Posts

Showing posts from 2019

Nanny State Or: How I Learned To Stop Thinking And Trust My Wife

We hired our first nanny (a term that makes me deeply uncomfortable) when our daughter was 12 weeks old. There is a special place in heaven reserved that lovely woman.   Beautiful, bright-eyed, freckle-faced, and Salvadoran, she was preternaturally tender and loving. She had a deep wellspring of patience for our colicky nightmare of an infant who alternated almost exclusively between crying and screaming, with only occasional breaks for chest-to-chest naps in the Baby Bjorn. She rode the bus to our house four mornings a week, every week for nearly nine months. She was our daughter’s second mother, fourth grandmother, third aunt, and closest companion. We trusted her with keys to our home, access to petty cash, the code to our garage door, not to mention the daily watering and feeding of our most precious possession. She called Emma her “muñeca,” her doll. And 13 years later, I can almost remember her name. When she gave notice, my wife and I were devastated. You don’t r

Bjorn Again

I am about as progressive a parent and partner as you’re likely to meet. I believe that when it comes to gender roles, “traditional” is just code for “repressive and patriarcal”. I cook (well). I clean (poorly). I shop. I mend. I darn. I can take a child’s temperature without a thermometer. I also drill. I hammer. I change flat tires. I hang things on walls. I can assemble Ikea furniture without directions. I know that gender is not binary. So it is with full awareness my modern, limousine liberal, quinoa-eating ethos that I say that no man should ever wear a Baby Bjorn. A Baby Bjorn is a deeply emasculating device. It is a full-frontal vasectomy. A canvas chest vagina. Which makes it all the more remarkable that I gladly wore one almost daily for nearly two years. Such was the nature of my daughter’s neediness. From her earliest days, she needed to be held, begged to be bounced, demanded to be in physical contact, pleaded to be on the move. This is what we told