New York City Girl

The world seemed glorious when we left the hospital with Claire for the first time. Truly, the sun greeted us more warmly, the breeze more gently, the ground held our feet…"Wait, what’s up with all the litter on the street? Ridiculous amounts of trash…"

As a parent, both good and bad seem more magnified. As a long time New Yorker, I used to be able to tolerate the city’s many bad parts. Parenthood has literally made me want to run for the hills (or just complain more loudly about NYC being loud).

I often wonder why we are raising a daughter in an over-populated, polluted place, short on greenery and civility. Our lack of square footage makes it tough for our newly walking daughter to get up enough steam before having to turn around and run the other way. I regularly detect marijuana smoke coming from the apartment down the hall. Claire learned the sound of a car horn before the tweet of a bird, the color of a school bus before a bee. I won’t bore you with my litany of complaints about the subway.

But speaking of the subway, let’s not forget about New York City and serendipity...

Yesterday, Claire and I hustled our way up the subway steps, and Malang Jobateh, Kora player, happened into our world. Breaking from the rest of the restless masses, we stopped to listen to him play. I had the good fortune of hearing the music through the innocent ears of a baby. Claire was mesmerized, eyes wide open, fully present. She even jammed to the beat a bit! 

I have waited 45 years for an introduction to the musical instrument, the Kora. Claire has beaten me by 44. She has also listened to mandolins, accordions, violins, flutes, guitars, drums, harps, cellos, basses and saxophones. She has danced with the Hare Krishnas, protested with the Falun Gong and partied with Puerto Ricans. She has rocked out at a punk rock concert at the Hudson Piers, and watched men and women dance to traditional Polish music in Central Park.

In true NYC fashion, we have planned for none of these experiences. Each performance, each gathering has been a happening. We have been spontaneously invited to join in the merriment by those caught up in celebration.

“Only in New York” is an ecumenical phrase. It can refer equally to the numerous nuisances of New York, as well as its many nuances. The challenge is remaining open to the contradiction of it all. A great place to start is by being in the moment -- something babies do very well.


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Potty City

A Puzzle: The following tale contains public nudity and sneaking through hotels, but is appropriate for a G rated sensibility.

First, some back story: When Claire was about four months old, our meal at a midtown diner was cut short by Claire’s explosive poop and a bathroom not fit for mankind. We hit the pavement with a poo-seeping baby in search of a restroom…

Slinking into the Parker Meridien hotel, I spy the ladies room just left of check-in. Opening the door, we confront an abundance of marble, but no changing table. Deflated, we turn around and run into a woman wearing a tag marked “Marketing Manager”.

“Can I help you?” she asks politely.

I think, “Nailed,”and answer, “No,"with a clip in my voice.

George asks for a bathroom with a changing table.

The woman counters with: “Are you staying in the hotel?”

“Nailed again," I think. “No," I confess.

She leans in and whispers, “Go up to the second floor. It’s quiet. Change her on a bench up there."

We nod in duplicity and head up the stairs briskly. Finding the least obtrusive area, we undress Claire quickly and expedite the damage. People walk by; I smile sheepishly.

I felt like I was dealing drugs or something. I started wondering why babies in public cause such a stir. I often find myself feeling apologetic when Claire is breastfeeding or is just plain loud in the public realm. Babies spend much of their lives sleeping, eating, pooping and screaming. Everyone finds a sleeping baby cute; pretty much everything else seems up for grabs. Come on, even Kim Kardashian got into the mix with her tweet opposing public breastfeeding.

Babies seem to remind us of our impulses, of baser needs and desires that we all wish to remain hidden. I remember reading somewhere that many theaters in the 1900’s were built without ladies’ room. It was considered unseemly that women peed!

The 21st century attitude towards babies is similar. If you ask me, this mind-set is our problem not a baby’s. I wish that Claire and her kind could be who they are in all their glory with no added eyebrow-raisings.

But then again, Claire is my child. And her poop smells like roses to me. Well, not really, but you get the point.

The Doctor is In

Claire and I have been enjoying our developmental movement class. Each week, my daughter enjoys hanging out with other babies while listening to the ukulele. I like that Claire is the star of the class on her tummy – thus indulging a baser impulse in me to live through my child for the first time.

This weekly delight was sullied a bit, though, when the group leader asked why we’d all taken his class. Most of the moms talked about spending more time on tummies or rolling over. I launched into my background as a special education teacher. How I’ve seen everything from reading disorders to writing difficulties go hand in hand with delays in gross motor skills. I said I was taking the class because I wanted to make sure that I was supporting Claire’s development in this area.

The other moms were interested in what I had to say. Not Dr. Movement. Perhaps my answer was too intense for him or I took up too much time. Perhaps I stepped on his toes a bit. He started by letting me know that delays in gross motor skills don’t necessarily translate into academic struggles. Then he warned me that my deficit model philosophy as a special educator could cause me to look for problems in my daughter instead of celebrating her strengths.

His lecture rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t like to be lectured. I don’t like to be lectured in front of people. I don’t like to pay someone to lecture me. And, most importantly, he couldn’t have been more off base. I think Claire is just perfect, thank you very much. I am not worried about a deficit in her. I am certain the problem lies within me. Wait, so there’s the skewed philosophy…children are born perfect and their parents mess them up. I will be no different as a parent.

This belief of mine was surely born of the therapist-ridden culture of NYC. Everyone I know is either messed up by their parents, thrives in spite of them or has had years on the couch to get back to status quo. Unbeknownst to him, Dr. Movement helped me realized that I had been either resigning myself to this fate for Claire or working myself into a frenzy trying to fight it. Well, that seemed a humorless perspective to me, and I started thinking it was precisely this vibe that made Dr. Movement give me a good talking to.

In the end, I am thankful to him. My perspective is a problem, just not the one he thought. Claire deserves a mom who feels confident in her ability to parent her. She needs a mom who can just let her be. So, as she works on her mini-pushups in class, I’m going to work on an attitude adjustment.