’s hard to get a comprehensive definition and I admit that not everything I’ve read about it is coherent for me.

I do know that transgenderism makes some feminists very angry, which I found interesting. It seems to turn on what the “transition” to a woman involves. So, if you’re a man, you can’t just one day say, “I identify as a woman” and therefore be a woman, even though you still present like a man. This is because being a woman is an experiential category: to be a woman, you have to experience the social reality of being a woman. Transgender activists call these people TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist).

I think I will stay out of that argument. On the face of it, it seems a bit rigid. If someone presents as a woman I will address them as a woman. On the other had, I don’t buy the idea that gender is a spectrum, with lots of different gender identities you can choose from in between male and female, as some have claimed. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think there aren’t people who struggle to inhabit either male or female identities, and I don’t think all of these people are just trying to be edgy and cool. Some of them are, of course; that’s just being young. We were all doing it at university, though the focus of our rebellion was more about sexual orientation.

I guess my point is, if the motivation for a non-binary gender identity is primarily political – to challenge gender norms – then my instinct would be to take a conservative position: keep gender binary — it works well — and manage the consequences of its exclusions compassionately. Life is already confusing enough.

I doubt that “smashing the binary” is what the majority of transgender people are all about. I’m open to learning more, and especially having it explained what the difference is between all these gender identities I’ve heard about and some other category like, say, personality. So what I’m saying is that I don’t fully understand the difference between “gender”, “gender expression”, and “gender identity”.

Anyway, I don’t really have to take a strong position on any of this. Lionel is a boy. That seems clear enough. He is only fifteen months but I dress him like a boy – mostly – and reinforce his boyness daily by the way I talk, play and handle him (quite roughly). I want him to keep his feelings to himself and respond to difficult situations with unprincipled aggression.

If someone told me that male was just the gender he was “assigned” at birth, I’d probably role my eyes. He was born a boy and will almost certainly express his gender, give or take, much like a boy. That’s just math.

I know the world is changing – more children under ten are experiencing gender dysphoria and it’s not clear why – but there’s still only a tiny chance that he’ll identify as a girl. If he does – I don’t just mean wanting to wear dresses, etc. – then I’ll have to think a bit harder about everything.

Most of what I know about this is from a Louis Theroux documentary, Transgender Kids. I love Louis Theroux’s films. What he sells is irresistible for people like me: the warm feeling of open-mindedness.

Theroux interviews little kids experiencing gender dysphoria -feeling you’re a male even though your biological sex is female (or vice versa). But it’s the parents who seem to be having the real shocker. Some of the parents are grappling with a dilemma: do they start hormone blockers – drugs that delay puberty – or wait and see. If they wait and see, their kid might revert to their birth gender and everything is fine. But if the gender dysphoria remains, they risk going through puberty with the “wrong” body and then, I guess, the longer you wait to transition, the harder it is.

Before seeing this film, I would have said that medical intervention into prepubescent children experiencing gender dysphoria is an appalling idea. I didn’t even know these things existed. But walk a mile in these parents’ shoes.

I’m also guessing lots of adult transgender men or women probably wished they’d had the chance to transition when they were younger.

I remain in the cautious camp –  we don’t know enough about the drugs or the condition of gender dysphoria in kids to make good decisions. But I guess it would have to happen to you personally to really have an informed view. I do recommend watching the documentary.

One too few

I love looking at the USA on a map. The way it seems to go “splat” across the continent. We’ll have all of this, from here to here, thanks very much. It’s a good spot. If you were a big country with lots of people, and you had to choose a location, you would choose there.

My big sister and her family travelled here from the USA this Christmas. She has three children, all under ten. I don’t know how she manages. I thought she would stop at one; then she had twins. Three lean, handsome boys with big American accents. They are my nephews. Bloody marvellous.

I have one boy who doesn’t speak at all yet. We haven’t talked about more. Other people say we need to have more so he will have friends, etc. But there is research out there -everything has to be evidenced based these days – suggesting that only children do quite well. Al Pacino is an only child. HOO-AH!

I found research that says older siblings reduce your chances of allergies, etc. It delights me to think that the principle purpose of my big sister’s life was to prevent me from getting eczema — except that I got eczema.

Do people really consult the research literature before deciding how many children to have? I will probably have just the one child because right now one seems all I can handle. There won’t be much calculation behind the decision, just the fear of being overwhelmed.

And it’s certainly nothing to do with wanting to save the planet.

Naturally, I would like to save the planet. It simply feels outside my realm of competence. But there are loads of articles online by people citing climate change as the reason why they kept their families small or had no children at all.

It’s easy not like these people. At the very least, some of them are plainly lying for some cheaply earned moral superiority.

Then again, 9.7 billion people — the current projection for 2050 — does sound like a lot. I don’t much like crowds or traffic. I think Sydney was better 20 years ago when you could drive from Newtown to Bondi in 20 minutes at peak hour and park on Campbell Parade. Maybe there wasn’t as much culture, but at least you never had your day at the beach ruined by people looking at statues.

I worry about the future. I didn’t so much before I had a kid. Sometimes I even looked forward to the spectacle of everything unravelling. But now all the bad news can get me down. Overpopulation is probably the least of my worries, but I did recently read a book about it called One Child: Do we have the right to more? The author, a philosophy professor, named Sarah Conly, says the problem of overpopulation is so pressing that state-imposed restrictions would be justified.

If you accept that overpopulation is as big a problem as she says, then I get the argument: more people will make current and future people less happy so we should have fewer people.

But the case falls apart once when she gets to the practicalities of public policy. In her defence, the focus of the book is the philosophical case; trying to bring moral clarity to what our rights and obligations are in a world of finite resources.

Fair enough. And maybe that’s where you need to start, but it’s only when you puzzle through the implementation of any one child policy that the trickier moral questions arise.

Say you take, as Conly suggests, the least coercive policy tool to begin with: education. Wouldn’t that stigmatise larger families? And wouldn’t we start to look at children as a kind of pollution? Maybe that’s the point, but it sounds a bit ugly, and the more coercive you get, the more unpleasant the possible unintended consequences.

So much for first principles. Or as Anton Chigurh asked Carson Wells before murdering him in No Country for Old Men: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

Anyway, I don’t think we’ll be talking about a one child policy here anytime soon. It was controversial enough in in China, so it’s unlikely to fly in a society that routinely debates whether annual numeracy tests are an obstacle to human flourishing. I’d be against it, and I’m not even that crazy about human rights.

Speaking of China, they reckon their one child policy stopped 400 million children being born and we never give them any credit. If I were China, that would piss me off.

I didn’t mean this to be a book review. But, if you’re reading this one day, son, I guess it’s just a record of the moment that I decided, without noble motive or consultation with your mother, to keep our family small. At least you know I gave it some thought.

And if you have a problem with it, know that only hours before posting, you shit yourself.

 

 

The stay-at-home gulag

Piece of cake

So it’s not as easy as I thought. I mean, taking care of a baby is not as easy as I thought it would be. I guess you don’t hear many people say, “looking after a baby turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be.” I’m sure some people think that; it’s all about your expectations, after all. But people don’t say it. Because if they did I would punch them. I’d also punch the ones who manage to blog regularly because I’ve found that impossible.

It’s hard not to think about this role through the lens of gender. That sounds a bit Radio National. What I mean is, it’s hard not to think that it’s much harder for a bloke. Or at least it’s not hard for a bloke to think it’s much harder for a bloke. I mean, if lots of women routinely got depressed after becoming mothers we would have heard more about it. There would be a name for it; some kind of syndrome or something.

But come on, seriously, it is harder for men. We don’t grow up imagining ourselves in the role and all that imagining must prepare you somewhat. All those dolls and stuff. And then there’s boobs. Isn’t that the give away? Doesn’t that just tell you women are better built for the job? I’ve been Lionel’s primary carer now for over four months and he is still clearly oriented toward my wife’s body in a pretty hardwired looking way, especially when he’s crook (though in truth I think this makes things harder for her).

One thing that definitely makes it hard for men is that there aren’t a lot of us. After my wife returned to work, I inherited her mothers’ group. I hated the idea of mothers’ group and thought I’d never go. But desperate for activities to pass the time, I now attend religiously. Women with babies are like the internet. They are an information superhighway (remember that phrase?) sharing experiences and intelligence through gossip and other kinds of dramatic storytelling. I benefit from these exchanges but I don’t fit in. I don’t talk fast and I don’t share as much and mostly I want to talk about something other than the baby. I also cramp their style; when I wonder off after Lionel I hear them whispering about their bodies. I’m in great shape, by the way.

I haven’t found a fathers’ group in Melbourne (frankly, I don’t know if I’d go if I found one because they would spend half the time talking AFL and I would rather listen to women talking about their bodies). But I have met other stay-at-home dads. We are all struggling. I mean, we make a fist of it, and you’d always take a good stay-at-home dad over a bad stay-at-home mum. But sometimes I wonder if we are not part of a social experiment that will one day see our children linked to crime epidemic a la that Freakanomics theory on abortion (though I think that might have turned out to be bullshit).

The truth is, not many men want to do this, and even though they won’t say it to your face, most other men don’t regard the role very highly at all. More men are doing it, and we’re all meant to be cool about that, but we’re mostly not.

A 2013 US study by the Pew Research Centre found that only 21% of stay-at-home-dads report that they’re at home to care for their family. The rest report they’re at home primarily for some other reason (illness, unemployment, etc.). So less than a quarter of the small number of men that do the job are happy to call it a choice. By contrast, 73% of women who don’t work outside the home say it’s to look after their kids.

Now, I don’t know whether this is because a lot of men would rather say they can’t get a job than admit that their wife out-earns them. Either way, it’s safe to say a lot of these stay-at-home dads are not happy campers.

I’m not saying I’m unhappy — that would be socially unacceptable — but there is definitely more suffering than before. Of course, there’s supposed to be more meaning, but I’m always reminded of that meme: “People without children have no meaning in their lives; people with children are tired, unhappy and have no meaning in their lives”. Or something like that.

But so what? In life, we have to forgo things we’d rather not to benefit some other end, even if that end is not guaranteed; that’s called a sacrifice, and you have to make sacrifices if you’re going to care for an infant. What is clear to me, just from watching and observing, is that some people are better at sacrifice than others and that a lot of these people who seem better at it aren’t men. But not all. So it’s got me wondering: how good at sacrifice am I?

I’m going to look further into this next time I blog. In the meantime, I’m off to kill a goat.

 

 

 

 

The Tit offensive

I’ve been trying to imagine not having a head.

This British architect named Douglas Harding said that when he successfully imagined not having a head, he experienced selflessness, with all the benefits that entails: an inner peace, the end of the constant mental chatter, etc.  It sounds easier than meditation, but I mustn’t be doing it right because I’m still feeling tired and agitated.

Babies cause tiredness in grown ups. There’s no getting around it. They have to eat every few hours and they can’t feed themselves.

This won’t be new information for everyone.

It’s nearly six  months and Lionel has started eating solids, so at some point soon, the whole 3 am snack will end, I hope.

“I love peas and the Atlantic Monthly”

He has been breastfeeding, which I think makes tackling sleep deprivation a bit more difficult. Not because babies sleep better on formula — though apparently they do — but because it limits parents’ ability to share the feeding.

I knew there was a lot of heat around the the whole breastfeeding issue before Lionel was born, so I googled, “the case against breastfeeding”. This is what you get.

The Atlantic Monthly piece from 2009 at the top of the google was the first thing I read carefully and it’s probably coloured my views since. But I love  and trust the Atlantic Monthly. If the Economist is “conventional-wisdom-spewing crack for anglophiles”, then the Atlantic Monthly is some other kind of crack.

The author, Hanna Rosin, writes about having a bad time breastfeeding and reckons that the evidence for “breast is best” isn’t very strong: it helps prevent an extra incident of gastrointestinal illness in some kids — some bad shitty, vomity days — but not much else. The claims made about IQ, obesity, etc., all look a bit questionable. There’s a relationship between better health and breastfeeding, but it’s not causal, and it’s impossible to factor out “confounding variables”, blah, blah, blah.

I knew this article wasn’t the last word on the science, but I shared my quickly acquired expertise on breastfeeding with my wife. Evidence is important to her because she is a sort of scientist and won’t normally accept my assertions at face value, even when I use a very authoritative tone.

She still breastfed. I think mainly because it was relatively straightforward for both him and her. We haven’t talked too much about it. Talking too much about anything can be hazardous. You always end up saying stupid stuff. Perhaps HBO was invented so couples wouldn’t have time to say too much stupid stuff to each other.

How much difficulty would we have embraced had it not been straightforward? Lactation consultants? I’ve read some are so committed to breastmilk that they will seek out wet nurses. We wouldn’t have done this, though I don’t know enough about it to ridicule the option, as silly as it sounds to me.

At some point I might have put my footdown — whatever that looks like.  I’m probably on the same page as this guy, even though he sounds like a whining little bitch. His message: don’t kill yourself breastfeeding; it’s good, but dropping the baby on its head because you’re tired is much worse. Formula might be less-than-perfect but we accept less than perfect for lots of other stuff.

I know there are lots of evil reasons offered for why men have issues with breastfeeding, as well as some weird ones; like being jealous of the bonding that goes on between a mother and baby and wanting to have your own breasts. I’m fairly certain none of these apply to me. The main way that I am evil is in my love of convenience. If there was a feeding patch that you could stick on a baby — sort of like a Nicorette, except that it slowly released all the nutrients that babies needed through the night — I would be tempted to use it some nights, and possibly every night. That’s a pretty ugly thought if you unpack it, but even good parents, it seems, have ugly thoughts from time to time.

And maybe the drive for convenience and efficiency is where some of the real heat in this discussion comes from. It’s not just about breastmilk being better for you, a claim that appears difficult to establish. It’s about evil people like me who might put efficiency ahead of a more decent, caring society. The breastfeeding mafia can’t afford to give ground to the machine because the machine would have mothers — especially mothers with small bargaining power — back at work after two weeks.  A society that supports breastfeeding supports all sorts of good public policy, like longer maternity leave, family friendly workplaces, etc.

I suppose I have a lot of time for that pro-breastfeeding sentiment, but can understand why memes like the one below cause so much aggravation:

Encouragement, or bullying? I mean, from the baby’s perspective, surely it’s 100% about food.

I don’t want to contribute to the “mummy wars”, and I’ve probably said lots of ignorant stuff in this post that will upset people. That’s not my intention. I just read stories about women buying formula in a supermarket while other women walk past and whisper, “breast is best”. Maybe this doesn’t really happen, but if it does then something is a bit wrong with the pro-breastfeed message.

 

 

 

Convict state. It just won’t rate.

I had no idea. Tasmania is awesome.

I’d never really paid it much attention. They always sell Tasmania with pictures of Cradle Mountain, which is just mountain with a lake on it. But there is other stuff, like what’s in these pictures.

Autumnal clothing

The Bay of Fires

An old bridge

Echo beach … no, Skamander beach

Bay of Fires

Another beach

Lionel at the MONA

I would say it’s a good place to take children, except that Tasmanians don’t really like kids. That’s the conclusion I drew from the small population and a funny look we got from some old people at the Bay of Fires. But if you can get past that, it’s very nice.

Even Hobart is nice. It reminded me of a Nordic harbour town, though these days it seems everyone visits Hobart to see the MONA.

We did.

I didn’t have a great reaction to this place. It left me feeling a bit despondent. I’m reluctant to make a record of it here because one day Lionel might read it and think his papa was some sort of fascist, ranting about the need for Art to be morally uplifting and that MONA’s exhibits reflect a loss of taste and judgement connected to the decline of Western civilisation.

But I don’t think my reaction is necessarily the same as the Nazi’s reaction to modern art: I don’t think all modern art is degenerative and I’ve had good experiences at other contemporary art museums. I  just think the MONA’s very obvious efforts to disturb and shock fall flat compared to, say, the world.

I won’t dwell on it anymore. Only a very small part of the week should ever be spent wondering whether or not one is a bit like Hitler. That is my affirmation for today.

Plus, other people seem to like it and it’s been good for the local economy. I would go back again for another look, maybe when Lionel is a grown up. Perhaps he will have developed more refined sensibilities and be able to explain some of the stuff to me.

In the meantime, Lionel has started rolling over. That’s to be expected, according to various infant milestone charts I’ve looked at.

Looking at infant milestone charts like this one are a good way to track your child’s development and increase your anxiety levels. I’m not sure how detailed these were for our parents, but I’ve found versions that take you right up to the “child’s” 20th year. Why stop there?

We have also stopped swaddling him — once again, in line with developmental milestones — which means bedtime is less hassle, but he looks kind of ridiculous.