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Movie Review: Despicable Me

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:30:08 +1000

“When we got adopted by a bald guy,” the character of young orphan Margo states, “I thought this would be more like Annie.” But this weekend’s new animated 3-D flick, Despicable Me, ain’t no Annie. There’s no singing, just a wee bit of dancing, and though, like Annie, there’s a large cast, in this case, they happen to be bright yellow creatures aptly called minions.

Besides the minions — who elicited oodles of giggles every time they hit the screen — Despicable Me is a film about parenting — just don’t tell the kids that. They’ll the leave the cinema thinking it’s about supervillains, squid-shooting guns and incredibly fluffy unicorns. Meanwhile, mums and dads will leave thinking it’s a redemption tale about the nature of parental love and the transformational power of kids on a parents’ mind, spirit and overall character.

So what’s the plot of Despicable Me? My 4-year-old daughter, Annabella, said, “It’s the story of that big guy trying to steal the moon and shrink it and do something with it.” My answer would have been it’s about a big guy who adopts three little girls and finds fatherhood more fulfilling than fulltime villain-hood. This multi-layered tale has that family-friendly power to appeal to young and old, girls and boys, and pretty much anyone with a heart — or a kid themselves.

The vocal cast includes Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, iCarly’s Miranda Cosgrove, and the one and only Julie Andrews, but you wouldn’t know it by merely watching the film; their voices were all but unrecognisable.

Steve Carell’s gruffy-voiced Gru has a devious scheme to steal the moon and enlists the help — unknowingly — of three little orphans. But deep down, the emotionally-damaged Gru is just trying to realise his childhood dreams of going to the moon — a dream his mum, voiced by Julie Andrews, all but squashed with her indifference.

Gru’s nemesis is the nerdy Bill Gates look-alike, Vector, voiced by Jason Segel. Besides having a weakness for baked goods, Vector’s back-story involves a need to please his dad and follow in thefamily business of doing evil. To put it simply, both villains — Gru and Vector — have some hardcore mummy and daddy issues.

And although my daughter loved the trio of orphans (and the unicorns and ballet dresses that accompanied them) undoubtedly, the movie’s biggest scene-stealers were the minions, a crew of squeaky creatures who do Gru’s bidding and help him accomplish his dastardly deeds. Annabella declared that “they were funnyland!”

Silly, sentimental and stunningly-animated, the film utilises some great optic tricks (two words: roller coaster!) But the story is so strong, the 2-D version would be just as powerful. And I bet the one hundred million minions would agree.

Dads at Delivery

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:30:44 +1000

In my first pregnancy, I knew I was not alone in my fear of pooping in the delivery room. I had the Internet and a bunch of women in my childbirth preparedness classes to echo my concern. In fact, in a poll I found online, 70% of women admitted to this same worry.

In one class I asked the teacher about it. Her answer was the same as any I’d read online: “You’ll poop, but you won’t care.”

When she saw I wasn’t comforted by her answer, she added, “Besides, the nurses and doctors have seen it all. Everyone does it.”

My concern was not for the doctors and nurses; it was for my husband. I don’t burp in front of him, and I don’t pass gas either. I spent the first six months of our relationship “taking a walk” and finding a public restroom when necessary. Now, married for 4 years, though I no longer take the walks, I still close the door to pee, and I never let him watch me wax my mustache or tweeze my eyebrows. (In fact, if you see him, please don’t let him know I do either of those things…)

As my first pregnancy progressed, I became more anxious that whatever went down in that delivery room would burn an image on my husband’s retina that would make it impossible for him to ever see me as a sexual being again.

But would he? I had to ask some men.

I started with Mickey, a TV writer. His response was comforting: “Honestly, I think it is one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen.”

I moved on to James. He works for one of those humour websites whose content consists of men getting kicked in the testicles a lot. There’s no way he wasn’t grossed out by the birth of his son, I was sure. And he even confessed that his wife “was really worried, so she requested that I stay up near her face when she gave birth and not look down south” and that he’s “pretty squeamish” and “didn’t object.” But, as she was delivering, the doctor grabbed him and pulled him down there, saying, “Here he comes! You gotta see this!” James’ response? “I watched the whole thing in full 3-D glory. I was so emotional that the thought of being grossed out didn’t even cross my mind. I was just crying and shaking and so happy.”

But how about later? When it was time to resume the amorous life, did the memories come back? “I didn’t really associate the vagina giving birth with the vagina I have sex with,” he mused. “It was almost a different entity.”

In fact, not one of the 12 men I spoke with mentioned being grossed out; not one of them mentioned being at all turned off later when it was time to have sex. And not one of them mentioned poop.

The closest I came to the answer I had anticipated was from Robert, a magazine editor, who described labour and delivery in these terms: “It goes from being a Ron Howard movie to a David Cronenberg movie.”

So it was gross, right? “Nah,” he says. “It was pretty amazing.”

Were all these guys lying to me, or were my teacher, my friends, and the Internet correct? How could it be that you could poop in front of your husband and both recover from it?

Dr. Louann Brizendine is a neurobiologist, M.D, and the author of The Male Brain, the sequel to her bestselling first book, The Female Brain. She says that men don’t think of birth as gross because they don’t process it as gross. “The level of emotional intensity and being on the line of life and death — because it is a life and death moment and everyone in that delivery suite knows that — gets recalled through that lens. The guys wrap all those memories into having watched the woman go through the absolute torture you have to go through delivery. His level of admiration and respect for her physical courage and ability to get through that kind of physical feat that he will never have to do overpowers all the other stuff. He’s in awe.”

Then, when the couple gets back to the master bed (if they can ever get any privacy), “Sex takes over his mind, and little details like the vision of mucous, blood, poop, and babies are rapidly forgotten under the sway of his libido.”

Of course I was happy to hear that, but as it turned out, I didn’t end up pooping. Thirty hours into it, I was wishing I’d had the opportunity to as I was wheeled into an operating room. The curtain hid the view from myself, but it didn’t hide the smells, the sounds. My husband sat next to me. When we heard the baby cry, I urged him to leave my side and go tend to the baby, to see how he was doing. As he walked past my body, disconnected in so many ways from the rest of me, he saw me wide open on the operating table, my organs out for evaluation.

Now he has seen my insides turned out; he cannot un-see them. And though he has never used a word like “gross,” the experience left him jarred, seeing his whole wife in parts. When we returned home from the hospital, his hands tiptoed around me, almost as though he might be afraid I had been made of paper this whole time — a kiss on the forehead, a hug around the shoulders. Now it’s almost three years later, and though I know that, to him, I am still more delicate, more human than before, he still swings me around the living room to a favourite song and hugs me very, very tight. What he saw that day was put in a file marked “Harder Times” in his head, and it hasn’t affected our lives or our intimacy. Time went on, and now when he looks at me or when we look at our son, we do not see the trauma of his birth or the fracturing his mother endured to get him here. We see only our boy.

To me, that is the most amazing part of this process. Whatever we go through in birth, we somehow stand up, brush ourselves off, and continue our lives. Our children never represent what we went through on that day. And somehow, our husbands and partners don’t seem to let anything that happened then matter, either. Whether it was what we said, how we cried, or what they saw, our bodies were the giver of this gift. Eventually, they forget what it came wrapped in.

I Let My Kid Play Violent Video Games

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:30:36 +1000

My 12-year-old son, Eli, is an avid gamer. The TV no longer interests him. Cartoons are relics of a vanished civilisation. When his daily allotment of screen time rolls around, he makes a beeline to the computer (or the Xbox 360, or his handheld Nintendo DS, or his new phone) and starts blasting away at his legions of enemies.

On a normal weekday, after homework is done, he is permitted about an hour to an hour and a half of gaming. It’s usually around the time I’m making dinner, so I’ve become accustomed to hearing ghastly sounds bursting out of the computer speakers while I chop garlic or debone a chicken thigh. My son gets bored quickly, so a typical gaming stint will include demonic cackles from his Level 65 “World of Warcraft” Death Knight alternating with the drawn out howls of pain from battling soldiers in “Team Fortress II” — along with the assorted explosions, machine gun fusillades, shrieks and screams that make up the rest of the soundtrack of modern gaming violence.

My son is not unusual. Boys under 17 years old account for 18 percent of the overall market for videogames (more than double the market share of girls the same age), according to industry group Entertainment Software Association. 12-13 year-olds are the peak of that demographic — hours spent gaming decline for older teens, presumably because the opposite sex has become more interesting. Boys are especially drawn to violent games — far more so than girls. Ratings systems designed to shield minors from “adult” games are a joke. Most big game retailers have a policy against selling games rated "M" (for Mature) to children under 17, but at least one parent of your child’s friend will blithely ignore recommendations. It’s much easier to play a violent video game than get into an R-rated movie. One study published in The Journal of Adolescent Health found that in a sample of over 1000 children, 68 percent of the boys reported that they played at least one mature-rated game regularly.

Among my son’s peer group, there is no more popular way to pass the time than to gather in front of a console and start piling up the blood and gore.

The Case for Critical Thinking

Why does Eli love first-person shooter games where it’s kill or be killed, where your outlook on the world is framed by whatever weapon you happen to be wielding? Because, he says, it’s “fun!” Because it’s “exciting!” Because … and he imitates a paranoid, hopped-up combat fighter’s body language — muscles tensed, eyes flitting from side-to-side, anticipating danger from every angle — and leaves the rest unsaid: The virtual world gets the adrenaline going.

Dating back to their earliest toddler days, when my children — I have a 15-year-old daughter — first started reaching for the remote control and the mouse, I’ve been concerned about how good parenting and modern entertainment intersect. I’ve generally taken a pretty liberal approach — likely due to a combination of factors. My parents never banned anything — my father was a television critic and I have always been a voracious consumer of media of all kinds. Censoring my children’s media consumption felt hypocritical from day one. With the one major exception of sexually explicit material, and within the constraints of regularly enforced screen time limits (TV, games, Facebook all fitting under that one category), I’ve mostly let my children watch and play what they want, although I do make sure to keep an eye on whatever it is they are checking out. Even if I believed it was possible to successfully cordon off the forbidden (which I don’t), my basic position has been that I’d rather raise my kids to critically engage the world than attempt to shelter them from it.

In general, I’m not unhappy with the results. My daughter may have ended up watching more episodes of America’s Next Top Model than I am comfortable with, but she is also a third generation feminist and is able to balance that contradiction. And my son may leave a trail of virtual corpses (human, alien, and magical) behind him everywhere he games, he may devote an inordinate amount of brain power to the question of what type of battle-axe his latest barbarian giant should be packing, and he can talk your ears off discussing the varying merits of the newest handheld gaming devices (“I know my lore,” he once told me, when I expressed surprise at how far back his encyclopedic knowledge of the gaming industry went), but he is in general a sociable, friendly, enthusiastic kid, fully engaged with school. He likes to roughhouse with his friends but he’s never been in a fight. He’s just your typical sweetheart who has slaughtered millions.

When Videogames Become Too Realistic

So I think I’m doing something right. My sample of one declares that obsessive gaming, properly regulated, doesn’t lead immediately to social dysfunction — at least not yet. But even so, I feel a sense of disquiet at just how much his entire generation is drawn to the killing fields. Too much of their interaction with the world is mediated, too much of it is high-intensity adrenaline-revving virtual combat, too much of the real world seems boring and uneventful, compared to the gaming life. What happens when my boy leaves the nest? Will he disappear into a videogame vortex? I wonder where this is all headed, for the simple reason that games are just getting too compelling.

Computer gaming has been a part of growing up for at least 35 years now, dating back to Pong and PacMan. But we have never seen anything like the complexity, aesthetic power, narrative depth, realism, immersiveness and addictive potential of today’s games. In the game “Spore,” you can evolve your own life form from scratch into a space-faring civilisation (and choose whether to be warlike or peaceful.) One of 2009’s hits, “Assassin’s Creed 2,” places you on the canals of Renaissance era Venice — in a world as lush as any painted by Titian or Tintoretto. “World of Warcraft” draws you into a fantasy landscape so rich and deep and interactive that reading J. R. R. Tolkien feels like a pale simulacrum, a bowl of bran that can’t compete with a 12-course banquet.

And then there’s the blockbuster smash of 2009, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” which grossed $US550 million in revenue just five days after its November release, putting it on a par with the biggest Hollywood productions. “Modern Warfare 2” delivers a hyper-realistic commando-fighting experience merging amazing movie production values with a narrative of terrorism, global warfare and constant peril ripped directly from the latest headlines in Afghanistan, Moscow and Washington. Watching kids play it is not unlike imagining yourself inhabiting the TV series 24; That much realism gives me pause.

The real world has a harder and harder time competing with these marvels of simulation. If I didn’t impose screen-time limits, my son would play these games until he keeled over.

Handling the Skeptics

My ex-sister-in-law, a mother of three young boys, views violent games as an evil distillation of 10,000 years of male war-mongering and brutality; she is convinced, like many pundits and psychologists, that such games desensitise kids to violence. Almost every parent I know worries about this to some extent, even if they don’t go quite so far as to denounce all of human civilisation. At the other end of the spectrum stand eloquent gaming advocates like Steven Johnson, who provocatively argues that hours spent in virtual distraction can positively prepare kids to excel in an ADHD, relentlessly multitasking world. I can’t subscribe to either view. The data, to say the least, are inconclusive. Untangling cause and effect from socioeconomic status, family dynamics and genetic predisposition is no easy task.

But it seems undeniable that there are consequences to so many hours spent in immersive, interactive environments. So in the absence of knowing anything for sure, what are we supposed to do?

Teaching Real World Lessons Through Gaming

When my kids first started watching television, rather than try to avoid commercials, I asked them to ask themselves one question whenever an ad came on: What do they want me to buy? It became a game even kindergarteners could play: Deconstruct the media! And I tried, when possible, to experience the world with them, rather than from afar. A critical stance, I hoped, would arm them against media propaganda better than placing them in an isolation ward. But what this requires is active engagement on the part of the parent, too. You can’t just let the TV be a babysitter. So I didn’t stop my preteen daughter from watching America’s Next Top Model, but you can be sure there were plenty of conversations about how pop culture treats women’s bodies.

I’ve tried to continue the same policy of engagement with gaming. When my son spends an hour talking about an escapade in “World of Warcraft” or "Team Fortress II," I try to draw connections between virtual war and real war, without being heavy-handed. I check in on him while he’s playing — his computer is in the dining room between our kitchen and family room, so he is always part of the house dynamic, rather than squirreled away behind closed doors. If he is playing a game I’ve never seen before — because you can find almost anything on the Web — I want to know what he likes about it. And I’m not shy to tell him when I find something objectionable. Once I was alarmed to discover him playing a Web-accessible game that featured street-fighting hobos beating up on each other in a darkened alley. He thought it was funny; I thought it was disgusting. But rather than ban it, I wanted to make sure he understood why I thought it was mean. We launched into a mini discussion of why poverty and homelessness weren’t all giggles.

How much of it stuck? I have no idea. I never saw him play the game again. But I’m betting that this strategy will have a more effective long-term impact than a command-and-control approach.

One recent attempt to exert some level of editorial responsibility over gaming turned out to be an almost comic failure. I decided not to buy him “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” for his birthday last November because I was suspicious of its rah-rah nationalistic politics and disturbed by just how closely it looked like footage from Iraq or Chechnya. I didn’t want to be personally responsible for bringing it into the house. A few months later, half of his best friends had the game and his opportunities to play it seem unlimited.

Having the Videogame Conversation

Eli doesn’t particularly like it when I express my distaste for some aspect of his gaming life. I’m sure he isn’t looking forward to having his Modern Warfare gaming accompanied by my kibitzing on the ineffectiveness of torture or how Government policy in the Mideast helps to breed terrorism. But he does appreciate it when I take his world seriously. He enjoys the give and take. And he’s getting a big dose of my values, without my bashing them into his brain with a sledgehammer.

A few months ago, my ears perked up when I heard the voices of young men spewing out a wide range of homophobic, racist and misogynistic comments from the computer speakers. Eli was playing a game called "Team Fortress 2," another first-person shooter, but one in which you could hear the live comments of other human players currently logged in and playing on the same server.

My first impulse was to tell him he shouldn’t be playing a game frequented by such cretins. But I knew a teenager who lives at his mother’s house played the game regularly, and I could not control his exposure over there. One way or another, he was going to hear this crap. So I kept to my usual path. I asked him if he understood why I found their comments so objectionable. I made fun of the intelligence of his fellow gamers, suggesting, uncharitably, that they hadn’t been brought up very well. He got a sour look on his face, but eventually he admitted he didn’t particularly like hearing a lot of the commentary either. He couldn’t tell me exactly why, but I’d like to believe it was because he recognised at some level that this kind of crudity just wasn’t cool. We ultimately found out there was a way to mute individual players if you wanted to.

He still plays the game, but I’m pretty sure that when he’s out of my sight, when he’s older or when there is no one around to enforce any rules, he won’t go over to that dark side—or at least not too far. All the engagement, all the conversation, has, I think, helped him tell the difference between the gaming reality and how to behave in the offline world, how to treat people with respect.

I believe all this, even if one can never be totally sure what is going on in the inner recesses of your child’s heart and mind. And I know I’m taking a gamble, but all our bets on how to raise our children are gambles. There are no hard-and-fast rules guaranteeing success, especially in a world that changes as quickly as ours does. The best we can do is make it up as we go along, keep asking questions, keep watching and keep listening. If we stay in the game, we have a better chance of influencing how it all plays out.

Do Kids Make Us Happy?

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:30:06 +1000

Recently, parenthood has taken a hit in the media. Multiple studies published in the last few years have concluded that having children decreases our well-being and leads to stress and conflict in the couples’ relationships. But should we believe the research?

Evidence That Kids Reduce Happiness

Take this article from last year’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, for example. The researchers followed couples for eight years and reported a general downward trend of happiness in the marriage after kids. The worst time for the couples’ relationship was after the birth of their first child, when ninety percent of the participants reported that the quality of their marriage had plunged. Another study used data from 13,000 households and found lower levels of emotional wellbeing and higher rates of depression among parents.

But how can this be? Most of us chose to have a kid (and then maybe chose to have more) and wouldn’t think of doing things differently. Many happiness researchers, however, say that we think kids make us happy because one toothy grin or warm nuzzle from our babies can suddenly erase eight hours of nappies and meal preps. It’s true that those moments have an intense hold on us, even at a chemical level. Love-inducing neurotransmitters like oxytocin are released in those cuddly times. Do they have an amnesic power?

Evidence That They Don’t

A recent study from the University of Glasgow, however, had more positive news for parents. The Glasgow researchers tracked people in 10,000 U.K. households and found that kids do increase life satisfaction. Nor should you stop at one; they found that the biggest boost to life enjoyment came with two or three kids.

Knowing that their findings buck the prevailing wisdom (and most other recent studies), the Glasgow team explains that their data paints a rosier picture of parenthood because they isolated certain variables, like age, sex, and marital status. Married people with middle-class incomes were the ones who reaped the most kid benefits, while unmarried couples or those under extreme financial hardship fared less well. The authors of the study say they think kids improve quality of life when it’s the “right time” for the couple.

But What Is Happiness?

In reconciling all these studies, however, let’s remember that happiness is a slippery term. Yes, if you’re asking about day-to-day fun — eating out, travelling, etc. — then life pre-children is probably going to win. But kids add a level of meaning and purpose to our lives, and generally people tend to feel better when they are emotionally connected to something important. People without kids find meaning in romantic partners, friends, other family members, work, and hobbies. But when kids are in the picture, watching them grow — and feeling our relationships with them grow too — can be hugely satisfying.

Another study released late last year — not about families, but about hard work — speaks to this point. The Journal of Happiness Studies reported that people feel happy when they work hard at something, but they don’t necessarily feel happy in the moment. While they’re struggling with a difficult task or new skill, enjoyment goes down and stress goes up. But those same activities made them feel happy and satisfied when they looked back on their day as a whole. So yes, if you asked a mum while she’s prepping dinner, with one baby on her hip and another one climbing on the dining room table, if she’s feeling over the moon, the answer might be no. But, at the end of the day, ask her what the most important thing in her life is and she’s bound to say her kids.

While My Kids Sleep… I Throw Away Their Toys!

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:30:28 +1000

When I was growing up, my mother’s end-of-her-rope tactic when my sister and I refused to clean our room was, “I’m going to throw all your toys away!” Sometimes she got out a giant black rubbish bag and chased us around the room with it. She grew seven feet tall when she did that and sparks shot from her eyes.

Which is to say, she shook a rubbish bag in the general direction of our mountain of toys as she sat down to patiently help us clean up—again.

I am not my mother. I never threaten to throw my children’s toys away, but sometimes, when the kids are sleeping at night, I really do throw their toys away. Right in a big black rubbish bag.

I should feel guilty about this, but I don’t. I secretly enjoy it. I find it soothing to put a fistful of puzzle pieces in the garbage and know that I’ll never again look for the missing one.

It’s liberating to throw a toy in the bin. Poof! I am no longer responsible for that object. I won’t spend another second of my life stooping to pick it up. I never again have to play referee over who plays with it. I don’t have to wait for a Freecycler to take it or have it sit in a donation box on my bedroom floor for six months until I get it together to drive to Goodwill. It’s just gone and I’m free of it.

I look for excuses to throw toys out. This train track has a jagged edge. Toss it! The box of beads spilled? Well, picking them out of the dust bunnies is just too much work. Bye-bye, beads! This Bob the Builder storybook was peed on. Can we trash this? Yes, we can!

Mostly, I keep my toy-trashing to small stuff: art supplies I could salvage but don’t want to, broken dolls, puzzles with missing pieces, books with torn pages. Sometimes, I indulge myself in getting rid of stuff that just really annoy me. Every Christmas, I commit quiet genocide on the battery-operated gizmos from grandparents and all the excess sweets.

My worst sin: when I throw away things, I tell the girls I’m putting them in a “special place” to “fix” later, like all those Polly Pocket Princess dolls whose heads have snapped off and won’t go back on for love, money or superglue.

Mercifully, I’ve never been busted. My kids are young and their passions are fleeting. They rarely ask after a toy I’ve thrown out. On the rare occasion that they do bring it up, it’s usually weeks after the fact and there’s no emotional weight behind the inquiry. I tell them the toy “went away,” or sometimes very candidly that I threw it out and they quickly move on to other distractions. My guess is that as they get older, this will work less well. My prayer is that their playthings will come with fewer little pieces that get strewn around the house.

Another good reason not to feel guilty: my kids just have too many things. Some of it has to go.

Between the carefully preserved treasures of childhoods past and the Christmas loot of childhoods present, we have a lot of toys. We have three dollhouses, two large sets of Tinkertoys and a 120-litre bucket full of stuffed animals. The wooden trains in this house could probably take you to Uluru if you laid out all the track.

I know how I’m supposed to deal with this. Good Mothers pack the toys up in little storage bins with labels and carefully rotate them so that only a few are out at a time. That way the kids always have something novel to play with and Mum never has an uncontrollable mess on her hands.

Let’s just say I am not a “neatly labelled storage bin” kind of person.

Apparently, the right way to go about the process is to explain to your children why their toys need to be binned. Jen Hunter, who runs Boston-based Find Your Floor, cautions against throwing children’s things away in secret. She says it can make kids insecure and lead to hoarding behaviours in later life. Instead, you should sit down with your child and tell them why it’s time to let go of some things. Getting you child engaged in the process of thinning out toy clutter will not only give you a happier kid, it’ll help them learn the skills to be a clutter-free adult.

She also points out that we can’t always tell what our kids are attached to. As parents, we may be tempted to weed out the trashiest items in the toy chest and keep the pretty stuff, but remember the Velveteen Rabbit? That filthy toy with a missing a limb that got that way because your kid played with it. There are some kids that Hunter calls “jr. hoarders” who are irrationally attached to toys they don’t even play with. But a toy might still be dear to them, even though it’s broken or covered with dog drool.

So, yes, I get it that sneaking toys into the rubbish while the kids sleep is bad. But I just can’t give up the feeling of freedom I get when I toss a toy that I’ve tripped over one too many times.

Five’s Company

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 08:30:43 +1000

I thought I was done raising young children. I’d been a single dad since Chet, my littlest one was just eight months old and his big sister, Ava, was three and a half. I’d blogged about it, written a book about it, congratulated myself on what a faithful parental servant I’d been to them, and now that they are of school age, I get a thrill commanding them to unload the dishwasher, take out the trash or make their beds. I had started imagining the day when I could just toss them a twenty and say, “Be home before midnight.”

And then I fell desperately in love with a woman and her eighteen-month-old heartbreaker.

Like Al Pacino in Godfather III, I suddenly said to myself: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” I’m telling you, before falling in love with Amanda and Maia, I could see the finish line: a time in the near future when I could go to the movies without factoring in an extra sixty bucks for a sitter, when, if my single friends from my former hipster days blew into town unannounced and invited me on some fabulous adventure that night, I could instantly say yes.

As part of our divorce mediation, my ex-wife and I had agreed to a “six-month rule.” We’d have to date someone six months and be positive that they would be a significant part of any future plans before introducing them to our kids. Amanda and I started dating around the Super Bowl, introduced the kids to each other around Father’s Day and were all living together in my New York City apartment by Labor Day.

For me, diapers were the biggest reminder that it was déjà vu all over again. The first time Amanda asked me to change Maia she said, “Are you sure you still remember?”

Remember? Ava stayed in diapers late. With the dissolution of my marriage I wasn’t about to push her. The result was that in the first six months after my then wife moved out, I was changing both kids, often at the same time. By the end I felt like one of those master pizza-pie-throwers or circus plate-spinners, or maybe a Benihana chef. When I changed diapers I should have charged admission to watch. That was just four years ago. Of course I still remembered. And then my memory was put to the test.

“Um, is the big picture of Dora supposed to be on the back or the front?”

I’d forgotten everything. Maia just looked up at me as if saying, “Is my mummy really in love with this idiot?” Then that oddly sweet smell re-invaded my brain and suddenly my past life came bubbling back to me. I held her fat little legs together and high in the air with one hand as if she were a freshly plucked turkey and I remembered that for a girl I had to wipe front to back. A fingertip full of Desitin, Velcro the wings shut, a quick tap on the butt and she was off again, wobbly race-walking back to play with the big kids.

“Ava’s daddy,” she murmured as she careened away.

“Chet’s daddy,” Chet corrected her, as he does dozens of times a day, to no avail.

Before Maia, Ava had been bugging me for yet another American Girl doll, but now Ava had a real one. Soon she was not only helping me change Maia but changing her herself. At the playground she helps her up the ladder to the slide and does her best to hoist her into the baby swings. Half the week Maia and her mum are off in Boston, where Amanda is getting her Ph.D., but as soon as Maia enters our apartment she runs and throws her arms around Ava’s neck.

I was initially more afraid of how Chet, the former baby of the family, would react. He, however, is perhaps the most gaga over our new little one. When he’s not pretending to be a monster, causing her to run squealing into my arms to protect her, he’s kissing her cheeks. When one of his friends called Maia a little devil (Chet’s nickname for her), he wrestled him to the ground.

Of course this is not to say that any of it is easy. We single parents grow especially territorial and sometimes a bit rigid. After the trauma of the breakup, it’s only natural that the new, smaller family binds together with a bit of a scar. At first it was hard for us to truly open up to these two new ones and they to us. Since both Amanda and I were thriving single parents, it’s been a real transition for us to again accept parental consensus.

It didn’t help, for example, that we’d each read different parenting manuals. The family bed, for example, has been a big adjustment for me. Unlike my kids, who were out of the co-sleeper after six months, almost-three-year-old Maia still begins her evening in the toddler bed next to ours, and by the morning she’s invariably glued to her mother’s neck. Add in Amanda’s insistence that the dog also sleeps in the bed, and my nights are spent clinging to the corner. If little Maia didn’t smell so good after a bath, hug so tight, and say things like, “Turn the dark light on” when she wants the light off, if she didn’t do a million things every day to make me love her more and commit even more deeply to watching and helping her grow up, and if her beautiful mother didn’t make me happier than I’ve ever been in my adult life, then I might be mad about how little sleep I’m getting.

I came from a family of four, had created my own family of four for a little over half a year, and then for six years commanded an invincible little family of three. A family of five, for me, is unchartered territory. Now that that we adults are outnumbered, Amanda and I have moved from a man-to-man defense to a zone. We have to pull out the leaf on the dining room table when we eat, the dishwasher and the laundry should just stay on in continuous loops, and the TV shuttles between the Wonderpets, Star Wars Clone Wars and Hannah Montana. When single friends come over, they gape at our familial chaos. If we lived under a big top I’d call us Cirque de la Famille and sell tickets.

Gradually, however, I’m getting the hang of it, I think. There are extended moments when I actually think we’ve got it under control. Of course it is exactly in those moments of calm that Amanda reminds me that we’ve agreed to adopt a little girl in the next two years. Her name will be Sadie.

On Love, Arguing and Psychosis

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:30:26 +1000

I met my husband when I was twenty years old. Most people enter marriage with their parents’ old china and Velvet Elvis paintings; we had those plus abandonment issues, histories of domestic assault, and a complete inability to communicate on every level — oh, and youth, which is arguably the greatest obstacle we had to overcome.

During the first decade of our lives together, we grew up together, grew apart together, fell out of love, figured out who we were as individual people, fell back in love with those people, and had three children. And today I can say that we’ve finally figured this “married with kids” thing out.

Well, yesterday we had it figured out. Today my husband and I fought in front of our children for the first time ever — like, in twelve and a half years of having kids ever. I don’t mean to say that we don’t ever fight because god knows we do; it’s just that, when we fight, we make sure our kids never see it. We both come from split families — I had the domestic assault one; his had the abandonment — so we’ve worked really hard to keep our crap between us. Sure, we fight, but we don’t do it often, and when we do, it’s in private and it’s over almost as soon as it starts.

Usually, I will start being an insane a**hole and he’ll tell me to go take a five-minute walk to sort it out. Or he’ll open a big, fat can of jerkface and I’ll tell him to check it before I am forced to wreck it. (That usually works.) We’ve learned over the years to mitigate each other’s mood-swings, and, because of that, our kids had never once born witness to anything more than a long scowl or a stern “Other room, NOW.”

But today it would seem that my Mercury was firmly lodged in his Uranus, because while I was trying to get my middle son to clean the damn bathroom, my husband decided that at that very second, that same child needed to take the vacuum to his brother. I was so sick and tired of trying to get the kid upstairs to the bathroom, I told my son no. And my husband told him yes. So I told my husband no, and he told me to f— off, and I told him to shove it, and he threw the vacuum, and I told him to get the f— out.

Because we’re five, that’s why.

Meanwhile, my nine-year-old was just standing there, watching this whole parade of lunacy unfold before him, and as soon as dad walked out of the room, he started to cry.

Because we’re fantastic parents, that’s why.

He cried and told me he was scared. I held him and reminded him that he fights worse than that with his brother every day, pointed out that I am a pain in the butt and his dad is an overbearing know-it-all and we’ve lived together for 15 long, long years. So of course we fight sometimes.

And now I don’t know if I’m sad that my kid had to see us acting like three-year-olds or if I’m secretly a little glad that he witnessed an argument that resolved itself within ten minutes with a big hug and two unprompted and very sincere apologies (that I made sure happened right in front of that kid) and then ice cream, because ice cream cures all evils. Am I wrong to think that I should be teaching him that it’s okay to have conflicts and that the world doesn’t end when you have them? Because I lived thirty years thinking one raised voice meant the End Of Civilization as we know it, and I never learned how to fight and get over it until I had to learn the hard way.

Perhaps that’s a rhetorical question. I just worry sometimes that my kids think their parents’ marriage is this perfect, happy-go-lucky thing and because of that, when their time comes, they will have no clue how to deal with the reality of marriage — the reality that our partners are all, on occasion, more than a little crazy, but we love each other through it anyway.

I Hate Taking My Kid to 3-D Movies

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:30:36 +1000

(Warning: movie spoilers ahead!)

I’m going to come right out and say it: I loathe 3-D movies. If there was a Facebook-style dislike button one could press when an ad for a 3-D movie came on TV, I would lean on that sucker to make my point. When yet another 3-D movie ostensibly marketed to the whole family is released, I pray my kids won’t notice. But they do notice — how could they not? — they’re TV watchers, internet surfers and general marketing targets. And once my kids see the promo, it’s over. They start counting the days until the movie is released — always mentioning it with the enthusiastic descriptor “in 3-D!” Lest I forget.

Let’s get the first set of complaints out of the way. 3-D movies: cool. Spending nearly $50 for matinee tickets for a family of four: not so cool. Yes, there’s something priceless about a special experience, but the “special” that used to apply to 3-D back in the dark ages (when it was used as an event device and we wore flimsy paper glasses) is a thing of the past. Today, there’s a new 3-D offering every week.

Most (but not all) of my issues can be traced to the stupid glasses. In the first place, they’re awkward — and if the cinema you frequent offers the reusable kind — of questionable cleanliness. Sure, I see employees spray them with what looks like disinfectant as we leave, and I’m no germophobe, mind you, but I just don’t trust it.

Next problem: the movie trailers. Previews for any and every movie with 3-D technology headed for theaters start rolling 18 months ahead. And in my unscientific sampling, I’ve found that at least 40 percent of the previews my kids watch at a 3-D animated feature are not age-appropriate. The doomsday sci-fi high-impact action movies, in particular, scare the bejeezes out of my three-year-old. I never expect to see these types of previews when my family sits through yet another Shrek or Ice Age movie, but apparently according to the Hollywood bigwigs, 3-D is the great equaliser. Um, no.

Then, once the movie starts, I’m robbed of one of my favourite experiences in the cinema with my kids: the ability to appreciate the look in their eyes as they become totally transfixed and transported. Covered by those oversized masks they call 3-D glasses, I can only infer their expressions.

All of this, of course, is predicated on the notion that my kids actually wear the glasses. Don’t get me wrong, my seven-year-old loves them, but my three-year-old finds them a little scary, a lot uncomfortable, and ultimately more fun to take on and off, drop on the floor, bang on the head of the patron in front of him… you get the idea. Which leaves my son watching most of the movie sans specs, and leaves me wondering exactly what kind of damage I’m doing to both his neurocortex and his already genetically predisposed crappy vision by allowing him to watch the pre-translated images.

All of which makes me further exasperated by the fact that only a scant handful of movies that are made in 3-D actually warrant the treatment. In the case of Toy Story 3, the usual Disney Pixar colour palate of vibrant-jump-at-you hues was actually compromised by 3-D. And while we’re on the subject, Toy Story 3 carried a message that was touching, and at moments, heartbreakingly honest in its sentimentality. Watching our hero, Andy, struggle between childhood and impending independence was one of the most emotionally satisfying movie experiences in recent memory. I found myself not just tearing up but getting downright weepy as Andy came to terms with growing up. But dammit, those friggin’ 3-D glasses were in the way, fogging up and making it very hard to wipe my tears away. (They don’t fit like regular glasses, so they’re ten times more awkward to deal with than my regular ones in weepfest situations.)

Listen, I’m no luddite. I married a guy who cut his teeth on Inspector Gadget and the Jetsons and has outfitted our house, nay, our life, accordingly. There is no bit of new technology that he does not find a way to harness into use for our convenience. A friend once joked that our house is wired in such a way that in order to watch TV, you have to first toast an English muffin which sets off a domino-effect of bells, whistles, switches and lights that makes the TV — which is controlled by task-gathering universal remotes — all the more absorbing and cutting-edge cool. Fine. But the idea of technology used for the sake of it or making a movie in 3-D just because you can is downright insulting.

Still, I go. I shell out the bucks. I try to get my little guy to wear the glasses, and then I get all self-important about why that particular cinematic gem was so not in need of 3-D enhancement. I do this in part because my kids enjoy the experience (and the bragging rights) of having seen something in 3-D. In fact, they’d watch almost anything in 3-D, which makes me wonder if I’ve got it all wrong and I should be recording instructional videos on manners, comportment and chore completion in 3-D for their viewing pleasure.

But inevitably I find myself ticked off at the laziness that passes for creativity while I cringe at a plotline that is clearly not appropriate — like the story thread in Despicable Me, in which Gru adopts three girls out of child slavery — er, an orphanage with a cookie business — and then returns them to the orphanage sometime later. No child, adopted or not, should ever see that message — and certainly not see it as funny. And in Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, which did a so-so job at spoofing old Bond movies, the only watchable scene involved stoner cats hopped up on catnip. Funny to me, but listening to my kids ape the dialogue with perfect inflection made me more than a mite uncomfortable.

Here’s what I think would make the 3D experience worthwhile: Bring it Rocky Horror style so that every member of the family must dress in the theme of the movie for an all-encompassing experience. This way, no matter how lazy the plotline or how inappropriate the themes, my kids can be fully distracted by taking off and putting on their costumes forty zillion times in the space of ninety minutes. (If I’m going to be driven crazy anyway, I’d at least prefer activity that will keep me from napping behind those blasted glasses.) And then, can we do something about the $20+ admission?

Parents, Facebook and Google

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 08:30:28 +1000

I Googled my mother. I was certain I knew everything there was to know about her — or at least everything a daughter wants to know.

She watches the detective show Bones twice a day, hates board games and bland food, loves coral lipstick, Hollywood tell-all books and George Clooney. She’s prone to offering unsolicited opinions, has no qualms about telling a brain surgeon how the ganglia really work, and goes to the movies with her sidekick, Marilyn. I know this stuff because we talk by phone, every week. That, and my sister fills me in.

It wasn’t always this way. As a teenager, we spoke very little. I figured she could never understand what it was like to be a kid. Now, a parent myself, the mirror has flipped. At least my generation has tools to help bridge the gap — tools like Google and social networks — at our fingertips.

When I joined Facebook, I took every security measure possible. It was months before I added a photo, then several additional weeks before I sent friend requests. One day, I found myself looking up everyone I’ve ever known, including my mother. To my surprise, I discovered she has a Facebook page, and with a fabulous photo that makes her look coy, playful!

How could this be? My mother is not playful; she is my mother. She makes chicken soup and tells me how to get stains out of tablecloths.

Who took that photo? Who are these people writing on her wall? I wanted to know, but I didn’t ask. Instead, I went with the flow and Googled her.

And up came her name.

Seems my mother has finally found an outlet for her commentary. She reviews books online, where her preference for fiction surprises me, especially those with dark, tawdry themes. Pity the authors she doesn’t care for; the word “annoying” comes up more than once in her reviews, some of which are picked up by other sites and reverberate across the Internet.

But books are only the beginning. She belongs to several “meet-up groups”. What are these? And why does a 76-year-old woman know and I don’t? On one of the sites, she answers the profile question: Which of these words best describes you? Talker. Listener. Icebreaker. She replies ALL. Then she goes on to note that in her opinion, people are defined by their experiences. Some of which, I find on another site (which I have also never heard of) lead me to THE BOMB:

My mother is registered on an online dating network.

Her code name — is that what you call it? — let’s just say, think Gone With the Wind. Why did she pick that? I want to know, but I dare not ask — after all, I am spying. Instead I go further undercover and register to read more. And there she is, in living colour, my mother, looking for “a date, a friend, an activity partner”, noting that she raised a family (finally, something I do know), has had several “vocations” and now watches her grandchildren with “great amusement.” What does that even mean?

When I get to the part about how she likes “witty dialogue with dinner,” I find myself wishing it wasn’t noon, so I could swish back a glass of wine. Now I’m certain I’ve been talking to someone else’s mother, not mine, for all these years.

The woman who thought my father hung the moon is saying, “Bring it on. I’m ready.”

Why didn’t she tell me?

There’s more. She both coordinates classes for seniors and takes classes for seniors — on everything from psychology to art history — enters writing competitions, and answers trivia questions. Online. With the computer my brother gave her.

“Have you Googled Mum?” I asked him soon after.

“Why would I Google Mum?” he answers — a man whose name, when Googled, fills up dozens of pages, and who lives only minutes from our mother.

Thousands of miles from his home, using my computer, I show him. He laughs till he can’t speak.

The thing is: Where do I go from here? Just because I can, is it right to keep tabs on my mother? Really, the whole concept behind “parental controls” on the Internet needs to be rethought. Who are the controls for? The parent or the kid with the nosy parent? What about the parent with a nosy kid? Can you blame anyone for looking? And if you don’t, and miss something big, how awful would you feel later?

Would she have gotten out and about and met new people and stayed connected to peers simply using the outdated tools of the telephone and snail mail, I’d say no way. And from everything I’ve read, the older you get, the more important it is to have communities, friendships and hobbies. As I approach my 50th birthday, I can’t help but wonder how the Internet will someday affect my relationship with my own kids. Will we talk to one another differently? Share more? Hide less? Will they like the new me or prefer the me they thought they knew? The one who says, “Pick up your clothes, dinner’s ready, and everything will be alright,” or the one who has friends from an online meet-up group?

But mostly I wonder if the Internet can take credit for people like my mother creating new versions of themselves, or if that new version has been there all along, and I just never thought to ask.

When she comes to visit this weekend, I will — face to face. I just hope she’ll send me a “friend request” when she gets back home.

Preparing Kids for Disappointment

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:30:47 +1000

Recently my daughter Phoebe and I were at a birthday party. Five-year-old girls poured from vents in the ceiling, cracks in the floor, through open windows. There were pigtails and pink clothing and loose teeth everywhere. A clown was flown in from New York to juggle stuffed bears, and two puppeteers performed a musical written about the birthday girl.

After an hour of fake fur and goofy high-pitched songs, the hostess approached with a tray covered mysteriously by a pink satin cloth. Beside the cloth rested a lone cupcake with one lit candle. The hostess held the tray aloft so little hands could not peek beneath the satin and led the group in a raucous round of “Happy Birthday.” Per usual, the girls screamed rather than sang Happy Birthday, their eyes all the while fixed on that tray. The instant the song ended, the mum lifted the cloth from the tray with a dramatic flourish.

“More cupcakes!”

Sure enough the tray was full of beautiful, oversized cupcakes iced in chocolate, vanilla and, of course, more pink. Some had candy crowns on top, some had princesses, and some had… squiggles?

A squiggle? How many five-year-old girls want a squiggle of purple frosting when they can have a candy princess or a crown? I’ll tell you how many: none. Mothers exchanged worried glances and a wave of panic filled the room as the hostess began handing out the cupcakes.

You could tell which girls got a squiggle because they were the ones with the quivering lower lips who silently held their cupcakes out to their mothers. That’s when I heard it, delivered in a firm hushed whisper into a morose child’s ear.

You get what you get and you don’t get upset.

It’s the thing we adults in charge are supposed to pronounce when what we really want to say is, “You wait here, honey, and I’ll go rip a princess cupcake out of Natasha’s hands and give it to you.”

The mum in question, she of the annoying and unfair parental platitude, looked up to find me staring at her. Her daughter held a squiggle cupcake between two fingers like it was a dead hamster. Mum and I locked eyes. I know she wanted confirmation, for me to nod in agreement, Yes, you get a squiggle and you feel fine. But I just couldn’t. To her dismay all I was able to do was shake my head.

What kind of mother serves princesses, crowns and squiggles? Of course the kids are upset. You get what you get and sometimes you get freaking crazy upset — ask any adult whoever was handed a pay increase less than what he or she requested, a quarter of Uncle Louie’s estate instead of half, bleacher tickets instead of seats behind home plate. You get what you get and sometimes you get pissed.

The mum looked down at the cupcake and shook her own head. Her daughter burst into tears.

Perhaps the notion that children need to learn to take what they’re given and not have negative feelings about it originated because when children have big, difficult emotions, (like those that happen when they get a squiggle rather than a princess or a crown), they want to cry and yell and throw the squiggle against the wall. But who wouldn’t? To me You get what you get and you don’t get upset seems more about denying an experience than teaching acceptance, more about dodging a tantrum and preventing disappointment than introducing a child to life lesson #8798: disappointment sucks but it happens all the time — sometimes every hour. How come we can’t discretely say, “You’re absolutely right, honey, squiggles suck”?

Denying disappointment doesn’t make it go away. So isn’t acknowledging it the first step in teaching our children how to manage that and other of life’s myriad upsets?

You get what you get and sometimes it’s totally worse than what someone else has gotten.

You get what you get no matter whether you’ve been a good girl for the last 24 hours or even the last 24 years.

You get what you get because some mothers are sadistic.

At the risk of causing a scene, I did the unthinkable. Her little girl stuck with the squiggle was looking at me with big sad eyes, the untouched cupcake limp in her hands.

I leaned over and whispered, “You get what you get and sometimes you do get upset.”

Her mouth fell open.

“But you eat it anyway.”

She smiled.

Thank goodness Phoebe got a crown.