A Father's Journal, Vol 1, No. 5
An old neighbor claims that he can find just about everything he needs at our local market, a small, cinder-block building in the center of our neighborhood. When Nancy and I were looking to move last year we found ourselves gravitating towards homes near this market, and did finally move only a couple of block further from it than we had been.
A little seedy, this market is the crossroads of our most local community, the place to be whether one's in search of cigarettes and beer or the daily New York Times. More and more, though, I find that what I get there is a hard time.
"Where's Emily?," Sandy asks gruffly from behind the counter as I walk in. "She's in college now?"
Emily is still only seven months old. This is Sandy's subtle way of reminding me that I haven't been bringing Emily in lately for her required visits. Sandy doesn't really think Emily's in college, but her joke does give me pause: One day Emily may well go off to school.
Nancy, Emily and I recently took in a concert by a guitarist from the Mid-West playing at a club in Northampton, Mass. Afterwards, we wandered into a coffeeshop-slash-bookstore, all the rage these days in hip parts of the country like Northampton. Downstairs, the place was full of these long tables, ratty overstuffed chairs, musty shelves of used books, and maybe forty young students, earnestly studying or talking. In the old days, the room would have been cloudy with rancid cigarette smoke. Now-a-days it is a well lit, smoke-free environment where they sell Snapple juices as well as double-decaf-cappacinos.
With my Snapple in hand, I surveyed the youths, talking, reading, laughing, until my eyes came to rest upon a woman of maybe nineteen. She was wearing a sweater and a man's suit coat, and was seriously focussed on some weighty text, oblivious to my examination. She had short dark hair and a round face, I noted, just like our Emily.
On the drive home, Nancy and I talked about the temptation to re-live our lives through our child, about wanting to save her some of the pain we've enjoyed on our way to the few insights into life which we cling to. And about how we suspect that this hope is futile.
Back when we decided to have a child we agreed that our kid would be completely free from the weighty burden of parental expectations. We would never project upon our child the images we have of ourselves. And we'd resist the trend to look for ways in which our baby exhibits her obviously above average abilities. This last bit has so far been the hardest.
Shortly after we were home from the hospital, we found ourselves talking about how quickly Emily was learning one thing or another.
"She's really smart, isn't she," we'd whisper to ourselves, looking cow-eyed at our daughter, before one of us remembered our vow.
"We weren't going to do that!"
"Oh, yeah, right."
Now, having seen this faux-Emily drinking coffee on her way to certain success in college and the world, I again find myself envisioning Emily in ways that she may or may not be, fermenting great expectations for her future, which strangely resemble certain hopes I once entertained for myself. Suddenly, I am again watching Emily's every move, looking for that new behavior which suggests high achievement.
Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, when he would lecture in this country, found himself answering the same question over and over again, so much so, in fact, that he came to call it the "American Question."
The question was essentially, "how can we make our children develop faster?"
Piaget, for his part, discouraged this kind of thinking. He was a stages man. He postulated that children develop in an orderly and consistent series of stages and that you could not and should not expect children to cut short or skip these innate steps of development.
It is most interesting, however, that Piaget saw this drive to speed development as a characteristically "American" thing. (I think we can assume he meant U.S. of America rather than, say, Canada or Venezuela or Guatemala, though they too probably have their own "American" questions.)
As a new parent, I certainly find myself wondering, more than I like to admit, about how my daughter stacks up development-wise. When friends with small children mention how little Pookie just rolled over to the left last night for the first time, I can savor the joy they feel for this event, until that little voice in me tries to reconstruct just when it was that Emily first rolled that way.
"And just how old is little Pookie right now, by the way?" I might innocently ask.
It is difficult to pin-point exactly when this impetus to accelerate was embedded in my psyche. Probably sometime in my dark and distant past, sometime between the publicly scored spelling tests and the scholarship competitions, between the Enquirer headlines ("Baby Genius Solves National Debt Problem") and the Menses Society membership rejection, I realized that our culture values precocious and productive pre-pubescents above your everyday, run-of-the-mill average kid. It may not be very democratic, but then the "American" way rarely is.
Another part of the American way is consumerism. New parents, in a particularly and peculiarly vulnerable state, are quick to accept the wisdom of and need for devices guaranteed to accelerate development. From before birth, parents are bombarded with innocuous looking catalogues of "learning tools" designed to make your kid spell better than you at age two, as well as empty your already threatened savings. One tries to be strong, to ignore the propaganda and mutter the mantra "my baby's OK as she is, my baby's OK as she is." But sometimes we breakdown and buy that stupid piece of plastic because we are, after all, "American."
Perhaps, I begin to wonder, I underestimated the subtlety of meaning in Sandy's comment about Emily being in college. Maybe she suspects me of piling my little girl with loads of expectations, and worries that I may not be taking the time to simply wander around the neighborhood, taking in the sights and the diverse mix of people at the market. Life is, after all, short, and I would do well to worry less about what my daughter will do and enjoy more how she is doing.
Maybe Sandy's comment had this sub-text, maybe not. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we should just stroll on down to the market right now, at this moment, while the sun is still out, just for fun.
Web Site Design Courtesy of Salwen Studios Graphic Design