Dad Is Fat (12 page)

When the neighbors living below us inevitably decide to move out, they always make the polite request that we hide our existence from potential new tenants. We comply because we feel horrible for having had them suffer under the weight of our world for a couple of years. We agree to help them trick new neighbors into moving in below us just like we agreed to help our former downstairs neighbors trick
them
into moving in below us. We are very ethical in our dishonesty.

Hiding the fact that our apartment is essentially a nonmovable clown car is not easy. We must remove all proof of children from the hallways. This involves taking in scooters and strollers into our already cramped apartment. We scour the halls for any telltale plastic toy or a dropped goldfish cracker. We remove our children’s holiday artwork from the front of our door. Our pre-Italian downstairs neighbors, Steve and Andrea, actually offered to buy us lunch so my family wouldn’t even be in the building during an open house. A really kind way to say, “Just get the hell out of the building!” I thanked them for the kind offer and instead took it upon myself to get our chaos the hell out of the building for a couple of hours.

There was once a surprise visit by a very serious prospective tenant. Our neighbors called us at the last minute. We really had to scramble. It was too late to take the kids out for fear of exiting the building and running into the unsuspecting buyer with a gaggle of foot-heavy toddlers. When we heard the Realtor in the hallway with the nice couple, we shooed all the kids into a back room and told them they had to play “the quiet game.” I forgot at the time that a two-year-old does not understand the rules of “the quiet game” or any rules of any game.
I clapped a hand over her mouth, and suddenly it became the scene in
The Sound of Music
where the von Trapp family is hiding in the convent from the German SS.

As we continue our search for a new apartment, our “must have” list does not include anything about “prewar,” “original moldings,” or “good neighborhood schools.” We just need to find a place where the downstairs neighbors are deaf or some other example of people who can’t hear that is not offensive to deaf people. Either way, I just don’t want those Chuds to come after us.

Kids are actually afraid of monsters. I remember being afraid of monsters as a kid, but now it seems pretty absurd. My son Jack is a confident, outgoing six-year-old, yet at night, monsters are a sincere concern of his. He’s not making it up to get attention. To him it’s a realistic possibility that there is a monster in the hallway, and he needs me as a security escort to go to the bathroom. He is not at all concerned about a domestic terrorist attack or an economic disaster, but he is terrified of monsters.

Personally, I think that the concept of an old white guy with a beard in a red coat coming down a chimney in the middle of the night or a fairy with a tooth fetish sliding things under my pillow while I sleep would be way freakier, but no, for kids it’s monsters.

Monsters are no different from fear of the dark. Why are children afraid of the dark? Because monsters live in the dark.
You can tell a kid there is no such thing as monsters, and they will look at you like you are naive. “Right, Dad. There are no monsters. And we didn’t really go to the moon either.” And they walk away from you like, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Where does this fear come from? It’s just the fear of the unknown. They can’t describe the monsters nor can they verbalize what these monsters will do to them if they ever actually do encounter them, but they know they’re out there. Watching. Waiting. We never really completely lose the fear, but as adults we just give the monsters different names, like “Bankruptcy” and “Cancer.” If our stockbrokers and doctors lived in our house, we’d be running to their room every night, too.

Of course, some kids aren’t afraid of monsters at all. My three-year-old, Katie, wants to sleep in her bed with monster dolls and be told stories of zombies and werewolves. Maybe she is just the type of person who literally is “embracing her fears.” I’m not exactly sure why one kid in particular is so scared of monsters, but he’s waking me up almost every night to tell me they’re there. And like any good parent, I explain to him that there are no monsters, but if he doesn’t get back in bed, I’m going to let the monsters in his room.

I’m not a man with many hobbies. Besides eating, sleeping, watching an occasional football game, and, of course, eating, I just like spending time with my children, although I’m consistently amazed at how little I truly have in common with them. I’m comfortable with the fact that a two-year-old doesn’t really grasp the “hide” or the “seek” part of hide and seek. And I’m not expecting to watch
The Wire
with an eight-year-old, but I would think there would be some overlap in interests. I realize their time on this planet has been short and sophistication is not something they can even pronounce, but I’m constantly stunned by our lack of commonalities. Nothing in my life has ever been as important as pushing the elevator button is to my three-year-old.

My six-year-old son, Jack, actually doesn’t like mashed potatoes. Yes, mashed potatoes, one of the greatest things on earth. The ice cream of potatoes. I know, I didn’t think it was
possible either. He of course loves french fries, hash browns, and baked potatoes, but mashed potatoes might as well be sewer sludge. “Ewww, mashed potatoes!” Little kids simply have bad taste in everything.

Little kids’ taste in clothing is baffling. I’m not a big believer in fashion, but I know that if you ask a three-year-old boy to pick something out to wear to the park, the outfit will definitely clash and most likely not include pants. “Okay, why don’t we wear pants and a shirt instead of a pair of goggles and a hat.”

Little kids are the only sober human beings for the past fifty years to enjoy a parade. And it’s not for kitsch appeal. People walking down the middle of the street to a drumbeat are fascinating to them. I always end up with the heaviest kid on my shoulders, watching the back of someone’s neck get sunburned. It’s no picnic.

Any time you eat outside with a kid, it’s a “picnic.” Kids love picnics, or, as I call them, “eating uncomfortably on the ground while swatting flies away from your food.”

Little kids’ taste in music is just as baffling. That Barney song, really? It’s a total rip-off of a million other bad songs, and
Barney
gets the credit? I smell a lawsuit. My three-year-old daughter, Katie, figured this out subconsciously because she frequently does her own mashups of these obviously plagiarized tunes.

[
Singing
] “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy fam-i-ly, with a knick-knack paddy-whack, give a dog a bone, this old man … is com-ing to town!”

They love all these horrible songs that are often about
other people’s misery. Everyone knows that “Ring Around the Rosie” is about people dying of plague. The “Old MacDonald” song is clearly about some poor farmer who lost his farm to foreclosure. He
had
a farm. Why doesn’t he have a farm anymore? The economy. Yet little kids smile and clap as they sing it. It’s just cruel.

A small child’s taste in movies is just as atrocious. You know you’ll do anything for your kids when you find yourself paying twelve dollars a ticket to see
The Smurfs
. If you liked some of the movies toddlers liked, you’d definitely keep it to yourself. I brought my kids to see
Yogi Bear
. At the end, my then four-year-old son, Jack, popped out of his chair and said, “That was amazing!” I responded with the appropriate “Shhhh. Save the enthusiasm for a Pixar movie. This room is filled with your peer group. Don’t embarrass yourself.” I was tempted to turn to the parents behind me and announce, “He’s being sarcastic.”

Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised when my children beg to watch
Spy Kids 2
for the twentieth time. After all, they are still impressed by a carousel. Also known as a “Merry-Go-Round” or “A Boring Piece of Junk.” Forty years after man walked on the moon, a slowly rotating plastic statue garden will put my children in gleeful hysterics. “Yea! A merry-go-round! Daddy, can we go on it? Oh please, please?” You are just going around and around at an excruciatingly slow pace to music they wouldn’t even play in an elevator. Nothing exciting is going to happen. That’s why those bogus shabby leather seat belts are so loose. They will never have cause to need those seat belts. At least with NASCAR, there is always the potential for an awesome wipeout.

Katie enjoying the rotating pieces of junk
.

I guess I’m doomed to never have anything in common with my kids except my last name. The sad thing is that by the time they’re old enough to have good taste, I’ll be one of those old guys with bad taste. “Really, Dad?
Those
clothes?
That
music? The Smurfs movie?” I finally understand what the Generation Gap is. Well, at least we’ll always have McDonald’s.

We live in a five-story walk-up. To you non–city dwellers, the term
walk-up
is used to describe an apartment building that is so luxurious, it doesn’t have an elevator. It’s called a “walk-up” because once you get up to your place, you never want to walk down. To fully understand this quandary, imagine you are watching television without a remote control and to change the channel you have to walk up five flights of stairs carrying a stroller. My dreams often involve elevators.

I should mention this apartment is on the Bowery in Manhattan. For those readers not presently recovering from heroin addiction who are familiar with this area of New York City, consider this: supposedly the term
hobo
comes from a description of the sketchy characters who were the main inhabitants on the cross streets of HOuston and BOwery. Hey, that’s right where I live. Isn’t that cool, hip, and ironic? The tiny overcrowded apartment where I’m raising my young children is in
the same location where they manufacture homeless people. Location, location, location.

I truly love living in New York City, and I’m proud to call it home. New York is a global city and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment. New York is the home of the United Nations and has welcomed all kinds of different cultures. Most recently, the parent culture. Despite the great improvements in the quality of life over the past couple of decades, the city is still not really kid-compatible.

The last several years have seen more and more parents deciding to stay in the city rather than take a long, frustrating, traffic-congested commute in for work. There have been a lot of great new playgrounds, kids’ programs, and kid-themed events added to this fine city. These things coupled with all the other assets I mentioned earlier would make it sound like an ideal place to raise a well-rounded individual. The problem is that all these amazing places and activities that New York City has to offer are impossible to get to if you have five kids.

We don’t have a car, an SUV, an eight-passenger van, or one of those
Partridge Family
buses. This means our primary forms of transportation are cabs, walking, and the subway. Cabs are probably the most convenient way to get around New York. True, cabs are superexpensive, but not really, compared with gas and parking. Cabs give you door-to-door service, and the drivers are always great characters. Why not just take cabs everywhere? Well, New York City cabs are only allowed to carry up to four passengers at a time. That’s right, I can’t fit my entire family in one cab. There goes the cab option. So, walking.

Walking had always been one of my favorite things about New York City. Many times on a balmy autumn evening I would opt for walking home from a spot at a local comedy club even if I could get home much faster on the subway. True, I am a cheap bastard, but it wasn’t just because of the $2.25 that I could save. Walking for thirty minutes in the city is a completely different experience from walking for thirty minutes past a boring cornfield. There are remarkable sights, sounds, and people watching that make the time pass extraordinarily fast, and before you know it, you have arrived at your destination. However, when you add a couple of kids and a stroller to that equation, it becomes a vastly different experience.

Strolling a kid down a sidewalk seems like it would be easy except for the fact that the stroller is the Bermuda Triangle of kids’ shoes. Strollers should always come with a coupon for a free pair of shoes. You can’t stroll a kid half a block before they only have one shoe on. You have no idea when or how they got it off or how you missed a shoe being dropped or flung from something you are pushing right in front of you. Wouldn’t you have walked over it? Toddler shoes should definitely come in threes. Of course, then you would always lose the wrong one. Then there are the kids that are “walking” with you. Little kids have short legs and complain a lot. Also when you walk with kids, they get bored of simply “walking” real quickly. Every metal grate, fire hydrant, tree guard, pole, and stoop becomes part of his or her personal obstacle course. A simple walk becomes
my
personal obstacle course … but my obstacle is actually
getting
anywhere while I try to wrangle my chimps off of dangerous death traps like tree guards, stoops, ramps,
and poles and try to prevent them from getting too close to the curb, where giant trucks and mindless cyclist are inches away from plowing them over. So, the subway.