You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  Not that I haven’t tried some sort of visual aid to remind my family. I can’t begin to quantify the amount of time and money I’ve spent on crafting reward charts, posting schedules, not to mention placing in-and out-boxes around our house to collect the reams of homework and school announcements that threaten to turn our home into utter chaos. I’ve tried everything from magnetic boards to my own homemade calendars to map out lists of chores. Not a single one of my programs has ever been followed. Within one day of being posted, a chart will be covered with Jeff’s doodles (satirical caricatures of me); by the end of two days, you can barely read the thing because he’s added silly nonsense words beside entries for tasks that must be completed. A column that previously read “Make bed” might now read, “Professor Q. Quakerman declares, we won the game: 44 to 44!” I’m not making this up. I haven’t a clue what it means, but I do know that by the third day Jeff pays it no more attention than if it were written in Cyrillic and, of course, our son follows Jeff’s lead. And so by the fourth day, if the chart/board/list hasn’t already fallen behind some piece of furniture at the close of day three, it’s crumpled in a corner gathering dust. Our in-and out-boxes are filled to the brim with Jeff’s receipts and stray scraps with telephone numbers. It’s a wonder any of us gets dressed and makes it out of the house each day in matching shoes and isn’t wandering the streets aimlessly.

  I have no more succeeded in crafting a daily routine than I have in declaring our home a demilitarized zone. “Isn’t it enough that there are wars around the world and gang violence in our neighborhood middle school; do we really need our kid to be wielding a toy gun?” I pleaded with my spouse when Ezra was a toddler. “Good luck with that!” was the only support Jeff was willing to offer in my war against warfare.

  “Trust but verify.” If it was good enough for Ronald Reagan, surely the Gurkahns could carry out this policy? When Ez was little, I requested that friends and family forgo giving Ezra toys that came with guns, guns that turned into toys, or toy guns. As it turns out, the only thing harder than getting on the same page with your partner is trying to tell your extended community that you are following a style of parenting that’s unfamiliar. Yes, that appeal worked so well that I’d find myself sitting up all night, discarding gifts and disarming toy soldiers who packed the most miniature of weaponry imaginable before Ezra could get a gander at them. I was a one-mother UN monitoring agency working to stop the arms proliferation in one toddler’s toy chest. Up until the time that Ezra was four, I managed to reach a kind of détente on the issue with Jeff, right up to the day I had the temerity to take our kid to the Autry Museum of Western Heritage. Going to a museum fit my educational mandate for an ideal outing. What I didn’t know was that the Autry museum is basically an institution dedicated to the history and celebration of the firearms of the Old West. For two hours we walked past row after row of display cases crammed with rifles, muskets, derringers, revolvers, and ammunition. I might as well have arranged a tour of the Smith & Wesson factory. By the time we made it to the gift store, Ezra was hanging on my leg, begging me for a toy pistol. Other parents were staring at me as our child threw himself on the floor and wept until I agreed on a compromise purchase. I begrudgingly bought him a real leather holster and a matching cowboy outfit. Ezra loved that outfit so much he wore it every day for three months. He slept in the thing. You can even see him wearing it in the adorable pictures from Jeff’s sister’s wedding. And what’s in the holster? Why, it’s a gun Ezra made himself out of LEGOs. That was the day I waved the white flag, surrendered, and Jeff went out and bought him a Nerf gun. The sole concession I’ve managed to negotiate is a prohibition against shooting me in the face.

  All of my plans, schemes, and agendas fuel Jeff’s characterization of me as overly strident and have earned me the nickname Sergeant Gurwitch in our family, but it’s just not true. Maybe it’s a little true. But I can only hope that somehow, despite Jeff’s insistence that our child grow up in that hilarious land of imagination known as Jeff’s id, it doesn’t result in Ezra’s running off to join the circus or get us a visit from social services. You see, in his role as Carnival Cruise director of fun, Jeff has taken to providing voices and personalities for all of our little one’s stuffed animals and takes pleasure in entertaining Ez’s friends with their antics. Besides the overwhelming amount of exchanges I have personally been subjected to from a trash-talking turtle, as Ez has gotten older, his stuffed animals have taken on a tone that is decidedly PG-13 heading in R-rated territory. There’s a moose named Melvin … who’s gay. This moose isn’t just a little gay, he’s so swish, he’s practically having a sexual identity crisis. Moose also has a partner in crime, a bear who addresses our son’s classmates with inappropriate salutations. Every time the phone rings, I imagine it’s a social worker who wants to know why children are being greeted at our house by a stuffed animal saying, “Hey, bitches!”

  All of which is to say that I’m not giving up my rank as Sergeant Gurwitch anytime soon, because in spite of Jeff’s best efforts, our son is a well-adjusted kid who’s enthusiastic about school. He’s confident (RIE) and independent (Sears) and artsy (Steiner) and he’s never actually shot me in the face, so mission accomplished. And we all know what happens when you utter those words. We’re so fucked.

  He Says

  Who knew that fun was so bad? To Annabelle all manner of fun is equivalent to a sugar-coated junky kid’s cereal: it might be tasty but it’ll rot your teeth and give you type 2 diabetes. Bad, fun, bad! Fun, you and your buddies silly, goofy, and laugh riot are not welcome in Ms. Gurwitch’s House of Superstructured Seriousness. So, fuck you, fun, and the funny little horse you rode in on!

  There must be some kind of balance between structure and spontaneity in the face of the complexities of child rearing in the early twenty-first century. You would hope that we might find some middle-ground flexibility. Alas, Annabelle sees flexibility as a threat to her parenting agenda. I’m less coparent and more, mortal parenting enemy.

  I’m not completely as averse to rules and structure as Annabelle alleges I am; it’s just that I have some experience with it and I’m not the biggest fan. My family wasn’t so much Father Knows Best as Father Knows All and Don’t You Dare Cross Him. He was a sort of benevolent, generous, and sometimes even silly dictator. My dad was equal parts Groucho Marx, Santa Claus, and Saddam Hussein. A dictator is still a dictator and let’s not forget how “weird” I was to him as a kid. To say I was the black sheep of the family really doesn’t paint me black enough. My mom was super overprotective of both my sister and me. I was the only person I knew growing up who had babysitters younger than I was because “a girl, even a younger one, is more mature and responsible than you are to take care of your sister.” Gee, thanks, Mom. I wonder if she ever knew how humiliating it was for me, a high school junior trying to get a freshman babysitter to tuck me into bed.

  As was every Jewish boy I ever knew growing up, I was expected to get good grades. Unlike most of them, I didn’t. This must have been a big disappointment to my parents. In eleventh grade, on my New York State-mandated Regents geometry exam, I got a 56 out of 100. I only got a 56 because the geometry genius I had cheated off of all year finished the test so quickly that I could copy only about half the answers. My father was furious with me and insisted on making me take the test over. I told him that he should be satisfied with a 56 because I was never going to do better. He wouldn’t listen to reason, forced me to study all summer, work with a tutor, and take the Regents exam again. Months later I asked my dad if the test score ever came back. It did. I asked what I got. A 19. I couldn’t help but laugh at my sheer ineptitude. It was so bad, I was almost proud of myself, but my dad couldn’t even look at me when he told me. It must have been humiliating for him. I can’t say I blame him—my father put himself through college and law school playing the saxophone in his own orchestra and his reward is a son with the mathematical aptitude of an early hominid.

  I wasn’t allowe
d to watch TV during the week (had to sneak it). I was expected to keep my room clean at all times (it never was), have good manners in public (couldn’t quite get the hang of that knife and fork thing), and never to talk back or question my parents’ decisions (something I did on a regular basis). Furthermore, from third to ninth grades I went to military school. The establishment in question was a private day school in Albany, New York, and I wasn’t sent there because I liked killing cats or burning down houses, but because my parents thought I would get a better education at a private school. The local Christian Brothers Academy was too Christian and the Hebrew Academy was far too Jewish, so this left just one establishment: the Albany Academy for Boys, founded in 1813, a bastion of white Anglo-Saxon old money elitism and virulently anti-Semitic—perfect! We wore West Point uniforms to class and learned how to drill with toy rifles. I entered the Academy’s battalion a buck private and after years of practicing, taking part in the school’s competitive and ceremonial drills, and marching in Veterans and Memorial Day parades, I left the Academy a buck private. I sucked at being a boy-soldier and hated that given just the slightest rank, even the nicest of classmates immediately turned into sadistic, power-mad assholes. So, yes, I was slightly skeptical about all the rules and guidelines Annabelle was so hell-bent on giving to our son, Ezra.

  Annabelle thinks it’s ironic that because of my history degree I wasn’t prepared to help her implement her Eighteen-Year Plan. But talk about “magical thinking,” anyone who has ever studied even a shred of twentieth-century history can tell you that these five or seven or however many year plans were hollow and doomed-to-fail policies of totalitarian communist governments. Ladies and Gents, I give you the Soviet Union. Oh, I’m sorry, it doesn’t exist anymore. I have always felt that both parents and superpowers should avoid enforcing idealistic dogma, because it will inevitably fly right in the face of a little something I like to call reality. But reality never stopped Annabelle. Not when she could make a plan, follow a philosophy, attend a class, or put her trust in anyone or anything that claims to be an authority. This was how we landed at RIE.

  RIE was insane! Don’t take my word for it; just go back and reread Annabelle’s description. Essentially, RIE is baby-raising Marxism, founded by the late Magda Gerber. She started developing her ideas during the 1950s while managing an iron curtain Hungarian orphanage. (I rest my case.) It’s a quaint technique that professes to give the baby the space to learn on his own from his environment without parental intrusion. I wager Magda thought that an RIE-trained infant would naturally choose communism over capitalism. Inevitably, the whole thing’s fated for disaster as soon as the babies are big enough to begin to exercise that inconvenient little thing called free will. I love it that Annabelle initiated the RIE Rebellion of 1998 that made her persona non grata at the place she had defended so rigorously. Like a pretentious university student who sees herself as part of the working classes, Annabelle would be the type of revolutionary idealist who fights to see the cause succeed, but soon finds fault with it, voices her dissent, and is subsequently executed. The road from dogmatic idealism to hypocrisy is a short one. I remember how when we first started living together and I was making a cappuccino and farted in front of her, Annabelle admonished me, “I hope we’re not going to be a couple who farts and burps in front of each other all the time.” And just as she said it, Annabelle sneezed with such force that she pushed out a fart so loud it startled her; she gasped and then burped loudly. “I don’t know about us,” I shot back, “but you will be.”

  And let me set the record straight on another Annabelle misconception about RIE: Ezra did not fall or have accidents as a baby because of RIE, but because he just naturally had good balance. Contrary to Annabelle’s assertion, I did go a couple times to RIE class and witnessed what was going on there. Let’s just say that compared to the other bumbling, stumbling RIE infants, Ezra was a baby Baryshnikov.

  I’m astonished that Annabelle failed to mention the other massive attempt to have some structure in our lives when Ezra was an infant. Bedtime: from six to nine p.m. every night, baby Ez had severe colic and couldn’t fall asleep. This was in part because Annabelle and I were sent home from the hospital with only a modicum of instruction and even less practice on how to work his feeding tube. Bringing home Ezra reminded me of getting my first computer in the late 1980s. I had never used anything vaguely computerized before; I didn’t even know how to type, but the cocky salesman guaranteed that I’d get the hang of it in no time. If that computer had been a baby, I would have killed it several times over. Obviously, we didn’t kill Ezra, but we were unknowingly and improperly letting too much air from the feeding tube enter his stomach and giving him really bad gas.

  The only thing that got him to fall asleep was to strap him in the car and drive and drive and drive. When he finally conked out, I’d drive back to the house and as delicately as defusing a bomb begin to unstrap him from his car seat. As I gently lifted him out, he’d inevitably wake up and start screaming his head off, and then it was back into the car and drive, drive, drive! By the time Ezra stopped crying and fell asleep I didn’t just want a glass of wine, I wanted to smash the bottle over my head.

  Even as Ezra got older, there were nights where he refused to sleep and would work himself into such a feral crazed state—thrashing, bucking, and barking—that I was tempted to go all Mutual of Omaha and shoot him with a tranquilizer gun. So when Annabelle brought up Ferberization, I was actually open to it if it meant just one more minute of sleep.

  Dr. Ferber’s method depicts the ritual of your baby’s learning to go to sleep by himself as the child’s natural progress toward nocturnal self-reliance. What to the untrained ear sounds like a baby wailing in desperate protest of abandonment is, for Ferber, a child learning how to self-soothe himself. Like many theories, Ferberizing seems reasonable until you put it into practice and have to wait outside your newborn’s room while he “cries it out” for a half hour, or in the infant/parental-crying continuum, a light-year. Hearing someone else’s baby crying is annoying; hearing your own baby wailing is what I imagine it feels like to endure electric shock torture. The current of Ezra’s cry would surge through my head, skin, and every nerve fiber. An infant has a brain the size of a chipmunk’s, for chrissakes. They’re not “crying it out” because it’s fun. They’re desperate for comfort, love, and warmth. How can denying a helpless baby natural parental compassion help in its further emotional development?

  As the wailing and gasping for air that emanated from Ezra’s bedroom continued unabated, I imagined what he might be like years later as a young man: “Why are you shooting heroin, Ezra?” “Oh, it’s no big deal. I’m self-soothing. You know, I don’t want to bother my parents—they’re trying to sleep.” Nocturnal self-reliance … Ferber … Schmuck. So we never made it through Ferberizing and in the end one or both of us would go in and soothe Ezra. I hoped this experience would help Annabelle see the wisdom of flexibility or, at the minimum, teach her not to attempt to live by didactic proclamations, particularly when Dr. Ferber himself began recanting his method soon after we abandoned it. But it fell on deaf ears (perhaps because she was shell-shocked from all the Ferber baby crying), and by then Annabelle had found a new cause célèbre: no toy guns!

  From third through sixth grade I shot Kenny Lashin. It was a comic-book gun game we made up featuring my very lifelike sound effects. I’d shoot Kenny with machine guns, silencers, shotguns, grenades, and poison-tipped darts and he would die. Kenny was a grand master at dying. He’d twitch and shudder with each bullet, dart, or flesh-impaling shrapnel. Kenny was my own one-man Sam Peckinpah movie.

  It wasn’t that I was a giant gun nut, but, as a general rule, little boys love guns. Being a girl and growing up with a sister sibling, Annabelle missed the whole boy-gun love affair. By the time Annabelle began to experience boys, they had pretty much put away their toy guns for a ticket into her pants. True, there are some boys who never outgrow their fascination with
guns. They become skeet shooters and hunters, gun aficionados and collectors, gangsters and Republicans, NRA members and Texans.

  Because there is no stopping little tykes from playing with toy guns, I wasn’t against Ezra’s having one. It’s not as if I wanted him to go around town with a toy Glock or Luger in his tiny hand. Nerf makes nifty Nerf guns and there’s always the amusing but annoying squirt guns, but Annabelle was against them, too, until he started making them on the sly out of LEGOs.

  After Annabelle saw the folly of her ways about guns, I thought maybe she’d loosen up a bit, but she was just getting started. Annabelle’s next crusade against fun was the evil of video games. I was flabbergasted. I had no idea I’d married an Amish. She lectured me about the dangers of video games, sent me e-mails, cut out articles, gave sermons to all our friends who had gaming systems about how they were raising a generation of warlike kids desensitized to violence, addicted to immediate gratification, and incapable of sustained focus. Her diatribes generally had the effect of sucking all the joy out of the air wherever she went. She’d sternly harangue any parent within earshot about how a gaming system hooked up to the TV tethers kids to some vile mind-control umbilical cord. In time, and after every single one of Ezra’s friends were given Xboxes, Sony PlayStations, and Nintendo Wiis, Annabelle relaxed her no-videos edict and allowed him a portable video game player. The result: Ezra played video games everywhere—in the car, in restaurants, on five-hour plane rides, at friends’ houses, on the toilet, and under the covers of his bed so we wouldn’t hear him when he should be sleeping. Once again for Annabelle, it was game, set, and match. Reality!

  My wife’s need to regulate and structure doesn’t just have jurisdiction over Ezra’s life; I, too, have been subjected to her edicts. One I especially disliked was attending a Friday-night playgroup. This wasn’t as much a playgroup for kids as it was an excuse for their parents to get together and drink. The venue revolved—each week it was held at a different house. The couples brought their babies, toddlers, or small children along with gallons of cheap wine and tasteless food—mainly varieties of cheeses so bland they were not even worth downing a Lactaid for. Kids were stuffed with gobs of delivery pizza and then left to their own devices while their parents got smashed. Why did Annabelle find this weekly occurrence so crucial? None of these people were my friends. Just because they were all parents of similarly aged kids didn’t make me want to hang out with them. And to be honest, all the couples seemed odd to me. Several group members were divorced; they came each week weary, sad, lonely, and overwhelmed. One frantic single mom seemed always to be on the verge of tears or was already crying her eyes out. She had a little boy who ate food only if it was white. There was a married couple whose giantism was only half as interesting as the fact that they were both named Fred. And then there was Tim Sands, who wore a mullet haircut, and his son with the same mullet haircut whom he called Son. No one knew the kid’s actual name. Maybe Son was his name. Tim was divorced and in the music business, but like everyone else who lives within a fifty-mile radius of Los Angeles, his dream was to write a television show. When he tried to give me the script he eventually wrote, I flatly refused to read it for two reasons: one, I’m in the TV-pilot-writing business, so reading it could result in a conflict, and two, I didn’t much care for Tim, his mullet, or his son named Son, and I didn’t want to read anything he wrote. But did that stop Annabelle? No, she had to read it. She didn’t dare alienate anyone from her sacred Friday night, drunken-ass parents’ group.