“The stars are sleeping.”

It’s becoming clear to me that most of my parenthood reflections lately are centered around language. That makes sense -- I have a language teaching background and my daughter is in the process of acquiring language.

But I never expected the changes in her language to be so dramatic so quickly.

On the drive to a gymnastics class for Eleanor, we listened to a story on Colorado Public Radio about a new study examining sleep in young children. The story itself -- telling us that children’s brains are developing really fast and that connections are consolidated during sleep -- wasn’t surprising or particularly revelatory. However, this fact (from the CU press release about the study) stuck with me:

“They also found that the strength of the connections between the left and right hemispheres increased by as much as 20 percent over a night’s sleep.”

Twenty percent! That’s crazy! But what I’ve seen in the last week at least anecdotally confirms the possibility of this kind of leap.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about more cute, cool things that Eleanor says for the last couple of weeks. I make a mental note every time there’s a new phrase or a new way of constructing sentences. Fast forward to today, and it feels impossible to keep up. It’s incredible. Just the last week has been one of the most astonishing of my life. My wife went back to work after the Winter Break, and I expected to struggle mightily with the transition. And there were struggles, to be sure. A resurgence in explosive, unexplained tantrums is just one front in the transition war.

But the fact is that being able to have real, functional conversations with my 19-month-old daughter has been perhaps the most meaningful experience of my life.

Here are a few of the phrases and sentences she’s uttered in the last week (context in parentheses):

• “Stars...sleeping.” (Gazing at the sky, under the noonday sun)
• “Eleanor eat toast...honey.” (nodding vigorously as she replies to the question, “What do you want for breakfast?”)
• “Wait turn.” (Hands clasped behind her back, waiting for the toy tunnel to clear in the library storytime play area)
• “Mommy sing choir church” (On Thursday night, while Daddy does bedtime while Mommy is at church choir rehearsal)
• “Mommy...here” (She says, all day Monday after Mommy returns to work after the weekend)
• “Papa (grandpa) ship. Mama (grandma) ship. Eleanor boat.” (Eleanor’s spoken desire to join her grandparents on their recent cruise)
• “Ottoman Game?” (Any time Daddy sits in his favorite armchair, near the ottoman Eleanor likes to leap off of into Daddy’s arms)
• “Climbing.” (In response to Mommy saying, “What did you do at gymnastics class today?”)
• “All town” (omitting “through the” which are the words she doesn’t understand in the “Wheels on the Bus” song)

The development speed is dizzying. Because she’s a really verbal kid (no surprise there), I’m getting to witness a brain getting wired in real time. What she talks about and the way she talks about it indicates in the most elegant way how her brain works and what she understands and what she remembers. She strings series of objects together because objects make sense -- she can see them and they can fall into categories or systems. In certain environments, objects exist and processes occur. If we’re at the library, there are books and toys and friends and snacks and turn-taking. If we’re eating breakfast, there are base foods and toppings and the highchair and the pink or purple bib.

If I ever return to teaching in a formal setting, I will hopefully remember this process my daughter is going through. People build on what they know. They will experiment tentatively, but only if they feel safe enough to make mistakes. They’ll keep learning and expanding their schema if they keep having successful interactions with the content.

But academic pursuits notwithstanding, I am so privileged to be a part of this little girl’s life. She is an amazing kid, and she’s almost always soaring through these experiences with a beaming smile on her face. I’ll try to remember that during the next tantrum.

For Eleanor, the stars really are sleeping. Something so beautiful, so way up in the sky, must need lots of rest so they can stay up there and shine so bright all night long.

The first tantrum

It was about pants.

My daughter loves to do everything herself, when it’s developmentally possible or not. Little did I know, as a (still) new parent, that this aspect of her temperament would directly lead to a 30-minute screaming meltdown.

A couple of weeks ago, Eleanor woke up cranky from her nap. Aside from crankiness, which makes everything more difficult, her current dislikes include vegetables and diaper changes. We struggled through getting the new diaper on -- it was such a frustrating experience that I didn’t even bother with her pants as I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. When I returned to my daughter’s room, I noticed that she was making a valiant attempt to put on her own pants.

Normally, I would applaud such initiative. But I was tired and feeling the need to get past the diaper changing trauma and on to the next activity of the day. Without thinking about it much, I lifted my daughter to her feet and pulled up her pants for her.

I chose...poorly.

This unthinking decision angered my nascently independent toddler to a level I’ve never experienced before. She exploded in rage -- my sweet, good-tempered, happy and smiley and always active daughter. She ran screaming from the room, quickly collapsing to the floor in the hallway. She kept the screaming fit going through pretty much every room in the house. She’d cry, her arms flailing until she would run into something, which would give renewed purchase to her fury. We finally ended up in the family room, where she picked up a puzzle and threw it to the ground. She dropped beside the puzzle -- still screaming -- picking up pieces and flinging them about in futility. She was reduced to writhing on the floor, amidst puzzle pieces she was too exhausted to chuck across the room anymore.

I tried several strategies to deal with this tantrum. I tried ignoring her -- I shut her inside her room and walked away, only to hear her screams reach an even stronger pitch. I picked her up and sang a song. I tried to read her a book, and then I tried making silly faces and then I tried letting her burn out the anger.

Nothing worked.

Eventually, we walked outside -- it was 40 degrees -- and we started talking about the sad tree and the happy tree. The sad tree is a crabapple in our front yard that never seems to get any bigger. It’s lost all its leaves and always looks a little pathetic. The happy tree is a glorious old linden tree in our backyard. Standing under that tree is one of my favorite things to do, in any season. The leaves turn a wondrous gold before dropping into my gutter.

I told my daughter that touching the happy tree always makes me feel better. I convinced her to follow my lead. It worked, and a smile even creeped onto her face. It wasn’t enough, mind you -- we still had to walk around for another 15 minutes outside until Mommy came home. By then, my crazy firebrand had calmed down. For them (my wife and my daughter), it was like the tantrum never happened.

I’ll never forget it.

The fallacy of hipster parenting

I have spent my fair share of time making entirely unfair and unfounded judgment calls about all sorts of people that I see around town, and that hasn’t changed too much since I’ve become a parent.

But it’s starting to make me uncomfortable.

Honestly, it’s hard not to grumble about people who appear to have such carefully crafted public images that conform to pop culture stereotypes, the same people who (we’re told) move through life with ironic detachment as their default emotional state -- people who (we’re told) don’t care about anything.

Effing hipsters.

How many times have you said that, or at least thought it? How many lumberjack-shirted, skinny-jean dudes, with their handlebar mustaches waxed to curled sharps, riding their fixed gear bicycles, have you muttered that comment about?

Heck, let’s put this in a parental context. See that woman over there in the lululemon yoga pants pushing her Duallie Bob Revolution stroller? She must be a Highland mommy who believes in attachment parenting and breastfeeds her five-year-old. She’s such a cliche, and you know she has money, and her tyrannical kids must be absolute terrors in daycare.

How about that thirty-something guy right there, overstuffed diaper bag slung over one shoulder, bucket carseat dragging in the crook of his arm, carrying a wailing eight-month-old baby with her pants on backward and cereal in her hair? This befuddled daddy must be “babysitting” today. He sure doesn’t look like he knows what he’s doing. Where’s his wife? He really looks like he needs some help.

We spend so much time placing people in categories and making snap judgments, but I have a question for you: How many of your friends are hipsters? Do you really know any hipsters? You know who I mean -- the people for whom the image they project is more important than anything else. And for that matter, how many of you actually know a mother who fits that Denver stereotype? Or a father?

Me? I don’t know any hipsters. Sure, I see them all the time, but I guess they’re someone else’s friends. When I look around town, seems like there sure are a lot of them...but none of my friends are hipsters. How could they be? I mean, my friends care about me, they like a lot of the same stuff I do, they’re generous, they help me take care of my daughter, etc.

Taking care of someone else voids your hipster cred, which probably means that no one is really a hipster, except of course the people who are, the people we don’t like, the people who aren’t like us. Those people are all hipsters.

I’ve been called a hipster, back when I was a indie-music loving teacher wearing my flannel shirt, goatee and horn-rimmed glasses. Now that I’m a parent, I’ve also born the brunt of the befuddled dad stereotype, too. Being on the receiving end of both judgments in recent years has got me thinking about why people are quick to attack hipsters or parents who they believe fit a particular stereotype.

That brings me to tonight’s subject: hipster parenting.

There’s been a lot of talk about trends in parenting, lately, from the rise of stay-at-home dads to what we stupid Americans can learn from middle class French parents to “elimination communication.”

As a parent of a kid who, let’s be honest, poops a lot, that last one seems so ridiculous that I have a really hard time not judging the parents who promote this method.

Effing hipsters.

And don’t get me started on those guys who run Kindling Quarterly. They have the gall to grow beards and live in Brooklyn and care about being good fathers and creating a space for men to talk intelligently and in-depth about modern fatherhood. They also seem to want to promote cool, expensive clothes made by their friends. This last point, along with the hipster beards, apparently invalidates the space they’re creating, according to a vocal group of haters trolling the comment sections of many an article about the magazine.

The magazine itself, and the responses to it, are chock-full of ideas to analyze, reflect on, engage with, etc. I could write a post here just comparing the comments section of a Canadian news article about the magazine to that of an American site’s feature. Both articles deal with similar themes, but the comments are fascinatingly different.

I bought the second issue of this magazine, and while it was really uneven, I am so excited for its potential. A thoughtful engagement with fatherhood as a concept, with essays written by thoughtful fathers, is an unfortunately rare find among major publications in this country.

Let me be clear about what I think: there’s no such thing as a hipster parent. There are a lot of bad parents out there, who don’t provide for their kids, neglect them, abuse them or just don’t care enough to love them deeply. But if you have even the slightest engagement in parenting your child, there's no way to be ironic and detached about that. So if you want to judge people and call them hipsters because they want to try something stupid or faddish or buy expensive stuff like their friends, you should realize that the vast majority of all parents are just doing the best they can to be parents. The job is too hard to do it filled with irony.

Unless you're just an awful person. And that doesn't make you a hipster.

Because it illustrates what parenting is really all about, and because it features Carrie Brownstein (I'm such a hipster!), I love this Portlandia skit about baby books: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw3bG8SrCM4

People try really hard to be good parents, to be the right kind of parents. They’ll do whatever it takes, even if it seems stupid to other people. Me? I made my daughter cry it out at night and then spent six months having her take her naps in my arms or in her car seat. In the end, whatever the trendy parenting thing is and whatever group you think we belong to, we all just give in and find something that works and meets the needs of our kids. And that’s what counts.

On Fatherhood: Turning the Tide

Lately, I’ve been delving into fatherhood as an intellectual concept. Maybe it’s because my daughter just had her first birthday, maybe it’s because of the incident I described in my last post, or maybe it’s because it’s summer, and I’m used to thinking about this particular time of year, after the school year is over, as a time of reflection.

As we’ve passed the year mark, I’ve realized that I have no intention, at least for another year, to re-enter the traditional workforce. Though I still struggle with anxiety and insomnia at times, I am happier, more focused and more relaxed than I have been in a long time. Being at home with my daughter is fun and incredibly challenging, and I have been able to find the spaces in the schedule that allow me some necessary alone time. I plan to continue writing, for which I hope to occasionally get paid, but other than that, I’m not looking for a job. Doing what I’m doing feels right for me and my family.

With that realization comes a renewed focus on the apparent untraditional nature of what I do. I am a stay-at-home dad. My wife is the breadwinner for our household, making each of us part of growing minorities, according to Census data and a recent Pew study.

I’ve never been considered a “manly” man and I’ve never felt like that’s an image that I need to live up to. I’m quite comfortable with my role. I’m happy being who I am and doing what I do. I don’t feel like I need to be more of a man, but I find myself bristling when I get the impression that people think I can’t do what I do because I’m a man. If a man or woman thinks I'm weak because I stay home, it doesn’t really bother me. But I do care if people think I can’t do my job well because I am a man.

I’ve written before about how I sometimes get irritated at the assumptions people make when I am in public with my daughter. Now that I am committing to this role for at least another year, I’m feeling the need to be even more vocal, and essentially political, about pushing against the stereotypes.

My best friend sent me a link to a write-up in the New York Times about Kindling Quarterly, a new magazine about fatherhood that started in January. I read the article, bought issue #2, and I read the magazine cover to cover (more on this, and the fallacy of hipster parenting, in another post). I’ve since been sucked into the rabbit hole of online articles about modern fatherhood, feminism and what it means for me to be inhabit the role that I do.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read so many articles about what it means to be a “dad” that my head is swimming. I’ve also been fascinated by how gendered they are. Though nearly all of the articles have been very thoughtful, they embody their authors’ assumptions about masculinity and fatherhood, whether they’re feminists from Brooklyn or guys who don’t know how to fold laundry writing for the Esquire.

Here’s my takeaway -- the conversation is changing, and for the better. There are more men (and women) talking about how more men are becoming more involved parents and that sharing parenting roles isn’t some kind of emasculation for men. The notion of dad as an occasional befuddled caregiver filling in for mom is being challenged at the same time that women like Sheryl Sandberg are creating the space for successful, assertive professional moms who have caring partners who share parenting duties.

The most visible evidence that the conversation is changing, of course, comes from commercials. Stewing about insensitive, sexist comments I read at the bottom of many an article about fatherhood and feeling the frustration of a hard day with my daughter, I was watching TV during her nap. I was amazed by the following commercial:

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/tide-wows-commercial-treats-dad-normal-human-147970

It’s sad that this isn’t the norm, but it really does mean the conversation is changing; this is a competent dad, who clearly spends a lot of quality time with his daughter. This is such an unassuming ad that you might miss just how important it is. And if you don’t think ads are an indicator of where we are as a nation, or that they have no power to drive conversation about social norms, watch this and read news articles about the ensuing controversy.

The conversation needs to continue. That’s why I will be taking on a new role in addition to this blog as a curator of articles about fatherhood. You’ll see more posts from me on Facebook and Twitter. I hope to amplify the current conversation and add my own voice where I see the need and the space for doing so.

So much of what I do now feels like I’m doing it for my daughter. I want her to know that what her mom does is normal and strong and amazing, and I want her to know that a man can be sensitive and caring and a feminist who’s engaged in his family. I don’t know how long I’ll be a stay-at-home dad, but I do know that me being one is important for my family.

Cutting corners

About three weeks ago, I completed my first half-marathon. I remember the moment I signed up for the Colfax race. It was in October, and I had been suffering from crippling insomnia for a couple of weeks. I was sitting in a bar on a Monday night (my night off from stay-at-home parenting), and I decided that I needed a goal to get back into exercising regularly. It worked, and though I still struggle with the anxiety and insomnia (on occasion), working toward that goal had a huge impact on me getting my life under control.

I loved running that race, and it went even better than I expected -- I finished in less than two hours, a result that I’m pretty proud of. The accomplishment has even led me to consider running a full marathon -- I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it. While I am proud of the work I put into training for the half, I still feel like I cut some corners. In terms of diet and exercise, I feel like I did the minimum I could do to still be successful with my goal. If I train for a full marathon, I’m thinking I won’t be able to cut so many corners -- there’s too much work involved.

Becoming a father has led me to question my predilection for cutting corners, because I’ve realized that it’s really hard to do that as a parent. You are responsible for the health, safety and happiness of another human being. If you really accept the weight of that responsibility, then you tend to go overboard. You feel both more anxious and more happy. You keep the house cleaner. You try to eat better. You drink less alcohol. You get less vocal with your road rage. You reflect on everything that has made you who you are up until that moment that you held your baby for the first time.

Well, at least you try. And sometimes, because of the stress of parenting and, really, the stress of life, you become the worst version of yourself.

I was in Target with my wife and daughter last week. We were all exhausted. None of us had been sleeping well, Eleanor was cutting her first two teeth, and I hate shopping in grocery stores. We had finished with our list, and I was pushing the cart while Katie carried Eleanor. Some dude was walking into the store as I was heading to the cash register. He was staring at his phone, walking slow, so I decided to push my cart quickly in front of him and get through the line and out of the store.

This inconsiderate man decided to pause his phone staring to say to me, “Excuse you,” as if we were in elementary school. I threw an expletive at him over my shoulder as I kept moving, because his passive aggressive comment made me so angry that I responded instead of just walking away. He decided to follow my family to the register and to confront me. I’m not sure what he had in mind, or what he expected to accomplish, but my wife disarmed him with some sort of diplomatic comment and he walked away.

Katie was terrified, and I felt horrible. I wasn’t acting like a Christian with my behavior, and my actions could have put my family in danger.

When you are a parent, and -- I’ll say it -- when you are a father, these stupid alpha male mistakes have horrific potential consequences. My temper endangered my family. That’s an awful mistake to make, and it left me with an indescribable, sobering realization about just how important my actions are now that I am a father. I’ll never forget the confused, quiet look on Eleanor’s face as she tried to process the interaction her father had with some stranger. It still haunts me several days later.

Being a father has led me to try to be the best version of myself, but the process isn’t complete -- it never will be. In another post, I’ll revisit how parenthood led me back to the church and my renewed quest to understand Christianity and to be a good Christian. In the meantime, I’d like to explain how this journey reminds me of John Wesley’s concept of Christian Perfection. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on this. Christian perfection, which is really about the process of becoming a better Christian -- not a perfect one -- is a lot like being a parent. It’s about striving to make the purity of your intention match your actions. You’re constantly trying to get better at it, but you’re a fallible human so you make a lot of mistakes on the way.

I am really fortunate that my mistakes so far haven’t done permanent damage. And here’s hoping that I learn from my mistakes and I strive toward being a perfect parent, even though I’ll never get there. I can’t cut corners on my path to becoming the best father I can be for my daughter.