You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  After that, Annabelle was conspicuously out of state and not present for three years’ worth of Father’s Days. Then last year—surprise, surprise—she’s in town and promises to take me to one of our favorite French restaurants for lunch. She’s all sweetness and light, swearing we have to end our dismal Father’s Day custom of absence and loathing. On the way to the restaurant, out of nowhere, Annabelle suddenly states she wants us to have a talk about our finances. She says we never talk about them. I say we always do, even, for some insane reason, on Father’s Fucking Day. She pushes, I resist, she insists, I lose it, and soon we are at each other’s throats about it. The restaurant plans are scrapped once again and it’s back to the doghouse/couch/TV sports for me. Thus, another Father’s Day bites the dust.

  This year, I plan to let Father’s Day come and go by treating it like any other Sunday. That might not make it a very special day, but it also might not suck ass.

  She Says

  Toothy Booty, or Bad Business in the Land of Fairies

  The tooth fairy visitation and honorarium is one of those childhood conventions we have tried to observe with some reliability, but due to our incompetence, competitiveness, and inability to stick to a plan, our tenure in fairydom had an inauspicious beginning, inconsistent middle, and is heading toward a crash-and-burn finish line.

  One of the unexpected side effects of having a kid with a chronic medical condition is that you are always primed to leap into crisis management mode at the smallest sign of trouble, so when Ezra was in kindergarten and he yelled from his bedroom, “Mom, my tooth fell out,” I screamed, “Oh my God, Jeff, his tooth fell out; let’s go to the hospital!” I was already herding a confused Ezra into the car before I remembered that young children’s teeth are supposed to fall out. After he went to sleep, we were stoked—Ezra’s first lost tooth! Jeff had what sounded like a plan. “Wouldn’t it be fun if we could tell Ezra we saw the tooth fairy? Better yet, what if he could see her?” Jeff suggested that we should make a tooth fairy visitation video every time Ezra loses a tooth. Jeff would film it and I’d be the tooth fairy. Maybe it was because I was so excited to have gotten a part without having to audition that I instantly agreed, and we sprang into action.

  See, it sounds like a good plan until you really start to think about it. “What should the tooth fairy wear, Jeff?” “A sheet.” “Too scary, she’s not the tooth ghost!” I settled on an elaborate beaded jacket that my mother wore in the 1960s. I looked like a tooth maître d’. Now we’re standing outside his door debating about the story line. “What should I say?” “I don’t know, something tooth fairyish.” “What do I do if he wakes up?” “You’re the actress, do what the tooth fairy would do!” After debating this for a solid thirty minutes, Jeff realized that there was no tape in the camera and we stalked off to our separate corners. That seemed to be that—our child seemed destined for a fairy-free childhood.

  The following morning, Ezra woke up ecstatic; he received two separate envelopes with a total of forty dollars. Huh? That’s a sum that’s going to be hard to produce every time the kid loses a tooth! As it turns out, both of us had separately left twenty dollars under Ezra’s pillow. In an attempt to cover up our mistake, I came up with the great idea that there’s an East Coast fairy and a West Coast fairy, and because we are often visiting family back east, Ezra falls into both of their jurisdictions. The very next time Ezra loses a tooth, he goes to bed early for the first (and as it turns out the only) time in his entire life because he’s anticipating his toothy booty, but Jeff and I both agree that forty bucks is too steep for one tooth and decide to cut the prize in half. To soften the disappointment the next morning, we contrive a new twist to the tooth fairy tale: because we live so far away, the East Coast fairy is often unable to come, depending on how many teeth have been lost along the longitudinal lines for which she is responsible on any given night. If you want to confound a six-year-old, use the word longitudinal.

  Tooth after tooth had us doling out cash and coming up with more and more East Coast tooth fairy excuses: She must have gotten caught in the jet stream and high winds prevented her from coming on time. She got confused with the time change. She’s on strike for a better benefit package. Due to tough economic times, cross-country fairy flights are almost nonexistent now.

  Cut to this year: after a long dry spell of no lost teeth, Ezra announces a tooth has come out during the day and he and I enter into a debate about whether there really is a tooth fairy. He’s eleven so it’s a tough sell, but he’s still in that prepubescent phase, perhaps best characterized by the tagline for the television series The X Files: “I want to believe.” I’m Mulder and he’s Scully and if I say it just right, I know I might just suck him in one more time. In an effort to make the fairy sound more plausible, I posit this line of reasoning: “I know you don’t believe in Santa; I mean, how can one guy circle the globe in a single night, right? However, there are thousands of fairies of all different types; the tooth fairy is merely one category of fairies that operates out of regional chapters, one of which is located right in our hillside neighborhood.” He looks at me incredulously. I elucidate, “Don’t believe me? What about leprechauns, who are a close relation of fairies? The Irish are famous for their belief in little people.” (I neglect to mention that the Irish are also famous for their drinking.) Ezra’s still skeptical and announces that he doesn’t think Los Angeles is magical enough to attract a legion of fairies. Uncertain, he goes downstairs to get Jeff’s take on the tooth fairy. My husband is so over the Gurkahn tooth tradition that he informs our son that the real tooth fairy is a trans-gender pixie who eats the old tooth and pees it out of her penis as money. “If that’s the cash you want, you got it.” Ezra giggles and then turns deadly serious. “Is that really true?” Thank you, Jeff.

  The next day Ezra is completely disappointed that the tooth fairy didn’t come at all. Jeff and I were so tired from arguing about why we keep up this canard that we fell asleep thinking the other was going to make the deposit once again. When he’s not looking, I slip a five-dollar bill in an envelope inside the pencil bag Ezra takes to school along with a note that reads: “To Ezra, Love, TF.” When I pick him up later, Ezra excitedly announces that he found a love letter in his pencil case with money and wants to figure out which girl is TF. When I inform him that TF stands for tooth fairy and not a girl at his school, he curses me and kicks me out of his room. I guess paying for his braces one day will be the punishment for screwing up the tooth fairy for him. This ritual has been a complete dental disaster. Thank God, he has only one more tooth to go.

  He Says

  A Long Day’s Journey into Date Night

  We try to go out once a week to a movie or dinner or just have a glass of wine and talk. One night a week, just Annabelle and I together, sounds simple … And yet I do believe that it might be easier for Iraq to self-govern than it is for us to pull off date night. But every week, we try.

  In order for date night to have even the slightest chance for success, we need to find a sitter for Ezra. This means calling, e-mailing, and texting all the sitters we have on tap at any given time, which varies from zero to three. If one can be procured, inevitably they cancel at the last minute. Most explanations have to do with cars: they won’t start or have stalled; a tire has gone flat; a battery died; brakes don’t work; a front window was smashed; a boyfriend needs it tonight to drive to Lincoln, Nebraska, to visit his sick mother. We’ve heard myriad excuses ranging from spontaneous sore throats to one sitter who announced on the day between agreeing to come over and the actual date night that she had a hit song in England and sitting was now conflicting with her band’s UK tour.

  When the sitter cancels at the last minute before date night, we shift into plan B: get Ezra a sleepover. As every parent discovers, sleepovers are the bartering exchange we use instead of money to help out on one another’s date nights. We take their kid one week; they take ours the next. After driving him down the block or across town, de
pending on whom I’ve bartered with and how far they live from us, we’re free at last for date night! Not so fast. We still have to pick a movie to see, but we’ve missed all the early showings due to driving Ez to the sleepover and Annabelle will be too tired for the later ones. I’m hungry, but she’s already had dinner and doesn’t want to eat too much late at night. We decide to just get a glass of wine at a local wine bar that also has food, perfect! She says that because we don’t have to make a movie or be back in time for a babysitter, we can relax and take our time. So Annabelle goes to take a shower and get ready for date night.

  This sounds reasonable, so we quickly kiss and I head downstairs to pour a glass of wine from what’s left over from last night’s bottle and wait for her to finish getting ready. That’s when I notice that there’s an unopened Netflix movie that’s been sitting on the coffee table for the last seven months. I pop it into the DVD player, get another glass of wine, and start to watch. It’s one of those French movies I had read was “sensual, provocative and emotionally insightful” in the New York Times, but we never got to see it when it was in the theaters because it’s so difficult to go and see movies on date night. I gather from the subtitles that the film is about people who are unhappy, smoke a fuckload of cigarettes, have extramarital affairs, and talk incessantly. It’s a lot slower paced and harder to follow than I thought it would be, but it’s set in majestic Paris and the French actresses as always are incredibly sexy. I think what the hell, I’ll just watch a little of it until Annabelle is ready to go. The next thing I know, the film is over and it’s three in the morning. I must have fallen asleep, which means I missed the classic French cinematic climax when the couple confront each other for having affairs, scream, cry, then have sex and smoke cigarettes. I go upstairs and find Annabelle sleeping on top of the still-made bed in her cute date night outfit and holding the latest copy of the New Yorker open on her lap, the lights and the TV on. It takes me ten minutes to find the TV remote and turn the set off. Then I remove the New Yorker from her hands and go to take a bath. Yes, yet another date night success for Annabelle and Jeff.

  She says

  Home Alone

  So true. But I would like to note that Jeff and I have substantially different expectations for date night. The part of date night I always hope for is a chance to go out with my spouse in the company of other people. As long as the topic isn’t religion, he can be really funny, entertaining, and cute. Usually socializing gives me a jolt of the falling-in-love dopamine rush of “Jeff is adorable.” Having other people with us on a date also ensures that we get a break from falling into the scheduling discussion that composes the majority of our exchanges on a daily basis. However, besides resolving all the things that can go wrong in our attempts to exit our home, it’s tantamount to winning the lottery when friends we both like are available when we are and also have a babysitter on the same night. That is why that Friday night playgroup we had when our kid was an infant worked for me. It was a fail-safe way to ensure we’d have conversations with other adults. As of the writing of this book, however, every single one of the couples in that group is now divorced and unavailable for date night. Now that they are single, their date nights are literally date nights. So who’s left to go out with? Like so many couples, we’ve lost track of many of the people we knew before entering the parenting years.

  Here is a short summary of whom you can expect to socialize with when your children are young should you be lucky enough to find a way to leave your domicile on date night, or frankly, any other night: People you will spend time with

  Parents of children whose kids are the same age as yours. Parents of children whose kids are the same age and sex. Parents of children who are the same age, sex, and who make around the same amount of money as you. As much as it’s fun to get together with others, if you don’t have some parity, you can’t vacation together and eventually you will fall off their list. Parents of children who are the same age, sex, have relatively similar financial resources, and also live within five miles of your home.

  People you won’t spend time with

  Single people. Especially single people who don’t have children. Single childless people who live outside a five-mile radius of your house. However, if you find single people who think your kid is almost as amazing and cute as you do, and are not put off by the suggestion that they come to your dwelling because you have no babysitter, you may get to enjoy their company. This has happened to us on several occasions, and we always provide dinner out of gratitude.

  People you break every rule and make time to see

  Friends you grew up with. Work buddies you call when either of you or both are out of work and need to commiserate. People who call and say they are getting divorced and need your support. People who’ve been diagnosed with cancer. Relatives who’ve traveled by plane to see you. Relatives who have traveled long distances by car, bus, or train (but not to see you) can be worked into preexisting plans if time permits. For example, “We’re going to see our kid play a maple tree in the school Thanksgiving play, wanna come?” Otherwise, forget it. (I have a cousin whom we both adore, but she’s single and even though she lives within two miles of our house, we haven’t seen her in three years.)

  All of which is to say, it really helps to like the person you’re married to, because when you have young children, most of your date nights will be spent solely in their company.

  She Says

  God of the Interfaith Faithless

  Kids raised in nonreligious homes, according to studies, tend to seek out religious organizations when they’re older in higher numbers than children raised in households with some exposure to religion. Clueless as to how to process this info, we’ve pieced together a smorgasbord of Episcopal school, three nights of Hanukkah, soap bars in the shape of a meditating Buddha, watching South Park episodes together, and attending the occasional gospel sing. Confusion abounds.

  Jeff insists he’s an agnostic, but remains open to a Supreme Being, however unknowable or unlikely. I consider myself a secular humanist atheist. I can’t conceive of any God who would create something that tastes so delicious, allow us to invent the tools to harvest it, and then not want us to enjoy something as fundamentally scrumptious as shellfish. It defies both gastronomic and evolutionary reasoning. Still, when Ezra recently asked me if it was OK to pray to God even if you’re unsure there is one, I jumped upon this as an occasion to institute a tradition of nightly prayers because it’s a much better way to end the day than playing with his iPod touch in bed.

  Our bedtime prayers consist of a gratitude list we make every night. Sometimes it’s being thankful for his home, friends, and favorite teachers. Other times it’s being grateful for the Jimi Hendrix version of “All Along the Watchtower,” PlayStation’s NBA ‘09 Live, and his own flattering leg-to-torso ratio.

  Sometimes we discuss world events at the end of the day and these inevitably creep into our prayers. For an entire month both Ezra and I ended our prayers with “At least I didn’t have to saw off my own leg after being buried by a building in an earthquake.”* Jeff’s only participation in this ritual comes in the form of mocking us by suggesting that his evening prayer is being thankful that he doesn’t have to participate in the nightly prayers. Then he makes his surly white stuffed bear Snow Ball say to Ezra, “Now you lay you down to sleep, you pray the Lord your soul to keep; now shut the hell up and go to sleep, bitch!” Oh, well, perhaps the lack of any formal religious training will cause Ezra to revolt when he’s older and become a Hasidic Jew, a Mormon, or a New Age Druid who believes that godlike extraterrestrials are coming to take him to the planet Poetic Irony, where his parents are being permanently held hostage.

  Here’s a list of marital conventional wisdom and how we choose to follow it:

  1. Conventional Wisdom: Talk through the tough times.

  Annabelle and Jeff: Pass. We prefer to just yell.

  2. CW: Learn how to listen.

  A&J: Pass again. Li
stening takes valuable time away from arguing and yelling.

  3. CW: Learn how to compromise.

  A&J: Still passing. Compromise is for pussies. We prefer to play the marital version of chicken—first one to back off from a head-on argument that could lead to a divorce loses.

  4. CW: Forgiveness is the most important value in a relationship.

  A&J: More passing. What’s the point of that? It’s much more satisfying to stew about all the things our partner has done wrong. Building resentment is one activity we enjoy doing together.

  5. CW: Never do anything without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse.

  A&J: Never do anything without enthusiastically disagreeing!

  6. CW: Commit to be in it for the long haul.

  A&J: We don’t like the phrase long haul. We are looking for something between eternity and the beginning of the next school year.