by Paul Reiser
It’s nothing to be proud of, I admit; pushing myself up by pulling down others. The Germans call it Schadenfreude—“the deriving of pleasure from the misfortunes of others.” (How about that, by the way? There were that many people being that petty that they had to make up a special word for it.)
As near as I can tell, all parents engage in some degree of this type of “Child-freude,” which is like Schadenfreude, just more finely tuned. I made it up, but it means: “Comfort derived specifically from pointing out, discussing, and maliciously ridiculing the flawed child-rearing practices and clothing choices of other parents.” We all do it, I’m sure of it. (If not, if we’re truly the only couple that does it, then boy is my face red. But I doubt we are.)
We all need to hear about other people’s struggles with their kids. It’s why I was so delighted about the President’s daughter getting a 73; it made me feel better about my kid’s 74. We just want to know we’re not the only ones fighting the fight. That we’re not alone. Of all the roles the first family serves, the role of head-scratching parents with real-life, perfectly imperfect kids is perhaps among the most unappreciated.
For the longest time, based on no evidence other than our own insecurity and sense of incompetence, my wife and I were convinced that we were the flat-out, no-question-about-it, least-skilled parents in the country. Furthermore, never ones to give ourselves a break, we believed that all the other parents in our sphere were doing a conspicuously stellar job with their kids.
We were convinced that every other set of parents we knew were perfect. They were more thorough in going over their kids’ homework, they set better boundaries than we did, didn’t let their kids watch as many hours of TV as we did, raised kids who were unfailingly polite in public and had a far greater sense of community and public service than our underachieving offspring over there on the couch watching SpongeBob. We were certain everybody else’s kids willingly and joyfully ate nothing but healthy foods, shunning all candy and candy-based products, they all sensibly and automatically put on weather-appropriate clothing, and voluntarily called their grandparents with clockwork regularity, giving fully detailed accounts of their numerous accomplishments, ending with testimonials to their wonderful and perfect parents, who were no doubt raised by these spectacular grandparents.
Turns out: not so much. At all.
The good news/bad news is: nobody knows what they’re doing. It’s a frightening discovery, considering how many people we’re talking about. But I find it tremendously liberating. It’s the one gargantuan truth that all parents ultimately learn, and of which they can never let go. That other parents out there are struggling too—and maybe even doing worse than us—is what allows us to get up every morning.
MY VERY GOOD BUDDY and I have a friendship built almost entirely on confessing our failures as fathers. To be fair, it’s more like expressing our fears that we might be failures. But no matter. The airing of these mutual insecurities (and occasional tiny victories) has been the cornerstone of a life-changing and life-affirming friendship. An oasis of support in a Sahara of self-recrimination. Apparently, we both needed to hear about someone else’s problems. To compare ourselves to an other. We just never knew it.
Our wives knew it. They’re much smarter in this regard. In fact, this good buddy and I only became friends because our wives conned us into it. Which is not uncommon, I’ve discovered.
For the majority of men my age, our friends are guys we never actually picked. They’re the husbands of our wives’ friends, or fathers of our kids’ friends. (I do have a few close friends from childhood, but they’re scattered about the country and I rarely get to see them.) But the guys I have spent the most time with for the last several years have been the guys whose lives, like mine, revolve around their kids. So, from school drop-offs to pickups to school plays and birthday parties, Little League, rock-band practice, school fund-raisers, etc. . . . these are the guys I’m with.
Invariably, the first bond between us was the shared resentment we all felt for being at these stupid events in the first place. And out of that mutual discomfort, friendships were forged. Good friendships. Solid friendships. Dependable brothers in arms. None of which changes the fact that I never picked these guys. Nor they me. We just got handed to one another, and were clever enough to make the best of it.
So within this group of arbitrary misfits was this one particular fellow who, as I say, became my friend only because our wives ordained it so. It was actually a deliberate “setup,” because they could have easily continued their friendship without involving us. But they both had the idea, and the strong conviction, that he and I would “hit it off” and somehow “be good for each other,” and so proceeded to match us up.
Privately, in our respective households, my wife and his wife were deftly selling us on each other. “You’ll really like him—he’s really funny!” “No, he’s not like you think he is. He’s actually a great guy, you guys are really alike.” “You guys’ll be great friends!”
And, in response, safe within the warmth of these very same respective households, the other guy and I were each saying, “What do I need another friend for? I already have friends I never talk to. More would just be overkill.”
But the loving wives persisted. They were determined to make this happen.
THE FIRST ENCOUNTER WAS EASY—the families got together for a bit of BBQ and kid-friendly football-watching. Probably could’ve enjoyed myself even if the guy was a deadbeat. But he wasn’t. He was a perfectly nice, bright, funny guy.
A few weeks later, the wives organized a dinner, this time just the four of us—no kids. Again, I couldn’t have had a better time. By the time we ordered, the group had already subdivided; my new best friend and I were huddled in animated conversation, as were the wives in their own corner. Their devious plan had worked; this guy and I each had a new friend.
Shortly thereafter, to the relief of our wives, my new best bud and I realized we didn’t need to go out and eat an entire dinner just to talk. Or even need to involve our wives. We could actually get together without them, which it turns out was everybody’s preference.
We had discovered early on that among the many things we had in common was an appreciation of the occasional cigar and a bit of Scotch. Very manly things—which took the sting out of the unspoken self-consciousness we were both feeling about doing something as un-manly as, apparently, courting.
So we initiated a weekly get-together—always on the same night of the week, always at the same time—for our Scotch, cigar, and chat. And as enjoyable as each of those elements was, it was the routine of doing it that became the centerpiece. We each found we looked forward to the consistency of these sit-downs.
And what flowed out of them was a steady stream of revelations. “Wow, my kid is going through the same problem with his teacher.” “Yeah, we tried the same meds for our kid, but got off it too.” “Yeah, my kids hate when I do that too.” And on and on. A veritable marathon of acknowledged shortcomings, from which the net take-away, for both of us, was a huge sense of “Wow, I thought it was just me!” Followed by a giddy sense of excitement in the relief and fun of that very discovery.
Why men are so late to the party in learning to do this is for people smarter than myself to figure out. But I do know there is a consistent gender divide here. Women know how to have friends, whereas men, I think, don’t. When my wife gets together with her friends, they will succinctly download the details of every facet of each other’s life. If I go to a ball game with a buddy, nothing makes us both happier than the sheer joy of getting to sit there and not talk for fifteen consecutive minutes.
I remember my father being the same way. A remarkably amiable fellow, with plenty of friends (actually they were mainly the husbands of my mother’s friends), but I don’t think he ever once picked up the phone and called a friend because he wanted to talk.
I’m not saying this is the best way to live; I just had not till recently noticed the discrep
ancy. My wife needs her friends. She cherishes her friends. I have friends, but have pretty much always felt I’d be fine without them too. Sort of the way I feel about juice; nice to have, but if we’re out, I’ll have something else.
Until I had kids. Then I needed friends. And, probably for the first time, was able to really be a friend. It’s another reason having kids is such a game-changer: it opens you in ways that just would not have happened otherwise. It connects you to all those others. Whether in friendship or mocking ridicule—either way, you need to acknowledge and take in others.
AND THIS IS THE CORNERSTONE of my plan for World Peace. Granted, I haven’t worked out all the details, but I figure if presidents and prime ministers all over the world would just open every conversation with something about their kids, it may not bring about global harmony overnight, but it’s not going to start any wars either. It can only be a step in the right direction. Talking about kids does that; it brings out the common ground between everybody.
Which is why I bet you, somewhere in the White House, late at night, you can probably hear someone say, “Hey, I’m sure the Ahmadinejads’ kid didn’t do so great on that science test, either.”
Bad Words
When my little guy was in second grade, he came home one day very pleased with himself.
“Daddy, I know what the ‘f-word’ is.”
Oh, boy. I knew this was coming someday, I just hadn’t expected it so soon.
“Well, where’d you learn that?” I asked.
“In school.”
I was so pleased with the public school system.
“In class? You learned this in class?”
“No. From my friend Max.”
“Max already knows the ‘f-word’?”
“Uh-huh,” my little angel said, bursting with confidence and the need to impress me. “Want to know what it is?’
“Okay,” I said, nervously. “What is the ‘f-word’?
He stood to his full three-foot-seven.
“It’s ‘shit,’ ” he said, beaming with pride. It took me a minute.
“ ‘Shit’ is the ‘f-word’?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
Now I was faced with a parenting dilemma. Do I let him go out in the world so woefully misguided? That seemed the very opposite of what parenting should be about. On the other hand, correcting him didn’t seem right either. “Oh, no, son—you’ve got it wrong. The ‘f-word’ is far more offensive. And with so many more permutations and variations. Come—pull up a chair, I shall explain.” That seemed far worse. And counterproductive. So I let it slide.
“That’s right, son,” I said. “You’ve got it right. Now, you know that’s a bad word, though, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, as he ran off to enjoy his quickly evaporating childhood. I sensed this discussion wasn’t over.
A few days later, he came over and acknowledged, “Daddy, I was wrong. That wasn’t the ‘f-word’ at all. That was the ‘s-word.’ ”
“That’s right, sweetie. What you have there is the ‘s-word.’ ”
He was learning, so that’s good.
“I know how to spell it too,” he told me.
“Do you?” I asked, making a mental note to get him new friends.
“Uh-huh,” he said. And then, with professional spelling bee precision, he laid it out. “S-h-i-m-t.”
“What?”
“S-h-i-m-t,” he repeated with unshakable confidence.
“Shimt?” I said, making sure I’d heard right. “With an m?”
“Uh-huh.”
I had not known that. Shimt, if I’m not mistaken, was a dish my grandmother used to make, generally on the high holidays. Potato shimt, with raisins and carrots and pieces of chicken tossed in. Sometimes beef—it varied. I had not heard of it in the context my son was proposing, but I nonetheless decided to accept his version as official.
“That’s right,” I said. “You got it. Now. Just because you know these words doesn’t mean you get to use them.”
This upset him.
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not nice words. I don’t want to hear you use these words.”
“But why would they have words if you’re not allowed to say them?”
“Well, you can say them when you’re older.”
“But my friends say them!”
“That’s because your friends’ parents don’t give a shimt. But I don’t want to hear those words from you.”
He walked off, very frustrated.
AND I HAVE TO SAY, I understood the feeling. Nobody likes to be thwarted.
As fate would have it, I’ve been going through the exact same problem—with my computer. My spell check will not let me curse. Not only won’t it allow it, it apparently thinks so highly of me that if I try to curse, it presumes I’ve made a mistake, and furthermore couldn’t possibly know what these words actually mean.
I was writing a friend of mine who was having problems at work. Trying to be supportive, I wrote back, “Well, gee, it sounds like your boss is a real c*!#sucker.” My computer didn’t like this. It underlined the word in red and sounded the little warning bing.
“Did you mean ‘coquettish’?” it asked me, trying to be helpful.
I typed back, “No, I meant ‘c*!#sucker.’ ”
Bing. “Funny guy,” the computer snickered. “That’s actually a very bad word—I’m sure you didn’t mean to say that. Did you maybe mean to write ‘cauliflower’?”
“No, I meant ‘c*!#sucker.’ ”
Bing. “ ‘Crocodile’?”
“No,” I typed back, increasingly aggravated. “ ‘C*!#sucker.’ ”
Bing. “ ‘Cockamamie’?”
“No.”
“ ‘Coriander.’ Did you mean ‘coriander’?”
“No, I meant ‘c*!#sucker.’ I’m saying his boss sounds like a real c*!#sucker.”
“ ‘Conquistador’? Did you possibly mean ‘conquistador’? Where does your friend live? Does he, by chance, live in fifteenth-century Spain? Because it’s possible his boss is a conquistador.”
“No, he’s a c!*#sucker, you #@!$*&*%$@er!”
It finally accepted the word, but sadly the computer has never looked at me the same since. The relationship has been irreparably strained.
But, as my son has explained to me, shimt happens.
Enough
My kids love any movie in 3-D. Actual life, which is already in 3-D, they’re not as enthralled with. But to see something on a screen that aspires to simulate actual life? They’ve never been happier.
To my mind, 3-D is one D more than necessary. I don’t recall ever seeing a movie and thinking, “If only this movie had one more dimension! I just feel too confined by mere width and height. I’m hankering for depth.” It’s never been an issue.
But the makers of these movies prey on our insatiable appetite for more. More depth, more volume, more sensation, more of a movie experience.
“Detail so vivid,” they boast, “it’s like you’re right there!”
You know what I say? “I don’t want to be there! I want to be here! You be there. That’s your job. You be the movie, I’ll be the guy watching the movie. From here.”
Remember when people used to say, “There’s no there there?” Well, now it’s worse; now there’s no here here. It’s all about taking you there.
I appreciate the novelty of these technological accomplishments; I just don’t see the appeal.
“It makes you feel like you’re actually in the movie!” my kids excitedly report. “What about that jungle scene—cool huh?! It’s like the trees are gonna hit you in the eye!”
The thing is, I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid getting hit in the eye. It’s exactly the kind of thing I’m against. But now we’ve developed the technology to simulate exactly that. I would respectfully argue it’s not something we need.
Very much like the new TV we just bought.
We already had a very nice TV. Did all the things you’d want a nice TV to do: looked good, sounded good, the def was high, the screen was both big and flat. (The manufacturers do send a bit of a mixed message with that one. I lose track of what it is we’re meant to aspire to: the bigness or the smallness. Happy to buy a new TV, just want to make sure I’m coveting the right qualities.)
I had been perfectly content with our TV. But then I did a foolish thing: I went to a friend’s house. And his TV looked much nicer. Bigger, better, clearer, louder, sharper, funnier . . . It just seemed, in general, that it was better to be him than me. A new TV, I believed, would rectify that.
(Deep down inside, I was, of course, embarrassed and ashamed at how remarkably shallow, impressionable, and predictable I can be. But this was, as I say, way deep down. On top of that was layer upon layer of animalistic impulses driving me, almost zombie-like, to “Go, get, more.”)
SO I GO TO THE STORE to look at new TVs. I tell the guy about the one I saw at my friend’s house. Guess what? They’ve already come out with an even newer, fancier model than the one he has! Bigger, wider, flatter, picture’s more clear, tangibly crisper, painfully louder—all-around better. Ha! Yes, please. Give me that.
I get it delivered—after having completed some construction at home, expanding the wall space to accommodate its girth—and they come to set it up.
The TV is incredible! The picture is stunning! I am very proud of myself. And feeling momentarily complete.
But I soon notice a problem: It’s so good, it’s actually too good. Things look so real, they don’t look real anymore. There’s so much detail, it’s dizzying. So much digital information coming in, so many gazillion pixels that stuff that’s supposed to look vivid looks surreal and otherworldly. And oddly amateurish. This can’t be right.
The guy comes back, looks at the picture, and in a refreshingly candid admission tells me, “Yeah, that’s been a bit of a problem.”