Salon.com > Jonathan Kronstadt

Kiddie fixations

Wed, 20 Sep 2000 19:12:00 +0000

Children are, by any reasonable adult standard, mentally ill.

I am not a health professional and I avoided psychology courses in college, not wishing to discover that my quirky charm was, in fact, a disease. But even I can recognize obsessive-compulsive disorder when it's articulated as symphonically as it has been in both my children.

Max, 3, is the current nut case. His elephant obsession has been going on a year now, its genesis having sprung from his first viewing of "The Jungle Book." (It had to be Disney, didn't it?)

It's only when you walk through life with the elephant obsessed that you realize what a pervasive presence pachyderms have in our society. Max and I will be strolling down the cereal aisle at our local grocery store, having a lovely, low-key time, when he will spy an elephant occupying a tiny spot on the back of a box. He points and then screams in a voice loud enough to move furniture, "Elephant!!!" After I restart my heart, we saunter over to the box in question and admire the elephantine image, and Max utters his signature line: "How did they know I like elephants?"

The New Dad

Mon, 12 Jun 2000 19:34:00 +0000

When I look into my father's eyes, I see a man I don't know very well. I don't know him because he wasn't around much when we lived in the same house, and neither of us has made much of an effort since. Now we're both fathers, but our experiences as fathers are as different as Prozac and Pez. In just one generation the role has changed into something he couldn't possibly recognize.

My father is an immigrant who didn't finish high school until he was in his 60s. As a young man he built a business and married a woman with a prominent Jewish last name and a master's degree in education. Then he did the only thing that made sense at the time -- worked his ass off and left the child rearing to his wife. He did what was expected of him, not knowing that by working to make our lives better, he'd lost his chance to be a part of them.

My life is different. My father worked hard so I didn't have to, and believe me, I didn't. This pampered childhood led to a lazy adulthood and an antipathy for authority figures that plagued me through my 20s and most of my 30s. Then I got lucky and found a woman who not only put up with my bullshit but found it amusing.

Baby barf rules

Mon, 17 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

One of the most rewarding things about parenting -- the kind of thing that makes all the lost sleep, frazzled nerves and self-flagellation worthwhile -- is getting puked on.

Before becoming a parent, I had blessed little experience with vomit. Sure, there was the obligatory episode on orientation weekend as a college freshman, and one particularly messy bout with the stomach flu when I lived in Iowa. (Some might say puking is a symptom of living in Iowa, and I think that's what I said at the time, between heaves.)

But on the whole, my vomit visitations pre-parenthood were well below the arithmetic mean. Even my eldest was not, as they say, a spit-uppy baby. There was one memorable incident, while we were waiting to pay our toll on the Delaware Turnpike, when she opened up like a fire hydrant. I still can't read the odometer clearly.

But again, we had largely dodged the barf bullet. Until Max came along. Sweet, lovable, low-maintenance little Max -- the poster child for easy babies, with one annoying talent. He can puke, as James Jones might say, from here to eternity. Perhaps one day I'll have the presence of mind to actually measure the distance of one of his heaves, like some kind of upchuck shot put. But for now let me share my vast knowledge on what to do, or not to do, when what goes down must come up.

Filthy living

Thu, 03 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

I have a friend who has both a child and a clean house. This makes about as much sense to me as a sold-out Neil Diamond concert. And she's about to have twins, so she has about as much chance of keeping her house clean as I do of growing old gracefully.

We have someone clean our house every two weeks. Having children helped me get over my bleeding-heart-liberal revulsion at hiring someone to clean up after me. It was frighteningly easy. Parenting reality can bitch-slap your principles in a heartbeat. So once a fortnight, after the kids go to bed, we race through the house getting things out of the way so that Susan can de-sticky the house.

Parenting is many things, but more than anything else it's adhesive. If you ever want to know what having suction cups for feet is like, just walk barefoot through our kitchen (and empty the dishwasher while you're there).

The morning of Susan's arrival we clear out as quickly and tidily as possible. Then in the afternoon we return to a clean house -- clean being an alarmingly relative term. On most days Martha Stewart would have an aneurysm before she made it through our foyer, but on Susan days she'd probably just gasp, compose herself and make flan.

Please, God, don't let him be a penis grabber

Thu, 28 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

After 18 months on the planet, Max has discovered his penis. This is a good thing. It's a nice penis, and it's his, so I want him to feel good about it. It's in the right place, and hopefully the two of them will share many happy years of socially appropriate activities together. But after spending numerous mornings as a parent assistant in my daughter's preschool class, I admit to the disturbing fear that he will become a penis grabber.

They are perfectly nice boys, these penis grabbers, but they demonstrate a single-minded devotion to their little pals that cannot help but hamper their development in other critical areas, such as not grabbing their penises. When first confronted with this phenomenon, I assumed that these newly potty-trained boy geniuses were merely trying to tell whomever was watching that they had to go. But nobody has to go that much. They just naturally gravitate there when they have a free hand, and they always have a free hand. Some of them seem to have six or eight free hands.

Penis grabbers present enlightened parents with a bit of a quandary: One wants to allow one's child the freedom to explore his anatomy to the best of his ability; but one doesn't want him to feel so free that he believes it is OK to try the same stuff with anyone else's anatomy.