Learning to Enjoy

I read Peter A. Coclanis' article about Study Abroad's Seven Deadly Sins with a knowing smile on my face. Not because his description of youthful debauchery abroad is my own college/travelling 20-something experience, per se (I went to a party school, yes, but my social life looked more like this than Animal House. No regrets.), but I've worked with students ever since, often in international contexts, and I've seen less dramatic versions of his bad apples. What's more, as an American living abroad, I'm sensitive to whatever image we Yanks have whenever and wherever we trapse around in other countries. We can do better. So, as a thirty-something with two daughters who will soon enough be skipping off on their own youthful adventures, I want to encourage us parents to read and think, especially this last paragraph:

Mature students with purpose and dedication will generally achieve the kind of personal growth so often heralded by study-abroad boosters. Immature students will not, for these programs do not so much build character as reveal it. A foreign country isn’t the place for a childish 20-year-old to grow up, especially when representing an American university. Students and parents, take heed.

Now, mistakes will be made, and these mistakes are often the best teachers (and make the best bar stories later). I, too, internationally open, mature-looking, tame, can look back on my own cringe moments. But even if Coclanis' list of sins are popular enough to forgive years later in the community of shared, laughable regret (I mean, who wants to be the guy at a table without a story to share?), there are dangers beyond hangovers and cultural faux pas. Also, the over-consumption and irresponsible use of good things like drink, sex, and technology isn't confined to foreign campuses. We parents can become good teachers before the teachable moments pile up too high.

So, for those of us raising children in a world of inflating choice, this is a chance to return to some thoughts about excellence in pleasure. I'll take two examples: drink and technology.

I had a professor who suggested making the drinking age 16 and the driving age 18 (that's how it is here in Germany, by the way). His logic was, once you try to bike home drunk, you'll never be stupid enough to drink and drive. Well, drunkenness is not famous for logic, and I question whatever definition of progress neighborhoods full of sloshed sophomores on BMXs fulfills, but I think he has a point for a different reason. Wouldn't it make more sense for young people to learn to drink at home: legally and under the watchful care of adults who know what they're doing?

Moreover, what if alcohol appreciation was a required part of 11th grade rather than a rare elective college course for over-21s? What if they understood much earlier the complexities of a good beer or how wine compliments food? What if they learned at an earlier age to view alcoholic beverages (in Chesterton's immortal words) as a drink and nota drug, that limitations enhance enjoyment and addiction can be avoided. America's blossoming beer culture and wine industry are showing the way already, while our kids our exposed to nothing but Bud commercials. (Note: There's a 16-year old boy in Germany fighting the good fight. Do any American breweries have apprenticeship programs for high schoolers?) Yes, anyone should be able to decline this course due to religious or conscientious objection, and by all means follow your conscience and teach your children to do the same, but treating alcohol like dirty secret only to be revealed as a cheap drug in far-away frat houses isn't doing young people, society, or study abroad programs any favors. And, after all, excellence in pleasure means not needing to rely on any pleasure for your happiness. A student, thus prepared, might find themselves abroad in a culture where the sauce is forbidden and still have the capacity for an enriching and enjoyable experience without touching a drop.

The same thing could be said of technology. Coclanis would ban smart phones if he could. He can't, and I think that's a good thing, but we can help him by raising our children to use technology well, and even when we're disoriented by the tech world's ever-changing landscape. My six-year old is growing up in a world that befuddles me more with every new adaption. My early-adaptor friend Justin has been evangelizing SnapChat to us old fogies who still think Twitter is modern, and for my daughters' sake, I'm starting to listen.

For my sake, I'd rather not. The only reason I knew about SnapChat, or at least knew SnapChat was the latest thing, is that I give private English lessons to teenagers. When I struck up a conversation about social media (an ESL trick is to explore topics of interest to elicit conversation without being boring), I quickly learned that Facebook is for dads, SnapChat's where it's at, and that I needed a different conversation topic.

What I've seen of SnapChat doesn't appeal to me, but I can understand it's appeal to teenagers. The temporary videos, the switching graphics, the crazy editing - it's like a digital house of mirrors. It's a ceaseless barrage of crazy images, which contrasts with my love of words, glorious bare words that leave the rest to the imagination (at least the Onion understands me).  This carnival atmosphere might explain SnapChat's generation and personality gap. As Facebook's grown from a playground for students to an adult-centered shopping mall with political graffiti, it makes sense that the young people want to run off to the carnival and use technology for regret-free silliness. I watch all the movements and get queasy; I feel the same way when I'm at a real carnival and I see teenagers devour chilli-dogs before hopping on the whirl-a-rama.

But in a few teensy years, my daughters will be exploring the carnival themselves. It's helpful, then, if I also know what's out there, so that I can help them navigate these pleasures with excellence. I've had a lot of helpful conversation with other parents whose kids are already of smart phone age, and it is a challenge for those of us who grew up with AOL and Gateway computers. But it means a patient, loving engagement, not to spy, but to understand the world they're entering, and help them use it in a way that it doesn't use them.

The marketers and the adults are descending on SnapChat, so I figure by the time my kids are old enough it'll be passe and the carnival will have moved elsewhere. But it will be there, and I pray I'll be able to help them use it well.

Humans, learning, and morality are complex, so there's no guarantee that any of this will spell maturity in travelling twenty-somethings. Sometimes it takes a horrible mistake for us to actually learn, so it's not all hopeless. It's a worthy pursuit. Excellence in pleasure, in this world, means "walking in the light" as the Apostle Paul instructs us. Coclani's description of fleshy immaturity reminds me of another phrase from Paul, this time condemning: "their god is their belly." What other gods have we been invited to follow, day in and day out? Excellence in pleasure suggests there's another.

Germany vs. the USA - the Maternity Ward Edition

The main difference is the screaming. There's more of it in Germany.

Let me explain. My first daughter was born back in the good ol' US of A, while the second was born here in Deutschland, so I've gotten a front row seat to the birthing philosophies and practices of both medical systems.

In the United States, we pay good money for medical services, and for that reason, these medical services should be as painless as possible. This is, of course, the purpose of medical services, to painlessly prop up our bodies, regardless of condition, so that we can fulfil our purpose by getting back to work as soon as possible. Americans agree with classical economists with this purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love profit and work hard according to its service. For this reason, Americans put great trust in profitable technologies to solve all our problems. Take, for instance, genetically modified food. Americans understand, and have seen irrefutable scientific evidence, that the only way to feed the ever-growing world population is to invest heavily in genetically modified foods, because what's natural has no way of keeping up with our industrial ways. This philosophy is also applied to birth. My German wife wanted to have a natural birth (we'll contrast the key German philosophy later), which was a novelty for all the midwives in the hospital. ("midwives" themselves were a novelty - what will those hipsters think of next?) Sure, the midwives were trained in the advantages of doing things naturally, but to actually have a woman in a hospital in America who wanted to be natural (and wasn't forced due to a speedy labor in the taxi cab) was exciting! Now, our daughter would be born on New Year's Day, and the hospital was full, perhaps because a number of families wanted their children to be the first born in the New Year (we didn't win that competition). But, there wasn't the kind of screaming you see in the movies. All the other moms sat placidly in their beds with needles in their spines, awaiting the child emerge with minimal resistance. From the silence, you'd think they were all waiting in those transport capsules from Alien. The screams from our end of the maternity ward must have been disconcerting.

Of course, for all our technology, no one noticed that our daughter was "sunny-side-up", i.E. facing the wrong way, until she was almost out. Moreover, and this is serious, a huge hole in America's healthcare system is postpartum care for mothers. Sure, we have all the appropriate vaccines and follow-up visits for the baby, good on-sight training and support groups for those who have trouble breast feeding... But rebuilding the woman's body through support and exercise is foreign to our system, yet it's such a boon to a woman's health, family, and happiness. Postpartum exercises is nothing but yoga for the yuppies who can afford it. Changing this seems like a pro-woman, pro-family, pro-life kind of policy we could all agree on.

Superior mother-care aside, Germany still has its own quirks. In Germany, medical service is almost an embarrassing necessity, sort of a sell-out. We have friends who send their daughter in our local "forest" kindergarten, where the little tikes forage around in the freezing rain and all the crafts involve tying sticks and leaves together with twine, and this is much more natural and therefore better than doing anything in a building. I'm surprised that they don't have forest hospitals, where patients lay on piles of leaves and surgery is performed with sharpened sticks, because it's natürlich. The word natürlich has a deeper, richer meaning than the English word "natural." It harkens back to a nobler time where we weren't so reliant on tablets and mobiles and shots and clothes, and people weren't so obsessed with bourgeois notions like pain avoidance or morality rates. Natürlich is better. Take, for instance, genetically modified food. Germans understand, and have seen irrefutable scientific evidence, that the only way to feed the ever-growing world population is to stop any and all investment in genetically modified food and go back to doing food the natürliche way that has fed mankind through the ages. Nonetheless, Germans, like everyone else, want to live and be comfortable, so they begrudgingly accept medical technology to keep us alive and warm and comfortable (gemütlich, which is almost as an important natürlich over here - if you have a product that can manage to be gemütlich and natürlich, believe me, it'll sell well here - but many things in Germany seem to be a struggle between Natürlichkeit and Gemütlichkeit). As having a baby is a natural process, however, Natürlichkeit trumps Gemütlichkeit, as we could tell during our hospital visit when the midwives (standard-issue over here) bragged about their hospital's low rate of epidurals. They went on to cite statistics about the horrifyingly high rate of epidurals by those snaggle-tooth, hill-billy American women who, for some backwards reason (probably involving fast food and a general lack of discipine), are reluctant to embrace the immense, natürlich, pain Mother Nature has ordained for them. Hence the screams. When we were waiting for my wife's labor pains to get going (no drugs, of course, only the help of the cocktail, which was sehr natürlich), we heard the mom ahead of us screaming like she was going through an exorcism. Oh, but in Germany, my wife got a hot tub to sit in during the process, so I guess there was a little Gemütlichkeit after all.

After the birth, however, the advantages of Natürlichkeit are clear. Our basic insurance covered standard midwife visits and, as I write this, my wife is at her postpartum gymnastics class, rebuilding and restrengthening her body with peer and professional support. Both systems, of course, helped bring a beautiful little girl each into the world and so for them, through all the quirks, I give thanks.

Notes on the Second - VII. Horrible, Horrible Thoughts

In the background of our hospital stay, you can think of parenting as a sequence of horrible thoughts. We all have horrible thoughts about the things we care about, like the way my fellow students and I are having exam-time nightmares about impossible questions and train delays. Parents' horrible thoughts are not here for a season, though; they stay background like the colors of your walls. We have (and I think I can speak of "we" here) horrible thoughts, because horrible things happen to people, and when these things happen to babies, to any children, then this new, common, transcendent, and entangling love that I've described elsewhere is ripped out of the chests of parents and communities, irreplaceable.

In my own experience, baby's complete dependence and vulnerability make the horrible thoughts so pressing, because in many cases, I'm the one responsible. What if I slip and fall down the stairs while I'm holding her? What if I nod off on the couch and she slides off my lap? What if she's not swaddled properly and she pulls the blanket over her head? What if the bedroom temperature isn't precisely 18 degrees Celsius, which we read somewhere is the least dangerous temperature for babies to sleep in? What if I touch her after eating peanut butter only to discover an acute peanut allergy? What if I left the coffee machine on because I was in a hurry not to be late for an exam and the house burns down with the three most important people in my life inside it?

Such questions circle my brain like dancing devils, and though anxiety is health-reducing bit devilment, I've surprisingly found these horrible, horrible thoughts to work towards something else entirely. A horrible thought ambushes me when I'm minding my own business, and then I cringe and I say, "Oh, God," not as a swear, but as a prayer. My child is at the mercy of everything from my own powers of concentration to diseases in nature still unrecorded, and so I plead to God for mercy. The babies under my roof have increased my prayers in frequency and intensity, the entangling love for them entangling our very beings into his sovereignty. This is not a get-out-of-trouble card, and I'm under no illusions that these things can't or won't happen to us. Nor is this an excuse for fatalism, and our prayers have the opposite effect, promoting a careful and engaging sort of love between parent and child. Rather, this is a sober kind of hope, not always comforting but always providing a an unanswerable form of joy, that neither death nor life can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

A few days ago, I was walking home, lost in thoughts about my university exams when I was almost killed. I was crossing the street, legally, when a car made a hasty and illegal turn. Had I not been awakened and jumped out of the way, I would have been hit. The car screeched to a halt a good thirty feet to late then pulled over. The driver didn't get out, but I can assume she was as shocked as I was. This experience is not uncommon - it happened to my wife back in the U.S. But it served as a reminder that however adult and in control we are, our situation is precarious.

This precariousness makes love all the more costly, and this is acted out in family and community as we do things to make each other happy, better, and alive. Drinks with friends, jokes among my co-students, an episode of Dr. Who while feeling my wife's warmth against my thigh, playing Frozen with my daughter - all of these things shine through the precariousness like the sun on a summer morning. It deepens the joy of holding my own baby daughter, ten pounds of helpless, human warmth, in my arms. Horrible thoughts are drowned out by the knowledge that this moment with the Second is an unmatchable gift.

This is the seventh and final chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second - VI. The First

When the first came, our new family was an insulated little bubble of three people, one of them new. Sure, we had enormous help from family and friends - especially the heroic grandmothers and fabulous meals from our D.C. church friends. But while they were constantly coming in and out of our little bubble, our little family strengthened like a three-fold cord.

Now, the first is five years old, and because of her, if our bubble isn't porous, it doesn't exist. She's blossomed into the richness of life that five years has to offer, the delights of learning and play and discovering things like characters and stories and science. Then, there are the challenges of discipline, disease, and the normal, everyday hassle of getting her ready for kindergarten.

Her new little sister has been thrust upon all of these things, and there's a strange paradox here. On one hand, she's old enough to be aware of what's going on, to know how to behave around her (gentle! quiet!), while avoiding the jealousies of younger older siblings. On the other hand, she's too young to really adjust her own life and habits for the change. She needs help and attention every morning, she needs and wants to play with her parents, she has moods, gets sick, gets excited, and, for the first time in her life, has become a picky eater. This of course, damages the sense of "mama-and-papa-against-the-world" was there for the first week of the First's life, and the Papa's supporting role is something like....

DoSomethingDoAnythingToDistractOrEntertainHerSoThatHerLittleSisterCanFinallyLearnToBreastfeedProperlyInPeaceExceptNotAnotherEpisodeOfSeanTheSheepBecauseShe'sSomehowInABadMoodAfterWatchingSeanTheSheepEvenThoughSheLovesItAndIKnowIt'sMuchTooColdToGoOutsideSoHelpHerPutOnHerPrincessDressAndColorButPleaseDon'tMakeTooMuchNoise!!!!!

Then, sickness entered the picture. The First came home from kindergarten (that oversized petri dish) with a nasty fever and a stiff neck. It got worse, and on Sunday, we took her to the hospital. By the grace of God, our own paediatrician was on hospital duty there, and the stiff neck signalled meningitis to him. The next day, my oldest daughter and I checked into the hospital, where we would stay for the next few days. My wife and youngest daughter stayed at home, still learning to feed and drink. It was a sad, sad situation - separation, hospital food, nightmares darkening our thoughts. There was, though, a warmth strengthening my bones at the time, and I think it was the knowledge that by simply being there I was where I ought to be and what I ought to be, and this confidence is foreign to me. A father and husband, present, within fear and sickness and suffering, standing against the effects of the Fall like a palm tree in a thunderstorm.

I wasn't alone of course - friendly and competent medical staff, my in-laws were heroes, and my wife was able to visit the hospital, and when we brought home a nasty intestinal disease from the hospital, everyone suffered but the baby, protected beautifully by my wife's milk. The antibiotics worked their magic on my oldest daughter, and we still don't know if it was actually meningitis, even though several doctors worked like Dr. House throughout the week to find out. Now, we're healthy, even if rumours of other diseases here in our neighbourhood tempt us to barricade our house 'til spring, and when we actually stop to think about it (and stopping to think is challenging when you have small kids), we're deeply thankful. My mother-in-law is convinced that our prayers helped my older daughter as much as the antibiotics. One doesn't exclude the other, and we did indeed pray.

There's another thought that helps, one that my wife brought home from the midwife that led her birthing classes. Whatever new amount of stress a little baby brings to her older sister, we've given them both an incredible gift. The love of a sister (or a brother) is not something you can easily replicate. And of course, every little girl's favorite film right now is about sisterly love, and from my daughter's Elsa dress to the way she kisses her little sister (gentle! quiet!), we get some nice reminders. As the midwife said, the sibling relationship is often the longest relationship someone can have.

This is the sixth chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second - V. Chunk

Five years ago, after the first was born, I chunked up. A lot of dads do. If you don't believe me, go to Facebook and look at pictures of your new-father friends. Then watch from the day of birth until about three months as the papa's cheeks swell, love handles pour over the side of his skinny jeans, and all his shirts start to develop little mouths between the buttons as if screaming for help. The new mom shrinks, the new baby grows, the new dad expands. I never got really fat, but it's enough chunk for me to get a little queasy-cringy every time someone breaks out the photo album. Moving to Germany and regular exercise, among other thing, has kept me reasonably fit sense, and I want to keep it that way. This time around I'm determined to avoid the chunk.

Papa-chunking is hard to avoid though, and there are two reasons. One is a new kind of tiredness; the other is a vague sense of karma. First the tiredness. During stressful seasons at work or study, I'm tired, but I need exercise. There comes a point when my brain can't take it anymore until I put my running shoes on and burn five kilometers like I'm Lola. New baby tiredness is different. It comes from staying up late with a baby intent on exercising her new lungs just to give'em a spin. When she's finally swaddled and asleep, I'm exhausted. Keep in mind, I've done very little physical activity except catch her every time she does those scary little newborn trust falls from my chest. Additionally, I've paced around and sang to her and watched terrible early-morning television that I'd have been better off not knowing about in the first placed. After she's finally quiet, swaddled, and sleeping, I'm not ready to hit the running trail, the weight machine, the basketball court, or however else we men keep our college boy figures. I'm ready to pass out on the hallway floor or ready to eat, and this is where the vague sense of karma comes in.

The vague sense of karma is the big reason for papa-chunking. After all, holding and comforting a tiny little human being for three and a quarter hours while she cries her little heart out is a GOOD. EFFEN. DEED. And because it's a good deed, I deserve seven cookies, three pieces of that good cheese we were saving for New Years, four spoonfuls of peanut butter (plus a couple of illicit swipes with the index finger), a hunk of that good peppery salami, a Magnum bar, and a bottle of beer to wash it all down. And my vague sense of karma tells me that if there is any sense of sovereign justice in the world, this three-and-a-half minute snack will have zero effect on my waste line.

So this time round, I haven't shunned the jogging trail, even though part of me wishes I could stay on our couch until my funeral. And, even though it's the Christmas season, I like to think I've held the binge-eating in check. Stay away, papa-chunk. You're not welcome here.

(At this point, the blogger takes a break to throw away the wrappers from the three chocolate Santas Clauses he took to write this post)

This is the fifth chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second - IV. She's So Friendly

Part of the purpose of this post is to "treasure these things in our hearts", which sleeplessness, stress, and an unfortunate bout of disease have made difficult this week.* The sleeplessness, at least, serves a purpose. The times when I am awake with her are little treasures in and of themselves, the first father-daughter moments where I have her all to myself. Whenever I first look into her wakeful eyes, the first word that comes to mind is "friendly." I never thought an infant could have any sort of friendly disposition, but she does. It's as if she says, "I'm content to let you be who you are, and I want to get to know that part of you better." The sentiment reveals itself not only in the way she looks up at me, but also in the way she coos and grunts when she's hungry. She cries a lot as a colicky little thing, but crying for her seems to be a last resort. She's a friendly person who would rather communicate through less intrusive means. I'll play the little baby games; I stick my tongue out, and she mimics me. I experiment with different voices to see how she reacts. I show her different patterns. And of course, I sing.

Babies aren't carry ons or blocks of wood. They're little people with little personalities, and it's the privilege of a parent to treasure these things so early.

This is the fourth chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

*This sentence was written in mid-December. Chapter 6 has the details.

Notes on the Second - III. Woman

Awe is the appropriate response a thoughtful man has to the woman he married. Awe usually requires a certain thoughtfulness. Being thoughtful means using your thoughts to poke through the stress and distractions and day-to-day muddle that makes everything too urgent for awe. When we can't do this, events come along to bring it out. My sense of awe, neglected like I neglect this blog, focused and compounded upon itself while watching my wife give birth. Most dads would agree with me here.

The cocktail worked so quickly that we had no time for drugs or anything else. The birth was going to be all natural, with the help from a midwife, a doctor, and a hot tub. It's hard for a man not to feel so unessential to the process, even as I brought her water and gave her a shoulder to lean on. We walked back and forth, we tried different positions and "labor massages," and in the end, pretty much anything we planned didn't really work, other than to say: "full steam ahead!" The midwife was a hero, making a little moan every time my wife yelled in agony, which apparently helped, and spoke words of comfort through the torturous fear between labor pains.

The screams came from every part of her body and soul. They contained fear, pain, determination, and love, somehow shameless and proud at the same time. In labor, there's a sense of irrational urgency, and yet a wise, determined patience. In all of these paradoxes, the culmination of the 9-month process of giving life, the woman in labor is more animal, more angel, and more human than a man could ever be.

During the final pushes, she grabbed my shoulder as the doctor and midwife directed traffic. "Grabbed" - no. She crushed my shoulder between her fingers. It hurt for a week, though that'll elicit no sympathy from a birthing woman.

At the end of it all, my daughter emerged from my wife. They let me cut the cord, and they sat her on my wife's broken body for her first meal. There were tears and greetings and pictures and weighings. We had a new person to get to know, but my wife was nine months ahead of me.

This is the third chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second - II. The Cocktail

We have friends who lovingly refer to one of their sons as their "margarita baby." You laugh, because you know. Your decision to get pregnant may have been lubricated by a cocktail (or three). Well, in Germany (and perhaps other back-to-nature oriented northern European countries), there's a cocktail for the end of the pregnancy. No, it's not Mommy's little Jägermeister to ease the her into a stupor so she can forget the experience. It's the labor-inducing cocktail, and it works. (In fact, don't go googling it and making it for yourself at home, which may be tempting with 9-months and nothing moving. We've heard of mothers going for the home cocktail, resulting in some unwanted, unsafe, home births.)

It works, but it's not delicious, according my wife. The back story: My wife's water broke the morning of my daughter's birth, so we packed what was still left to pack, sent our first daughter with her grandmother, and moseyed on over to the hospital, hoping the labor pains would come soon. Well, the pains were there, but they were too wimpy to take on woman. By the afternoon, the midwife, for no extra tip, poured the cocktail. My wife sipped it down over the next hour - it's mostly nut oils, which isn't exactly "great taste, less filling." But I repeat: it works. Not only does it work, but from what I understand, the labor pains it induces are less painful than those from the medical procedure we were familiar with from having our first daughter in the States. But Labor pains they were, and my wife suddenly became capable of balling up steel beams with her fingers.

This is the second chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second - I. The Waiting

Our second child was late. Ok, late is a stupid term. Every doctor, nurse, and midwife we talked to reminded us that the "due date" was really just the middle of a range, and real earliness or lateness can involve a lot of unpleasantness. She came eight days after the due date, which isn't late. It's right on time, like a wizard.

But it felt late, especially when the doctor told my wife, eight days before the due date that "THE BABY IS LOW! GET READY! IT'LL COME AT ANY MOMENT!!!" We spent the following to weeks like Olympic sprinters waiting for the gun, head down, bottoms up, cleats sharp. This stressed us, especially as we invited everyone around us to get in sprint position - my in-laws, who were to pitch in with our first child during the labor adventures, my co-students, who were ready to pitch in with my projects and take copious notes should I suddenly get called to the hospital.

From then on, every conversation began with a look of expectation. "Is the baby there?" My daughter's kindergarten, university, church, street. Texts and Facebook, Email (remember Email?). It could get tedious. "No, not yet. My wife is uncomfortable, but she and the child are healthy. She's due the 13th, but it could be up to ten days after it." Every time. Tedious, but part of me loved it and not just the part of me that craves your approval. I loved it, because it's much better than the alternative. Those around us saw my family - my unborn child, my wife, my daughter, me - as something worth caring about. That old question, "how are you doing?" honestly asked, means something.

This is the first chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second

I. The Waiting

Our second child was late. Ok, late is a stupid term. Every doctor, nurse, and midwife we talked to reminded us that the "due date" was really just the middle of a range, and real earliness or lateness can involve a lot of unpleasantness. She came eight days after the due date, which isn't late. It's right on time, like a wizard.

But it felt late, especially when the doctor told my wife, eight days before the due date that "THE BABY IS LOW! GET READY! IT'LL COME AT ANY MOMENT!!!" We spent the following to weeks like Olympic sprinters waiting for the gun, head down, bottoms up, cleats sharp. This stressed us, especially as we invited everyone around us to get in sprint position - my in-laws, who were to pitch in with our first child during the labor adventures, my co-students, who were ready to pitch in with my projects and take copious notes should I suddenly get called to the hospital.

From then on, every conversation began with a look of expectation. "Is the baby there?" My daughter's kindergarten, university, church, street. Texts and Facebook, Email (remember Email?). It could get tedious. "No, not yet. My wife is uncomfortable, but she and the child are healthy. She's due the 13th, but it could be up to ten days after it." Every time. Tedious, but part of me loved it and not just the part of me that craves your approval. I loved it, because it's much better than the alternative. Those around us saw my family - my unborn child, my wife, my daughter, me - as something worth caring about. That old question, "how are you doing?" honestly asked, means something.

II. The Cocktail

We have friends who lovingly refer to one of their sons as their "margarita baby." You laugh, because you know. Your decision to get pregnant may have been lubricated by a cocktail (or three). Well, in Germany (and perhaps other back-to-nature oriented northern European countries), there's a cocktail for the end of the pregnancy. No, it's not Mommy's little Jägermeister to ease the her into a stupor so she can forget the experience. It's the labor-inducing cocktail, and it works. (In fact, don't go googling it and making it for yourself at home, which may be tempting with 9-months and nothing moving. We've heard of mothers going for the home cocktail, resulting in some unwanted, and unsafe, home births.)

It works, but it's not delicious, according my wife. The back story: My wife's water broke the morning of my daughter's birth, so we packed what was still left to pack, sent our first daughter with her grandmother, and moseyed on over to the hospital, hoping the labor pains would come soon. Well, the pains were there, but they were too wimpy to take on woman. By the afternoon, the midwife, for no extra tip, poured the cocktail. My wife sipped it down over the next hour - it's mostly nut oils, which isn't exactly "great taste, less filling." But I repeat: it works. Not only does it work, but from what I understand, the labor pains it induces are less painful than those from the medical procedure we were familiar with from having our first daughter in the States. But Labor pains they were, and my wife suddenly became capable of balling up steel beams with her fingers.

III. Woman

Awe is the appropriate response a thoughtful man has to the woman he married. Awe usually requires a certain thoughtfulness. Being thoughtful means using your thoughts to poke through the stress and distractions and day-to-day muddle that makes everything too urgent for awe. When we can't do this,  events come along to bring it out. My sense of awe, neglected like I neglect this blog, focused and compounded upon itself while watching my wife give birth. Most dads would agree with me here.

The cocktail worked so quickly that we had no time for drugs or anything else. The birth was going to be all natural, with the help from a midwife, a doctor, and a hot tub. It's hard for a man not to feel so unessential to the process, even as I brought her water and gave her a shoulder to lean on. We walked back and forth, we tried different positions and "labor massages," and in the end, pretty much anything we planned didn't really work, other than to say: "full steam ahead!" The midwife was a hero, making a little moan every time my wife yelled in agony, which apparently helped, and spoke words of comfort through the torturous fear between labor pains.

The screams came from every part of her body and soul. They contained fear, pain, determination, and love, somehow shameless and proud at the same time. In labor, there's a sense of irrational urgency, and yet a wise, determined patience. In all of these paradoxes, the culmination of the 9-month process of giving life, the woman in labor is more animal, more angel, and more human than a man could ever be.

During the final pushes, she grabbed my shoulder as the doctor and midwife directed traffic. "Grabbed" - no. She crushed my shoulder between her fingers. It hurt for a week, though that'll elicit no sympathy from a birthing woman.

At the end of it all, my daughter emerged from my wife. They let me cut the cord, and they sat her on my wife's broken body for her first meal. There were tears and greetings and pictures and weighings. We had a new person to get to know, but my wife was nine months ahead of me.

IV. She's so Friendly

Part of the purpose of this post is to "treasure these things in our hearts", which sleeplessness, stress, and an unfortunate bout of disease have made difficult this week. The sleeplessness, at least, serves a purpose. The times when I am awake with her are little treasures in and of themselves, the first father-daughter moments where I have her all to myself. Whenever I first look into her wakeful eyes, the first word that comes to mind is "friendly." I never thought an infant could have any sort of friendly disposition, but she does. It's as if she says, "I'm content to let you be who you are, and I want to get to know that part of you better." The sentiment reveals itself in the way she looks, even in the way she coos and grunts when she's hungry. She cries a lot as a colicky little thing, but crying for her seems to be a last resort. She's a friendly person who would rather communicate through less intrusive means. I'll play the little baby games; I stick my tongue out, and she mimics me. I experiment with different voices to see how she reacts. I show her different patterns. And of course, I sing.

Babies aren't carry ons or blocks of wood. They're little people with little personalities, and it's the privilege of a parent to treasure these things so early.

V. Chunk

Five years ago, after the first was born, I chunked up. A lot of dads do. If you don't believe me, go to Facebook and look at pictures of your new-father friends. Then watch from the day of birth until about three months as the papa's cheeks swell, love handles pour over the side of his skinny jeans, and all his shirts start to develop little mouths between the buttons as if screaming for help. The new mom shrinks, the new baby grows, the new dad expands. I never got really fat, but it's enough chunk for me to get a little queasy-cringy every time someone breaks out the photo album. Moving to Germany and regular exercise, among other thing, has kept me reasonably fit sense, and I want to keep it that way. This time around I'm determined to avoid the chunk.

Papa-chunking is hard to avoid though, and there are two reasons. One is a new kind of tiredness; the other is a vague sense of karma. First the tiredness. During stressful seasons at work or study, I'm tired, but I need exercise. There comes a point when my brain can't take it anymore until I put my running shoes on and burn five kilometers like I'm Lola. New baby tiredness is different. It comes from staying up late with a baby intent on exercising her new lungs just to give'em a spin. When she's finally swaddled and asleep, I'm exhausted. Keep in mind, I've done very little physical activity except catch her every time she does those scary little newborn trust falls from my chest. Additionally, I've paced around and sang to her and watched terrible early-morning television that I'd have been better off not knowing about in the first placed. After she's finally quiet, swaddled, and sleeping, I'm not ready to hit the running trail, the weight machine, the basketball court, or however else we men keep our college boy figures. I'm ready to pass out on the hallway floor or ready to eat, and this is where the vague sense of karma comes in.

The vague sense of karma is the big reason for papa-chunking. After all, holding and comforting a tiny little human being for three and a quarter hours while she cries her little heart out is a GOOD. EFFEN. DEED. And because it's a good deed, I deserve seven cookies, three pieces of that good cheese we were saving for New Years, four spoonfuls of peanut butter (plus a couple of illicit swipes with the index finger), a hunk of that good peppery salami, a Magnum bar, and a bottle of beer to wash it all down. And my vague sense of karma tells me that if there is any sense of sovereign justice in the world, this three-and-a-half minute snack will have zero effect on my waste line.

So this time round, I haven't shunned the jogging trail, even though part of me wishes I could stay on our couch until my funeral. And, even though it's the Christmas season, I like to think I've held the binge-eating in check. Stay away, papa-chunk. You're not welcome here.

(At this point, the blogger takes a break to throw away the wrappers from the three chocolate Santas Clauses he took to write this post)

VI. The First

When the first came, our new family was an insulated little bubble of three people, one of them new. Sure, we had enormous help from family and friends - especially the heroic grandmothers and fabulous meals from our D.C. church friends. But while they were constantly coming in and out of our little bubble, our little family strengthened like a three-fold cord.

Now, the first is five years old, and because of her, if our bubble isn't porous, it doesn't exist. She's blossomed into the richness of life that five years has to offer, the delights of learning and play and discovering things like characters and stories and science. Then, there are the challenges of discipline, disease, and the normal, everyday hassle of getting her ready for kindergarten.

Her new little sister has been thrust upon all of these things, and there's a strange paradox here. On one hand, she's old enough to be aware of what's going on, to know how to behave around her (gentle! quiet!), while avoiding the jealousies of younger older siblings. On the other hand, she's too young to really adjust her own life and habits for the change. She needs help and attention every morning, she needs and wants to play with her parents, she has moods, gets sick, gets excited, and, for the first time in her life, has become a picky eater. This of course, damages the sense of "mama-and-papa-against-the-world" was there for the first week of the First's life, and the Papa's supporting role is something like....

DoSomethingDoAnythingToDistractOrEntertainHerSoThatHerLittleSisterCanFinallyLearnToBreastfeedProperlyInPeaceExceptNotAnotherEpisodeOfSeanTheSheepBecauseShe'sSomehowInABadMoodAfterWatchingSeanTheSheepEvenThoughSheLovesItAndIKnowIt'sMuchTooColdToGoOutsideSoHelpHerPutOnHerPrincessDressAndColorButPleaseDon'tMakeTooMuchNoise!!!!!

Then, sickness entered the picture. The First came home from kindergarten (that oversized petri dish) with a nasty fever and a stiff neck. It got worse, and on Sunday, we took her to the hospital. By the grace of God, our own paediatrician was on hospital duty there, and the stiff neck signalled meningitis to him. The next day, my oldest daughter and I checked into the hospital, where we would stay for the next few days. My wife and youngest daughter stayed at home, still learning to feed and drink. It was a sad, sad situation - separation, hospital food, nightmares darkening our thoughts. There was, though, a warmth strengthening my bones at the time, and I think it was the knowledge that by simply being there I was where I ought to be and what I ought to be, and this confidence is foreign to me. A father and husband, present, within fear and sickness and suffering, standing against the effects of the Fall like a palm tree in a thunderstorm.

I wasn't alone of course - friendly and competent medical staff, my in-laws were heroes, and my wife was able to visit the hospital, and when we brought home a nasty intestinal disease from the hospital, everyone suffered but the baby, protected beautifully by my wife's milk. The antibiotics worked their magic on my oldest daughter, and we still don't know if it was actually meningitis, even though several doctors worked like Dr. House throughout the week to find out. Now, we're healthy, even if rumours of other diseases here in our neighbourhood tempt us to barricade our house 'til spring, and when we actually stop to think about it (and stopping to think is challenging when you have small kids), we're deeply thankful. My mother-in-law is convinced that our prayers helped my older daughter as much as the antibiotics. One doesn't exclude the other, and we did indeed pray.

There's another thought that helps, one that my wife brought home from the midwife that led her birthing classes. Whatever new amount of stress a little baby brings to her older sister, we've given them both an incredible gift. The love of a sister (or a brother) is not something you can easily replicate. And of course, every little girl's favorite film right now is about sisterly love, and from my daughter's Elsa dress to the way she kisses her little sister (gentle! quiet!), we get some nice reminders. As the midwife said, the sibling relationship is often the longest relationship someone can have.

VII. Horrible, Horrible Thoughts

In the background of our hospital stay, you can think of parenting as a sequence of horrible thoughts. We all have horrible thoughts about the things we care about, like the way my fellow students and I are having exam-time nightmares about impossible questions and train delays. Parents' horrible thoughts are not here for a season, though; they stay background like the colors of your walls. We have (and I think I can speak of "we" here) horrible thoughts, because horrible things happen to people, and when these things happen to babies, to any children, then this new, common, transcendent, and entangling love that I've described elsewhere is ripped out of the chests of parents and communities, irreplaceable.

In my own experience, baby's complete dependence and vulnerability make the horrible thoughts so pressing, because in many cases, I'm the one responsible. What if I slip and fall down the stairs while I'm holding her? What if I nod off on the couch and she slides off my lap? What if she's not swaddled properly and she pulls the blanket over her head? What if the bedroom temperature isn't precisely 18 degrees Celsius, which we read somewhere is the least dangerous temperature for babies to sleep in? What if I touch her after eating peanut butter only to discover an acute peanut allergy? What if I left the coffee machine on because I was in a hurry not to be late for an exam and the house burns down with the three most important people in my life inside it?

Such questions circle my brain like dancing devils, and though anxiety is health-reducing bit devilment, I've surprisingly found these horrible, horrible thoughts to work towards something else entirely. A horrible thought ambushes me when I'm minding my own business, and then I cringe and I say, "Oh, God," not as a swear, but as a prayer. My child is at the mercy of everything from my own powers of concentration to diseases in nature still unrecorded, and so I plead to God for mercy. The babies under my roof have increased my prayers in frequency and intensity, the entangling love for them entangling our very beings into his sovereignty. This is not a get-out-of-trouble card, and I'm under no illusions that these things can't or won't happen to us. Nor is this an excuse for fatalism, and our prayers have the opposite effect, promoting a careful and engaging sort of love between parent and child. Rather, this is a sober kind of hope, not always comforting but always providing a an unanswerable form of joy, that neither death nor life can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

A few days ago, I was walking home, lost in thoughts about my university exams when I was almost killed. I was crossing the street, legally, when a car made a hasty and illegal turn. Had I not been awakened and jumped out of the way, I would have been hit. The car screeched to a halt a good thirty feet to late then pulled over. The driver didn't get out, but I can assume she was as shocked as I was. This experience is not uncommon - it happened to my wife back in the U.S. But it served as a reminder that however adult and in control we are, our situation is precarious.

This precariousness makes love all the more costly, and this is acted out in family and community as we do things to make each other happy, better, and alive. Drinks with friends, jokes among my co-students, an episode of Dr. Who while feeling my wife's warmth against my thigh, playing Frozen with my daughter - all of these things shine through the precariousness like the sun on a summer morning. It deepens the joy of holding my own baby daughter, ten pounds of helpless, human warmth, in my arms. Horrible thoughts are drowned out by the knowledge that this moment with the Second is an unmatchable gift.

Naming and Being Named

Call me Jon. Or Jonathan. I try to be uncomplicated about my name, and, as both Jon (or John) and Jonathan are common names, I'm happy to go with whichever name is left available in our particular social setting. If there's someone called Jo(h)n, I'll be Jonathan, which still sounds attractive, though three syllables is a mouthful for lazy, friendly banter.

As a child, I insisted on Jonathan. My mother told me I was named for the biblical Jonathan - David's best friend who willingly gave up the throne that was his birthright to make way for God's anointed - and the name means "gift from God," and my parents considered me a gift. So, it was clear, even in my little ears, that there was depth, love, and meaning to this choice. Besides, it somehow sounded more special. The monosyllable is so common in popular literature and culture, and I was blissfully unaware that my name was part of a naming trend in the 70s and 80s - the fact is, there were always several Jonathans in my classes. (Think how many GenX and Millennial writers share my name)

My family moved to Florida when I was 13, and I was ready to shed my awkward, middle school baggage, and calling myself Jon felt like a clean break. This initiated my present naming situation: to my family, at least the family I grew up with, I was and am Jonathan, to most of my friends, Jon, and at the workplace, a confusing mix of the two. This worked well from school to young single life, but marriage and other circumstances have mixed the two the two names in ways that feel strange. My wife, in her transition from friend to family, still calls me Jon, and I think this is good and right. To my daughter, I am first "Papa," and she knows that I am "Jon," but I'm not sure if she is aware of my full name. My parents and sisters still call me "Jonathan," and whenever they refer to me as Jon, usually whenever they intermix with my friends, it's almost as if they're referring to someone else. Likewise, I knew my sister's husband before their marriage, and to him I was Jon, but now he's adapted to call me "Jonathan," with the same results: it always takes me a couple seconds to realize he's talking about (or even to) me. Identity is relative. I try to be uncomplicated about my name, but I'm not.

I'm satisfied with my name, nonetheless, and the sacrificial love displayed by the biblical Jonathan is a source of aspiration, and my parents probably had this in mind. These reflections about my own name accompanied the deep sense of sadness I felt when my daughter told me she wished she had a different one.

Her name is Joy, and I admit this was a hazardous choice. It's not especially common, which is a blessing for trend-resistant parents and a curse for sensitive children who want to fit in. It's less common here in Germany, and though the word is known and pronounceable here (this was important to us, of course), it's not unchallenging either. The word is overused in flippant speech, cartoons, and advertising, and to boot, her birthday is dangerously close to Christmas. The name is a target for songs and puns, and anyone who knows me well will know that in this regard, her father is a the chief of sinners.

"Joy" was on our shortlist almost five years ago when we arrived at the hospital, but we wanted to get a good look at her before we came to a final decision. She spent the first 24 hours outside the womb nameless, but the decision had been made in my heart from the moment we made eye-contact, and I don't think I could have been convinced otherwise.

Here's why. When it comes to love, I am in a position of privilege. I grew up loving my parents, loving my sisters, loving my friends, and loving God and experience love from each of them. Since then, I've added the love for my wife and the love of her family, and I'm well aware that none of these are a given. I knew I would love my children, but I didn't think it would add much to what I already had. I was wrong. Holding my daughter in my arms added a completely new dimension to my love for which I could have never been prepared. This love multiplied the anxiety that I could lose something so precious. She could be driven away later in life; tragedy could end it sooner. New parents are aware of the horrifying thought of sudden infant death syndrome, and the idea that my child could be robbed of her breath for no apparent reason made, for me, the sound of a snoring baby the most beautiful sound under heaven. Every day, every hour, every second of her existence became a gift of great price, and thankfulness compounded upon thankfulness enriched my life in ways that never would have occurred to me otherwise.

This deep thankfulness for life and for love is called joy. It's something that marketing campaigns and Christmas ornaments can only hint at, but it's something that all of us who get to properly love another human can experience. This reflects an even greater joy, the joy of the Lord, the joy of his unadulterated love, a joy we see through the glass darkly, but which the Bible insists is our strength, dour and self-conscious as I am. It was the only word that could come to my lips on that day as I looked in her dark eyes, doctors and nurses scurrying around me to repair my wife's broken body. A day later we gave her the name Joy, and whatever silliness our culture adds to this word, it has never been inappropriate.

I'm told it's a small administrative hassle, getting your named changed. I can imagine a future so individualistic that we change our names with our fashions, and that no one need, after a few drinks, to grimace and admit that they hate their name - they can just get it removed and replaced and inform their friends via text message. My daughter, sick of puns and Christmas songs, could do this one day. I hope she doesn't. I hope that her dissatisfaction with her name is just the short-lived fancy of a four-year-old and nothing deeper. I hope that she'll understand the meaning of her name, how much joy and love she gave her parents, how it reflects her intrinsic worth, how it reminds us of the joy of the Lord, our strength. There's an old-fashioned comfort here. In these times, where the question, "How can I add value to the organization?" is so much more pressing than, "What is the chief end of man?" the idea that value can be not just achieved but also imparted by those who gave us life is a cry of blessing. In naming, we can participate in this, and in being named, we can remember.

Your Children Should Think You're Omniscient For as Long as Possible

I was taking my daughter on a walk about a year ago, when she pointed to a little boy across the street I had never seen before. She asked, "what's his name?"

"I don't know," I replied. Her eyes widened in shock and confusion. Little tears beaded in their corners.

"But... but... you know!" It was on that day that my daughter discovered an unfortunate truth: I am not omniscient. I should have casually said, "oh, his name's Frank," and walked on. Lesson learned.

Parenting and Entangling Love

Part of having a child, a wife, bills, and interesting things to look at is that I don't write as often as I would like. By way of saying, I wanted to respond from my little corner of the web to an interesting online writing kerfluffle about the challenges and joys of parenting, but I'm a little late thanks to the challenges and joys of parenting (I'm writing these words with one of those Disney sing-a-long films running in the background). Here in Germany, a couple of journalists complained that modern demands of parenting and career simply can't work, but shrug and say they might as well try to make it work anyway. Then, Ruth Graham's protest against all the negative, "honest" parent-complaining drew a lot of attention (at least in my social networking sphere), including Rachel Lu's beautiful, thoughtful response. Lu wrote one of those "I-wish-I-had-written-that" essays clarifying my jumble of thoughts and feelings about parenting-angst with a lovely description of joy and love in parenting. The whole thing's worth a slow read, and I wanted to highlight a couple points she makes towards the end:

Finally, I should address the most critical question: Is it worth it? If so, why? Certainly, there are cultural changes that could make the plunge into parenthood less daunting. It would be possible, too, for parents to feel less stressed and more affirmed. Still, child-rearing will always be miserable and magical, for more or less the same reasons. It’s a “happy pig or unhappy Socrates” sort of conundrum. Parenthood makes life harder, but also richer. It’s less pleasant but more meaningful. That’s because love fundamentally changes us as human beings. Like the dissatisfied Socrates, we can look on the unburdened (including our own former selves) with a certain amount of wistful envy, but it isn’t in our nature to want to stuff love back into its Pandora’s box.

She ends with: 

An employer could never get away with drawing up a contract like the one you implicitly have with your kids. So yes, it’s reasonable to be a little bit terrified. It’s no small thing to let another person become the main star of your life. It’s even harder when you realize that one day they’ll just walk right out the door again, leaving you twenty years older but no longer able to sleep in on a Saturday morning.

Still, if the opportunity beckons, you should do it. Because if you don’t, you’ll be the person who chose the happy pig over Socrates. You don’t want to go to your grave knowing that one of your most important life decisions was to run away from love.

These thoughts are seconded by Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. In her interview on Fresh Air, she documents the "no fun" part then gets to the joy, and like Lu, she knows what we all know, that the joy is worth it, even if it can't be numerically verified:

And, you know, the studies don't focus on (the joy) so much. I have to sort of go to philosophy and novels in order to discuss the joy. The problem with these studies is that if you're feeling good about something, you know, you rank it a five. So that moment that I was describing with my baby looking at me and cooing at me - which was, like, just like this transcendent moment in my life - would rate the same if I'm doing everything on a scale of one to five, as, like, a dinner with a friend, if I had a really great time at that dinner. In the same way that, like, you know, on Amazon, you know, a John Grisham novel and, you know, and Charles Dickens like kind of get fives, you know, but they're not necessarily the same experience, you know. 

And also, I can't remember who said this to me - I think it was George Vaillant, a psychiatrist who is kind of a poet-philosopher, too - he pointed out that, like, it's kind of like using a number to describe a taste. You know, how do you do that? So I think that social science misses a lot of the joy.

And, you know, one of the remarkable things about joy is that it is sort of predicated on this idea of being very connected to somebody. I think Christopher Hitchens described, you know, having kids as, you know, your heart running around in somebody else's body. And that feeling is so powerful, it's almost scary, because there's almost, like, an implied sense of loss about it.

It's, like, you love somebody so much, that you are almost automatically afraid of losing them, like, that this connection is so deep, that you can't think of that connection without thinking of that connection being broken. So joy, in some ways, is almost a harder feeling to tolerate than sadness, in some ways, because it's so powerful and makes us so vulnerable. But it's why it is also so profoundly special and what makes parenting, to so many of us, so huge and incomparable.

So, a hearty amen to both from this papa across the pond. Both women (with an assist from Maria Popova) reminded me of C.S. Lewis' famous reflection in The Four Loves: "To love is to be vulnerable. To love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it in tact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it up carefully with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of heaven outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the dangers and perturbations of love is hell."

Choosing lasting, difficult joy over immediate happiness is an ancient problem, and the fact that children are more of an economic burden than necessity thrusts today's (Western) family into the center of this choice. I've no special insight into this, but I'm encouraged: the fact that we're talking about it means this joy is not dead, and I wonder if paradoxically, we comfortable westerners are taking the joys of entangled love more seriously. This reminded me of something I noticed in that other great love entanglement: marriage. When I first came to Germany, I was told that Germans, consistent with the trends of most of Western Europe, were marrying later than Americans. I assumed that this meant they no longer took marriage seriously, that in a post-religious age they had deconstructed a ritual of religion and state enough to render it meaningless, or at least with much less meaning. Maybe at some point they'll muddle through the ritual and smile for the camera like distracted teenagers in a confirmation class, but more important is a fuzzy concept of love independent of the things our ancients had passed down.

It didn't take long to realize my assumption was wrong, at least among the students, young academics, and young professionals I interacted with. Sure, I'd hear people deconstruct marriage to justify premarital sex, but at the end of the day, marriage was a damn serious thing for most people, particularly for those in relationships. I found those living together didn't see their lifestyles as an alternative to marriage, but they saw marital commitment as something they couldn't lightly go into without a lot of practice and growth together. They were avoiding a complete entanglement, taking tentative steps into the rosebush, keeping the exit available, because they weren't about to make a commitment they didn't think they could keep. From this position, marriage was wonderful but overwhelming. They wanted it as much as the Bible-belt American standing before them, but with a deliberate slowness. I can imagine approaching child-rearing the same way, and it looks like more and more westerners are following in this path. The general seriousness about the topic impressed me, and it still does.

I sympathize. I had always wanted to be married, and yet the act of getting married cost me more courage than I could carry myself. Then our daughter came along, and she flooded our lives with love and joy but also with so many worldly worries that without the help of some god-fearing friends and family members, well, who knows how far we would have sunk. And still, both steps are the steps in my life where I can most clearly look at them and pronounce them good. I say this from a position of privilege - both my wife and I come from great families where martial promises were honored and children were viewed as gifts from the Lord. Not everyone grew up in such luxury, and I can understand how those without it might find the promises of love and joy of children much less believable, and all the "honest" parenting blogs could be a stumbling block for anybody. Entangling yourself in love is more and more a heroic, deeply serious step, the risks are no longer hidden behind smiles, closed doors, and rigorous cultural standards. It's serious stuff, and it's good we're all still talking about it.

Honest talking and writing doesn't hide the mess, the failures, or the heartbreak, but neither does it stay there, and I'm glad Lu and Senior reminded us how to write about the sort of things that don't fit on clever charts or Buzzfeed lists, but fit into philosophy, novels, poetry, and prose. The seriousness with which we're taking the commitments that irreversibly entangle our hearts to others mean that there's a hunger for it. And those of us who are presumptuous enough to tape our thoughts to the Internet should remember that writing about love and joy are worth the effort.

These Jets Are Lagged

"I used to be better at jet lag." I've been saying this to anyone who asks about my Christmas holiday in Florida. I've rocked back and forth between the US and Germany since university, and it's true. I could handle it. I could handle it better than most of my peers. I remember how on one summer trip to Germany, so many of my pitiful cohorts slouched like war refugees on Deutsche Bahn while I stoically willed wakefulness and sleep at their proper time upon my compliant body. Several days later, I was chipper as a springtime squirrel while others were still falling asleep before dessert.

Not anymore. I can will nothing. Instead my hands, feet, and head are tethered to a timezone six hours away, watching football, avoiding public transportation, and eating large, fatty meals just before bed. The sun, wintery and distant as it is now, has no effect on me. It sits on the horizon, I sit in my living room, and we ignore each other like bored roommates. I sleep at my body's command. This could be mid-sentence in a conversation with my mother-in-law, or while chewing a piece of toast, or while typing something up so that my head hits the keyboard like this: 8iuy65rfd

What changed? Well, two things.

First, my body is aging. Now, whenever I say this, anyone older than me points out that I ain't seen nothin' yet. And that's true. I'm not old; I'm not even middle aged. I will be some day, Lord willing, but not yet. Nonetheless, I'm no longer that cock-sure traveling college student. There are things I could do a decade ago that my aging body just won't play anymore:

Me: "I'm going to sleep in."
Aging body: "This is your 7:00 wake-up call!"
Me: "That chili-cheese dog looks delicious! I'm going to eat it."
Aging body: "Of course you are, you contemptuous glutton. And for the next few days, you're going to feel as if someone poured cement in your intestines."
Me: "I'm going to run ten kilometers!"
Aging body: "And your joints are going to HATE you."
Me: "I'll put some ice on it. It'll be fine!"
Aging body: "...in about three weeks."
Me: "Jet lag doesn't phase this traveler! I'm not going to fall asleep!
Aging body: "Zzzzzzzzz"

I hear it's only downhill from here.

But age isn't the only reason I'm suddenly a jet lag failure. After all, my dad beat jet lag well into middle age with the right combination of tablets, wine, and airline pasta (WARNING: Do not attempt without first consulting your physician - especially the airline pasta part). The other reason is, of course, a small child.

Yes, for the past four years I've been traveling with a carry-on that I can't stow in the overhead compartment. No traveling parents, no airplane sleep for you. You are there to feed, change, walk, and entertain the passenger capable of throwing herself into a temper tantrum somewhere over the Atlantic. And when you land, your schedule will not abide by actual sunshine, but by your little sunshine. And when you say, "we should go to sleep," she'll say "neither of us can sleep, so let's play princess ponies," and you will smile and neigh like playing princess ponies is what you've wanted to do every since you bought your plane tickets.

So, for the parents of young children, jet lag is not something to be willed away, but to be endured like recovery from surgery, slowly, until a week later, you notice yourself rising with the sun again.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Oh look, my blog! I found it between the couch cushions, next to a bottle cap and a couple of pennies. I had to dust off the cookie crumbs, not to mention two, no, three impermeable gummy bears, plus hair that could be human or teddy bear. I tell you, one day, you put it down, and the next day it falls through the cracks and coats itself sticky with sugar. Well, I rinsed it off in the kitchen sink, because I found something familiar and needed to write about it. This is from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It describes the protagonist's mother, mothering in the late 1800s but still familiar today: 

"In many ways, she was a remarkably careful mother, poor woman. I was in a sense her only child. Before I was born she had brought herself a new home health care book. It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more particular than Leviticus. On its authority she tried to keep us from making any use of our brains for an hour after supper, or from reading at all when our feet were cold. The idea was to prevent conflicting demands on the circulation of the blood. My grandfather told her once that if you couldn't read with cold feet there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine, but she was very serious about these things and he only irritated her. She said 'Nobody in Maine gets much of anything to eat, so it all comes out even.' When I got home she scrubbed me down and put me to bed and fed me six or seven times a day and forbade me the use of my brain after every single meal. The tedium was considerable."

If she lived today, she'd have a blog. I say this as someone deep in the careful parenting camp. And I'm sure the Internet makes her "health care book" look less like Leviticus and more like a book of nursery rhymes. I know I wield it like a weapon against any potential malady or sign of ill-health that could approach my daughter. And I'm sure a good portion of it is really healthy! Perhaps in a generation or two my daughter will laugh at this area and say "the tedium was considerable." But I hope she'll also remember herself as well-loved.

Speaking of which, you should read (or re-read) Gilead. I've just finished, and I haven't felt this way about prose since I read Breakfast and Tiffany's a couple years ago. I know Robinson is read and loved by plenty of literary connoisseurs, but for the rest of us, well, this book is a feast and there's no shame in being late for it. I won't say too much about it, because it's one of those books that's best left to speak for itself. I'll only mention a couple things. It's the letters of an aging pastor who knows he's dying to his young son. It's beautiful - more like a hike in the country than any sort of action film - with the most nourishing food for thought gently weaved into the narrative. And there's this quote: 

"For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean, considering that you're only a little fellow now and when you're a man you might find these letters of no interest. Or they might never reach you, for any number of reasons. Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed. That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth."

With this in mind, I intend to write more. 

Doch, English! Bilingual Children in Germany

A smug feeling crept through my chest as I read about the struggles expat mom has with encouraging her son to retain his English in Madrid. Ha. My little half-expat has embraced both her father and mother tongue, to the point where she was translating some of her German kindergarten (preschool over here) songs for my parents over skype. Ah, yes, glory be to the parents who have it all together.

Of course, if we were ever to have another child of a slightly other disposition, any feelings of smugness could be blown out of the water. A next child could be a stubborn monolingual, too. It could have a different personality, talents and behavior patterns, and that instruction book in my mind based on my first child is about as useful as a manual for Gateway Computers. But, I'm not there yet, my child has embraced bilingualism (so far), and I'll fantasize about being that good. I wonder, though, if Germany has built an advantage for raising bilinguals in its own growing multiculturalism.

I was warned that my daughter might reject bilingualism when she entered kindergarten. It happened to a Scottish-German neighbor couple. Their children were doing fine in English until they entered kindergarten full of children who only knew German. No one shared a second language, so they felt isolated and uncomfortable using it. The added fact that children are talented in finding ways to put each other down, and the children suppressed their knowledge of their mother tongue.

Not so for our daughter. Her kindergarten is in the "downtown" part of our little city, which is its own little melting pot. In her kindergarten, monolinguals are the minority. It's not a strange thing to speak a second language; it's the norm. The fact that she's the only English speaker isn't a big deal, but bilingualism by itself seems to count. Whenever I come to pick her up, I'm surrounded by mixed marriages and people speaking Turkish, Russian, Vietnamese, Polish, Greek, Italian, Armenian, and more. Oh yes, German too. These happy babel sounds mean that the ones who suddenly express themselves in another language aren't some horrifying school-child anomaly, like being the only kid in a tacky Christmas sweater in June. It's just something everyone does.

If economic trends continue, things will stay this way. Germany's economy is chugging a long, and it's continuing to attract the most employable young southern Europeans. Many of these technically gifted immigrants, like the Turkish guest workers and Russian-German immigrants before them, will stay, settle, and raise wonderfully bilingual families.

When I spoke to him about his own bilingual children, a French-German father I know shrugged his shoulders and said, "it's completely normal." "Completely normal." All the kids here are bilingual. This encourages my daughter to retain her father tongue, but there's a downside. I've no reason to be smug.

Ten Things To Say to Young Children That Guarantee Their Parents Will Never Ask You To Babysit Them Again

You know you've thought it. You watched the darling couple get married, settle down, blossom, and then, oh tears of happiness! the woman's belly turned into a baby bump, grew, and, before you can shake a pastel-pink rattle - pop - that plushy miniature human is resting and cooing in the arms of a glowing young Mother.

Twelve-thousand Facebook photos later (good luck analyzing those, NSA!), those two parents, all smug and smiling on the Internet, really need a break. I mean, they haven't seen a film since the first Ironman came out, and the wife always mutters "vodka cranberry" every time her bundle of joy comes running. So, they ask you, their very dear friend to babysit. Of course, they think you'd babysit! You've known them since college, were present at every significant event, you wept at their wedding (and overpaid for that tux/bridesmaids dress, mind you) and kept a social media vigil while their child was being born! I mean, of course!

You have two options. You could tell them the truth: "I don't think your kids like me, besides, I can't be confined to your house when you don't even have HBO! I mean, hello, Game of Thrones!"

Nah, I didn't think so. The best approach is the passive-aggressive approach, because it keeps relational conflict below the surface - where it belongs. So option number two is to warp the minds of their kid(s) into such a twisted little pre-kindergarten knot that those mooching parents never ask you to babysit again. You'll have to sacrifice one night of freedom, of course. But to be free for the rest of your life, tell those lil' anklebiters any combination of the following:

1. "Interesting how your dad made you eat all that salad. Dinner at my house was always a snickers bar with a side of gummy bears. Healthy, and better tasting too."
2. "Baseball is an indoor sport. Extra points if you hit Mom's blender!"
3. "Why doesn't your mom still breast feed you? I guarantee you everyone else in preschool is still breast fed."
4. "Your bed is a dangerous place. If your parents loved you, they'd let you sleep in their room."
5. "Yeah, I smoked to impress people at school. It worked, too! Don't regret it one bit." 
6. "I brought over my favorite movie! It's about a little girl like you! It's called The Exorcist!"
7. "Baths are completely unnecessary. A waste of time, if you ask me." 
8. "Wiping your bottom is completely unnecessary. A waste of time, if you ask me." 
9. "Let's call your granny and ask her why Mommy always pays more attention to her iPad than to me." 
10. "Good night! Remember, I promise you can drink a Coke for breakfast." 

Oh, and if you try any of these with my daughter, I'll release a live badger your living room. 

The Picnic (Home Sick)

We didn't want to get sick, of course, and we tried everything. But sickness is part of life and winter and public education, and, on the night my daughter's fever set a personal record, our sainted pediatrician was open late treating a relentless line of sniffling kindergartners. That was Thursday, we got the medicine Friday morning. It's Saturday afternoon as a write this, and my daughter is restlessly watching one of the "BBC Earth" films. She wanted to see the one where "the shark eats the seal," which is the first one. This might sound like bragging, as in, "I-got-my-daughter-to-watch-something-educational-nanny-nanny-boo-boo," but really, this my penance for letting her watch a DVD of Disney Princess greatest hits earlier this morning.

Speaking of morning - this morning was very short. Blessedly short. For all the suffering and worrying about a sick child, there is one delicious mercy. We slept in. All of us, including teenie one. Normally, one parent sleeps in while the other does his or her Christian duty to wake up like it's a Tuesday to feed and clothe and entertain a tiny little person. This morning, for perhaps the first time in her life, she out-slept the both of us. I woke up to nothing but sunbeams and quiet. My wife had already gotten up to fix coffee. Our church had it's women's day, where all the ladies sang and ate and encouraged. So I think she's having a good time, even if she had to get up for it. The poor woman. She had a terrible night sleep anyway. My daughter has a fever, but I wasn't spared the sniffles, which means I snored like an eight-hour freight train. My wife informed me of this first thing when I emerged from the bedroom. Maybe she didn't sleep in after all. 

So after a leisury breakfast involving peanut butter and bananas (when you find peanut butter in Europe, you buy lots of it), I helped my sick little daughter up. She ate her light breakfast, slurped her antibiotics and played and toddled around. Not needing much attention, I left her to do some Internet reading (don't worry, my chair was about five feet away from where she was laying on the couch). 

I got lost reading a lovely essay, when, I felt a little tug on my jeans pocket. She's up. "It's time for a picnic, Papa!" I look outside. Snowflakes, lots of them, but too indecisive to stick to the ground. Not picnic weather. Nonplussed, she unrolled a piece of bubble wrap from a package we opened long ago and laid it out on the living room floor. She invited me to her feast, and Î sat down. "What are we eating?" I asked. 

"I have hambooger for you, papa!" 

"mmmm... hamburger. I love hamburgers." I wanted to ask if they were made with horse meat, but I don't think she's up enough on current events to get the joke.

Hamburger finished, she announced, "Î have spaghetti for you!" I'm normally not in the mood for a bowl of spaghetti after a burger, but I didn't wan to be impolite.

"Thank you. Mmmm... that's some good spaghetti!" 

Then we each took a few minutes to pop the bubbles in our picnic blanket. 

Real lunch was served later. I let her watch the Princesses (while wearing her official Cinderella dress) while I fried up some pressed sausage and boiled some potatoes. The Germans call pressed sausage "Fleischkäse," or "meat cheese." It's because it looks and tastes like meat but has the consistency of cheese. I realize this sounds like a form of cafeteria torture, but it's actually quite good, especially if you have onions and a bit of Bavarian sweet mustard. I managed to fry it up on the 2nd try - the first time I left it in the pan too long and the alarms went off. Delicious, even after hamburger and spaghetti. 

Surviving the German Winter Part II: Play in the Snow

This is part II of a four-part series on surviving the German winter. You can read part I here. 

Once the snow comes, the kids naturally want to play in it. My daughter has seen enough Christmas specials to know that as soon as the ground is white, all the neighborhood kids burst out the front doors, armed with sleds and cherry-red mittens. They make enormous snowmen with pipes and coal for eyes (I have never seen a three year old walking around with a pipe and and two lumps of coal, though I guess that's what they all did in the 50s when the Christmas specials were filmed) and toboggan down enormous hills. These are my memories as well. What I don't remember is the battle Armageddon my mother must have went though just to get three kids dressed for the winter. I'm struggling with just one.

It takes about seven and a half hours to dress your average three year for snow. Five of those is just getting her little fingers into those friggin mittens, but the rest consists of several pairs of tights, wooly socks over thins socks, hats not truly designed for children, water-resistant snow pants with zippers to bleed your fingers and the most incomprehensible pair of snow boots in the world (they look so simple, then you try to put her feet in them). Once my daughter is wearing enough layers that I could safely roll her down a mountain with a sled (don't worry, haven't tried it, no plans to), she removes her scarf from her lips and announces that she has to go potty.

With this news in mind, I teach my daughter three choice curse words, and frantically unbutton and unzip enough for her to do her business at the proper way in the proper place. By the time everything's ready to go, of course she's already soiled herself. I can now only sigh and check which of her many layers are salvageable and which need to go directly to laundry. My daughter, then, sees her shadow in the bathroom light and declares six more weeks of potty training. Or, I could just remember to let her empty herself before we hit the sleds.

Of course, we've managed to go out in the snow a couple times this winter. It's fun - watching a little girl discover how snow crunches under her little boot is a reminder of all that is good about life. But it only takes a couple of snowfalls to crush a few of your idyllic snow scenes, and this has much to do with the nature of snow itself. You really can't have it all. Snow that is powdery and good for sledding is rubbish for snowmen, and wet, heavy snow ain't up to snuff when it comes for sledding. The snow is the great decider of your activities, even as your daughter is screaming "I WANNA BUILD A SNOWMAAANNNNNN!!!" Nope! We're going sledding, darlin'! This is after we built a snowman that looked more like a six-inch dollop of whipped cream. Just like in the commercials.

The New Saturdays Mornings

Waiting in line at the post office a few years ago brought about this reflection on Saturday mornings. I, content and well-rested after sleeping in, reading unbothered and eating my wife's apple-cinnamon pancakes stood in front of a beautiful and exhausted young mother. Married and waiting for children, I knew my idyllic Saturday mornings were numbered. Now, a father of an almost-three year old, Saturdays are no longer us time. My wife and I can no longer enjoy the executive breakfast or the lazy reading and comfort coffee and all the other Saturday pleasures afforded to young married couples. Parenting is a great job; it's the best job I've ever had, but you don't get to take a day off for a well-deserved sabbath.

My new Saturday mornings run like this. My daughter's noises wake my wife up. The noises could be singing, crying, talking, laughing, grunting, coughing or any combination thereof, but my wife wakes up. My wife sleeps like a soldier - any small noise and she is up and ready for action. I'm glad she's not the kind to keep a gun under her pillow, or else I'd get shot in the ribs every time I needed to use the toilet at night. The noises can come at any point between 7 and 8:30 AM, the later the more merciful. My wife rouses me with an elbow and a whisper of "Schatz," which in this context is German for "darling." I wake up, fumble with whatever clothes I can find and exit the bedroom stage right. I let my wife go back to sleep. Saturday morning is her turn.

I go to my daughter. She's usually happy to see me, though sometimes she protests, "Mama! NOT Papa!" "Sorry kid, you're stuck with me." is my response. I pick her up.

***

What follows is a philosophical discussion about the potty. My more progressive argument is that big girls, including all the cool kids in her future kindergarten, go pee pee on the potty. The potty is the future, and even though I'll still love her if she's wearing diapers during her drivers' test, it is good and just and right to take the porcelain splash. It's well worth pointing out, I continue, that those who use the potty are often rewarded with gummy bears. My daughter's arguments are more agrarian, a kind of curmudgeonly conservationism suspicious of change and newfangled technology. While she has successfully tried and used the potty, she doesn't think the evidence for permanent change is very compelling. The diaper has served her well for almost three years, keeping leaks at a minimum and promoting a lifestyle where nothing need be interrupted just because nature calls. Indeed, if more adults wore diapers, then economic productivity would increase as toilet breaks decrease. And isn't the toilet break just one more staple of the lazy, anti-capitalist worker? In the same way, my daughter can continue coloring, playing with her dolls or watching "Baby Praise" without that unproductive walk down the hall. In any case, the toilet is cruelly cold, especially in morning.

***

After setting a livid toddler on the toilet with a 50% chance of achieving the desired result, we move to our living/dining room. She scampers to her toys and I take a dreary walk to the kitchen. Any walk I take in the morning is dreary until I have my coffee. I make coffee. While the coffee drips, I put my daughter's oat meal in the microwave, grate an apple to put over the oatmeal, pour her milk, take out two pieces of bread, put it on a plate, spread some delicious German spreadable over it (either creamy honey or creamy meat), put a mandarin orange next to the bread. The coffee is finished. I pour my coffee, pour some more milk over her oatmeal and voela! breakfast for two is served. Restaurant quality multitasking.

After putting the appropriate plates in the appropriate places, I pick me daughter up to bring her to her seat. She then erupts in a declaration of independence. After all, she can climb into her chair by herself. I let her do so. While we eat, I pop open the laptop. Now I know some of you are judging. The laptop at the table is against all conventional parenting wisdom. Screens distract from loving attention, and technology is harmful to child development. Technology should be kept away from the child until it is able to grow its own cucumbers and spear its own fish in the river. And besides, I'm a terrible example. Let me respond. First, I still engage my daughter. I really do. Second, we always eat a computer free family lunch in traditional German fashion, as well as an evening bread. And third, who doesn't read the newspaper at breakfast? I just don't have a paper version.

Breakfast is finished. I push my daughter's stool back so she can get down by herself. Any of the following could happen: reading a children's book, listening to a children's CD, drawing on the doodle board or putting a farm-based puzzle together. Personally, I'd rather keep reading the screen, like in the old days. At the couch, or at the table or (in nice weather) out on the balcony. Often, she plays, and I get to read. But then, I feel a little hand tap my knee. Time to close the laptop or the the book. Her turn. Whichever book is on. "Curious George?" "Mickey Mouse?" "Little People?" "ABC?" "Jesus?" She usually asks regarding on her mood - usually a particular book stays her favorite for about three weeks or so, and comes back again after a few months. But I read. I reluctantly put aside my selfish pleasure of a morning built around me. Not that there's anything wrong with that, when no one else is there. But love is a less-accessible pleasure. Close the macbook, the newspaper or the book. Put the child on the lap, read the book for the thousands time. The annoyance gives way to a certain joy that's stronger in memory, but always there. I give the characters voices, she tells me what's in the pictures. Love and love. Coffee helps.