When we were pregnant I went along, month by month, in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and then, after The Pumpkin was born, I did the same thing with its baby’s-first-year sequel.  To be honest, at this point, I don’t remember much of what I read, but I do remember feeling reassured by the way information was given according to chronological development.  Brott follows the same organizational scheme here, breaking down a chapter a year for pre-school thru the primary grades.  I thought the chapter subheadings carried throughout were quite helpful: “What’s Going On with Your Child” does development (physical, social, intellectual, you name it); “What’s Going On With You” talks about the challenges and opportunities that face a guy trying to be an “involved” dad at that age; “You and Your Child” covers the impact father involvement has at that age and delves into ways to be involved in your child’s education and things to do and watch for at home in other developmental arenas; and “You and Your Partner” touches on relationship stuff at this point in your family’s development.

 

Underscoring everything is this idea of involvement.  When I first saw the subheading “Why Be Involved with Your _____-Year-old?” I was like, “Duh!  Who has to be told why you should be involved with your kid?”  But thinking about it, removing myself personally from the equation, I have to acknowledge that that’s still a question in our society and culture.  Brott tries to support the implied “Duh! Yes!” answer to the question with research.  The effect can be a little didactic, though I get what he’s trying to do and why.  I mean, he’s not producing a scholarly study here, so there’s no footnotes, but sometimes it feels like the results of one study or another are trotted out to say, hey, see, somebody studied this and proved why you should be an involved dad, so do it.  And I know that academic research studies in the social sciences are never that cut-and-dried—there’s always the issue of context, and who the sample was, and what got excluded, and what competing studies say.  And so while I understand why research is used in this way, I think it’s a little tricky.

 

And I wonder if books geared toward moms rely on this approach as much.  I wonder if it’s seen as a “guy” thing, that you back up an emotional, personal endeavor like fatherhood with data, with facts, with research.  In the chapter on four-year-olds, Brott illustrates what he’s saying about dealing with and enabling your child’s growing independence with an extended excerpt from a first-person piece giving an anecdote about him and his oldest daughter.  I thought that this personal illustration was so much more effective than any bulletted list of data points, and I wished he’d used this approach more throughout.  But then again maybe it would’ve been a different kind of book.

 

Because what this is is a guidebook.  It’s chock-full of specific ideas for involvement in everything from education to physical activities to reading to video games and beyond.  He talks about how household issues can affect childrearing and vice versa, and brings in issues such as gender roles (for child and parent), step-parenting, single parenting, raising developmentally disabled children...  It’s a lot to pack into one book, or even a series of books, and I appreciate the effort.  And as a former teacher who struggled with the issue of parent involvement, I love the unrelenting emphasis on getting involved with your child’s education, at home and in school, in any way possible.  That message can’t be hammered home enough.

 

But even in Brott’s inclusiveness, a couple things stuck out for me, and maybe that’s just because I’m me.  First, let me say that I truly appreciate his child-gender-identification method of alternating “he” and “she” every other chapter except when the subject is gender specific.  That’s a conscious choice made in the name of gender equity, and I appreciate it.  But, me being me, I was looking to see how other issues of difference would be dealt with.  Racial issues get short shrift, with a couple mentions of when kids start to recognized physical differences associated with “race,” specifically tied to transracial adoption.  That sort of made me feel that, as a father of color, I wasn’t quite the intended audience.  Another thing was how “partners” were addressed.  Nowhere did I get the sense that this book was for dads whose partners were other dads.  Now, I know that one book can’t be all things to all people, but I can hope, can’t I?

 

 

That’s right, post-it notes.

 

Though I have the savant-like ability to remember random, unimportant bits of pop-culture trivia, I don’t always have the best recall about other stuff, and I am also not, shall we say, the neatest or most organized person around.  [I can hear my friends, especially my dear wife, laughing until they cough right now.]  Put those two things together, and what have you got?

 

Post-its.  Lots of them.  Everywhere.  I jot stuff down that I want to remember, and if I’m lucky, I find the post-it in question in a timely manner before it gets thrown away or lost forever under a pile of other crap.  Specifically, in this case, I like to write down funny things The Pumpkin says to save them for a blogpost, or to tell her mother, or both.

 

Yeah, well, things don’t always work out as planned.  So I started to gather up the existing post-its I could find around the house—in the kitchen (in random drawers I put them in for safe-keeping), in baskets on shelves, on the family room bookcase, and, of course, in the office.  Our desk, or rather, the way I keep our desk, makes my poor partner in crime want to cry.  I’m sorry, babe.  Really.

 

But if I wasn’t such a frakkin’ mess, literally, would I be able to write that I just found two post-its, stuck together end-to-end, dated one-year-plus-one-month-ago, of tidbits from The Pumpkin’s language development at almost-age-two?  [No, I am not kidding, and sad to say that’s probably not the oldest thing on this desk.]  Now, of course, the thing with my little note habit is that I don’t always know what the hell I’m talking about.  I may not remember the context, or I may not even be able to read my own handwriting.  But, on 9/7/06, this is what I wrote on two post-its:

 

•“Daddy no email” to ABC Song.  [Okay, simple, she was tired enough of me getting on the computer that she was telling me to stop doing it to the tune of her favorite song.  Heh.]

 

•contraction’s [sic - wow, that’s bad, I usually don’t do stuff like that, even on a post-it]:  where’s daddy; there’s daddy; from “there is” [with notation for missing “it”]; it’s empty [I have no idea if I’m saying that she starting using “is” contractions” at this point or what, probably]

 

•[under a line of separation] “Oh shit” = who/what is it/that; “what it is” [Heh, guess I found her pronunciations and grammar inversions amusing, poor kid]

 

 

Oh yeah, sometimes, I guess for context or record keeping, I put a date on these things.  Sometimes, not so much.  And the other thing I was reminded of, in collecting all the post-its I could find, was that this post-it thing must be genetic, but I found as many, if not more, post-its covered in tiny little pen or pencil doodles by my little budding artist.  Give her a post-it pad (or let her find one) and minutes later, you’ve got individual notes everywhere, blank and drawn on, on the floor, on the futon, on the doors, on the chairs, on the dog (only once, I think), written on the front and the sticky side, pads now divided into halves and thirds, glue dried out from exposure.  I like to ask her what her little scribbles are supposed to be.  Sometimes she ponders it, like she hadn’t considered that it was supposed to be anything when she did it, and then she’ll go, “Uhhhh, a straight line.”  Yeah baby, that’s not a straight line, but whatever.  Heh.  Sometimes I’ll even date them.  

 

So, without further ado, here are all the post-its I found last night, first her captioned artworks (which all look the same to me), then my “dialogue notes”:

 

The Pumpkin’s scribbles:

•”a straight line”

•”a straight line with a man”

•”a happy face”

•”a drum maker with a man”

•”alligator”

•”alligator” [again]

•”Waldo” [our dog] 8/3/07

•”it’s a different pig” 8/3/07

•”a different paper” 8/4/07

•”it’s a white cow” 8/4/07

 

The Pumpkin’s quotes, transcribed by daddy:

•”I was sleeping and then I was not sleeping.”

•”And we have dirt too.”

•”Good job staying still [illegible] Waldo!  I so happy.”  sings

•Her: “That was me singing the song ‘the people go in the bus.’”

  Me: “Can you sing it again?”

  Her: “I did it already.  You like that song?”

•Waiting for her “Happy Healthy Monsters” dvd to load so I can cook dinner:  “So what you do to get Cookie Monster game?”  When menu is up: “Here it goes!  Here it goes Daddy!  That’s it!”

•”Oh that’s great, you did a good job trying Daddy.  Here’s your chip and your french fry.”  (helping close bag)  [I can only assume this means I was zipping up the backpack she keeps her toy food in, and she decided I deserved a reward—of praise and some pretend food.  Heh.]

 

That’s all I can find for now  (didn’t look under every pile and in every crevice, however).  I’m sure I’ll accumulate another stockpile soon.

 

 

Ummm, say what? Now, before I go too much further, let me say this. This is not about wanting to be marketed to, or to be offered swag or recognition. I mean, sure, free stuff can be nice, and knowing that folks read you is ego-boosting, but you all know I write (unfortunately) so infrequently that I’m not about to put a reviews blog on my to-do list too, and I am so technologically backwards that I couldn’t tell you any site stats to save my life. And yes, some more diverse and non-stereotypical representations of p.o.c. in media, whether fictional, non-fictional or marketing, would be nice, but that’s a “duh” proposition, and a blog topic in and of itself (as are the concomitant topics of teaching critical media literacy to our kids and combating the ill effects of rampant commercialism and capitalism on our families and communities. (Say that five times fast.) [Have I told you how much I love the Home Depot ad where the AsAm mom bribes her daughter to trick the clueless AsAm dad into wanting new a new kitchen? Or the Baskin Robbins (I think) commercial with the AsAm grandpa (or older dad? could be!) who changes the kid’s F grade to an A because the offscreen mom had promised some ice cream treat for an A, and then he busts past the kid to get to the car first? Heh. But seeing as how I can’t even remember for sure who was selling what in that one, I guess it didn’t really work on me. Oh well.]

 

 

Certainly, I am grateful to the dozens of people I spoke to after the session was over. There was a full 20 minutes of chatting with people who agreed with my comment and told me to press on and to keep fighting for women of color. I needed something else instead. I needed any of them to take the microphone and say, “Excuse me. Isn’t anyone going to answer Kelly’s question?”

 

Where were you, Mommybloggers? I needed you.

 

The concept of finding community through blogging, especially parentblogging, is an interesting and important one to me, because I started reading blogs and writing blogs because, like so many, I was looking for online community to combat offline isolation. I was a multiracial, Asian American, politically liberal, stay-at-home-dad living in a conservative, homogenous, segregated, traditional community where all those things made me “other.” Of course, I was used to being “other,” I’d practically made a career of it. But in looking for information about being a SAHD, or even looking for a recommendation for a non-ugly diaper bag, I stumbled onto the parentblogosphere. A handful of dadblogs served as my gateway to more blogs, as every new blog and blogroll and comment link introduced me to a world of SAHDs and SAHMs and WAHDs and WAHMs and work-outside-the-home parents of all types and stripes.

 

And then I started to notice something, something not surprising for the guy who used to start every class in college by tallying apparent race and gender demographics in his notebook margins to get a preemptive handle on potential participation/representation issues: I started gravitating to bloggers who turned out to be parents of color, or parents (through adoption or intermarriage) of kids of color, or multiracial parents, or Asian American parents, and not only that, I started looking for them. It wasn’t that race, culture or identity were necessarily major themes or even talked about at all on all of these blogs, but when it was there, I noticed.

 

With those that did explicitly talk about the intersection of race, culture, family and parenting, the connection was even deeper. Why? Well, I guess that’s part of what we’re talking about here, or talking around—the invisible line between those who understand that, and those who even have to ask the question, and the wish that, at least in these virtual communities we share with others due to the ties of parenthood, we could get rid of that line altogether, or at least assume that those on the other side of it realize it’s there and are doing their part to erase it.

 

 

 

That brings up another question as well: why aren’t the Top Bloggers people of color? Where is the Black/Hispanic/Asian/Indian Dooce? Is there a mommyblogger (I think I will just pick on stick with that one genre for the moment to make a point) of color who is considered an “expert”? The reason I ask this has to do with a question someone posed to me in a private email (which, as you’ll realize, needs to be out in the open here so I’m repeating it).

 

Are you a mommyblogger?

 

Well, that was rather pointed. I mean, it reads “Mocha MOMMA” on my address bar and my banner. To be fair I have children. They aren’t the focus of everything I write about so does that make me less of a mom?

 

No. Not at all.

 

 

 

 

The second reason for my prevailing sense of exclusion is by far a more important one to me…. And that is the fact that I am a minority; and that, more than anything, perpetuates this feeling - even in places where I have been included.

 

If you doubt it (or, do you even think about it?), let me confirm it for you: the mommy blogging community is white. And I am not. At least, not as a general cross-section of Americans define "white". I am white in race but Hispanic in culture. And that makes me not white - at least to anyone who is not like me (I use the term "white" and "regular Americans" to mean white Anglos and basically, what has always been considered the majority in this country)….

 

[…]

 

And while blogging has opened my world in so many ways, it has also made me feel quite alienated at times. It has underscored just how different I am. And it's frustrating. I mean, I read some things that are completely foreign to me. Like, I can't wrap my head around it. And then I check the comments out, and everyone's agreeing, and I'm just floored….

 

Obviously, this is not intentional exclusion. But it is a kind of exclusion nonetheless. It is my feeling that the MB world-at-large is predominantly made up of white women. Few are the African-American women, the Hispanic ones, the Asian ones, etc. Of course, this ties to questions of privilege; and the assumption is that white, in many ways, equals privilege. But there are plenty of African-American, Hispanic and Asian families that are educated, wealthy and just as privileged as white ones (to name the top minority groups in the U.S., but certainly this is can be true of all minority groups). I have made an effort to find blogs (specifically, MBs) by minorities. And they're out there, but not as many as I wish there were, and certainly not in numbers that would drive the point home that we're here and living and loving and have just as much to offer as anyone else. This dearth of minority-voice blogs is another topic unto itself, but for the purposes of inclusion or exclusion, I have to ask, where are the minorities as far as commenting in MBs? I mean, yeah, you don't comment on a blog by first announcing your ethnicity, but there is a void of comments and conversation from women (and mothers) from the perspective of a minority voice.

 

Is this just me? Do any minorities who read MBs ever feel like, "WTF? I so can't relate"? Does anyone else feel sometimes that the mommy blog world is a microcosm of the United States, where white voices lead and prevail and there seems little room for minorities? And where these white voices seemingly have little to no experiences beyond their white world?

 

[…]

 

The exclusion of the mom blog world of minorities is simply one based on ignorance. You cannot address, or include, that which you do not know. It is true of me in the reverse. But as the minority here, I can't help but see it as a disadvantage….

 

 

This might sound strange to those of you who have this image of me as some super-progressive-duty-sharing-gender-role-stereotype-fighting-former-stay-at-home-dad, but until the other night, I don’t think I’d ever really put The Pumpkin to bed totally by myself.  [La dra. and I are rarely apart in the evening.  Unlike some couples who do their “guy” things and “girl” things out, separately, we just never have.]  In the beginning, of course, it stemmed from la dra. having to nurse her to sleep, which, obviously, I couldn’t do.  But eventually, as the amount of time she had been back at work became considerably longer than the amount of time she’d been able to take off, I guess I sort of thought of the whole bedtime ritual that evolved—bathtime, pajamas, storytime, sleep—as mommy-and-baby-bonding time, as much deserved “alone” time after a long day of watching after the health of other people, and other people’s children.  I don’t know if I ever exactly voiced that to her, especially not after one of those (increasingly frequent) days when The Pumpkin would fight taking a bath, screaming and flailing, or when she’d only fall asleep after 23 storybooks and two whole repetitions of her 40-minute bedtime CD.  

 

But even nine months after we became a two-working-parent family, that’s still pretty much how nighttimes go.  That’s not to say, however, that I’m not involved in the ritual.  Today’s version includes me popping in and out of the bathroom to watch, help, or entertain as need be (not a lot of room between the bathtub and the cabinetry, and it gets hot in there!), reading the first book of the night (“Goodnight Moon”) after pajamas are on, and taking her towel back to the bathroom.  It’s getting hard to remember all the variations we’ve gone through, or when we used to do them, or how long they lasted: helping bathe our tiny babygirl in the plastic tub next to the sink; being in charge of toweling off, diapering, and pajama-putting-on (toddlergirl hasn’t let me do any of those things in a long time); reading “Charlie Parker Played Be Bop” or other books; listening at the door to see if the CD had gone past the fourth song, meaning it was my turn to go in and try to put her to sleep via rocking, shushing, and otherwise moving around the room in the dark without stopping....

 

At any rate, things have evolved to the point where, today, mommy’s in charge of the bath and daddy says good-night after reading one book.  Usually, if we’re lucky, la dra. emerges after a couple books and four songs (we’re not always that lucky, but sometimes she comes out to tell me she fell asleep during the first book, so sometimes it feels like more of a crapshoot than it actually is).  But that brings us to the other night.  La dra. had the day off, so she and The Pumpkin hung out with friends for part of the day—after our darling toddler, who usually gets up around 7, didn’t wake up till 9.  We think she’s growing.  Heh.  But anyway, after that start, she decided she wasn’t going to nap either.  I got home from work, assuming we’d get ready to go have dinner at some friends (where la dra. was supposed to get a free microdermabrasion treatment—which turned out, of course, to really be a Mary Kay sales pitch).  But toddlergirl wasn’t having it.  The mere mention of it being time to get ready to go to her BFF’s house for dinner set off a giant crying, kicking, “no!”-screaming tantrum.  So that was that, I thought.  I mean, after all, she didn’t nap, she was tired, we’d put her to bed early after some dinner, right?  

 

Well, half-an-hour later, BFF’s mommy calls to see if la dra. could just come hang out by herself.  The Pumpkin had been fine in the interim, so I asked her, again, if she wanted to go to BFF’s house.  This time, she said yes, happily, and ran to find her shoes.  Okaaay...  So we loaded in to the car, with her singing along to her kiddie-songs CD in the back, eventually growing quiet.  And, of course, about 5 minutes away from our destination, I crane my neck to peek back there and—she’s asleep.  Sigh.  Okay.  So we get to their house, I keep the motor running, and she doesn’t wake up.  I drop off la dra. for some ladies-only time, and head home.  20 minutes later, I pull into our driveway—still asleep.  I turn the car off, pick her up, and take her into the house and into her room—still asleep.  I turn on her music and take off her pants—so far so good.  I rock her around the room a little, enjoying the feel of her in my arms, which I don’t get to experience much anymore [she doesn’t need to be rocked to sleep for naps much anymore].

 

And then it happens.  She opens her eyes, starts screaming for mama, flailing and kicking hard.  It’s over.  The only way I can get her to calm down is to say we’ll go back in the car—tricking her, I guess, in to thinking we’ll go back to BFF’s house.  But instead, I drive in circles around our neighborhood for half an hour, and though she’s calm and sucking on a binky, she’s wide awake.  Shit.  I finally take her home, get inside, and try to take her back to her darkened room.  Commence the crying and flailing.  Okay, okay, no sleep yet, no sleep yet.  I go heat up some dinner for both of us.  She’s fine, not crying for mama or anything.  She climbs up onto a chair next to me, talking to me, watching me eat, cramming noodles into her mouth.  I tell her that as soon as she’s done eating, we’re going to take a nice bath (the previous night had been one of those “hurry, wipe down the screaming child” nights), and then we’ll read some books and go to sleep.  Okay, she says.  I ask her if she’s done eating.  I’m still eating, she says.  I say again, eat your noodles, then we’ll take a nice bath.  And before I can finish, she looks at me and says, “Then I try again to sleep.  I can do it.”

 

My heart just melts, and my fears dissipate.  Yes you can, baby, yes you can.  Bathtime goes amazingly well, no kicking, no crying, no fighting, just soap and water and toys and fun, and she even lets me wash her hair and cocks her head back like I tell her so I don’t get water in her eyes.  I tell her well in advance when we’re going to get out of the tub, and when it’s time, she doesn’t fight that either.  I get her in her p.j.s, dry and comb her hair while she’s in my lap, and I read three books, “Goodnight Moon” and her “Philippines books” which mama always reads (she pronounces it “Fil-peens”).  I turn off the light, turn on her music, put her in her crib and tell her I’m going to lay down on the floor and put my hand through the slats for her to hold.  Five songs later, I turn on the nightlight to check, and she’s asleep.  Five minutes later, mama comes come from a nice night with her friends, skin all soft and microdermabraded.

 

What could’ve been a disaster—what I expected to be a disaster—wasn’t.  I put my babygirl to sleep, by myself.  And I know that, no matter how many screaming, flailing, fighting-bathtime, crying-for-mama/”No, I don’t want you!” nights we have in store for us in the future, I can do it again.

 

But anyway, the other day, while I was at home with The Pumpkin, lying on the floor of her room clutching my stomach while she did her own thing, something obvious occurred to me.  That “in sickness and in health” thing from traditional Western wedding vows, that doesn’t just apply to the partners in a marriage.  That’s a given, assumed, unspoken, doesn’t-even-need-to-be-said contract between parent and child, too.  Like I said, obvious, right?  But here’s what really hit me.  It’s not one way.  Of course parents pledge to take care of and love their children in sickness and in health, that’s part of the definition of “parent,” right?  But through the love we give and the example we set, the family and home environment we try to shape, our kids learn what it means to take care of others, to love and protect right back at us.

 

We got home from meeting la dra. for lunch (it was Saturday, she was working), and I was starting to feel off.  I asked The Pumpkin if she was tired and wanted to take a nap, and we went to her room.  A couple minutes in the crib and it was obvious it wasn’t time yet.  I, however, needed to lie down, so I grabbed a few blankets as a pillow and plopped on the floor.  Seeing me, The Pumpkin said she wanted to lie down on the blankets with me (the previous day, staying home with her sick, she’d gone down for her nap on the floor with me).  But once out of the crib, she was more interested in playing than sleeping, even though her nap music was already on and the shutters were closed.  She asked me to get her bear from the crib, but I said, “Baby, I wish I could get your bear but my tummy doesn’t feel good so I don’t think I can get up, okay?”  And she said okay, and for about the next hour, she went about her business with me sprawled out on the floor.  I was dozing in and out, trying to stay awake, but what I do remember is this:  The Pumpkin climbing up to open a couple of the shutters for some light; going in and out of the room, each time putting her binky on the chair and saying “Daddy, I be right back, okay?” and closing the door, returning with a clutch of books from the living room, which she’d deposit on the chair in exchange for her binky; and finally, climbing up again and closing the blinds she’d opened, popping her binky back in her mouth and hugging the stuffed Lambchop doll she’s taken to calling her “baby,” snuggling up to me on the floor and falling asleep in seconds.

 

 

In sickness and in health, heh.  Obvious, yes, that it goes both ways, but amazing to watch happen, nonetheless.

 

[Don’t forget to click thru to the full post to see the video with this post!]