 |
Pony: Stranger Anxiety
10.23.2007
I had a couple of funny encounters yesterday.
First off, I have to say that dads who do a good portion of childcare, working it around their freelancing etc. - well they are a rare commodity in the playground.
I always make a point to say hello when I see a playground dad in the middle of the day, as it feels a little less straightforward to approach dads other moms, and I imagine they don't get their share of social feedback.
Yesterday, however, I met the kind of dad who was like the loathesome yoga-dude. Deadly serious. Defensive. Pedantic. And all-knowing.
"I am totally against strollers," announced the dad, unsolicited. "They are not good for babies. They spend nine months inside their mothers' bellies..."
You don't say...
"...and they don't know what a stroller is. It is traumatizing for them because it is too separate from the parent. We carried my kid in a sling the whole time. Never owned a stroller."
Even when she was a toddler? On long shopping days?
He lectured me about all the different kinds of slings as though I was new to this whole parenting thing, explaining how his kid had a better disposition than most because of this....
His odd boastfulness went on but I spaced out and fixated on a piece of earwax in G's ear.
"... And she never got earaches," he concluded, adding sagely: "Breastfeeding gives them immunity," as though he had personally lactated.
He was about to tell me about how you can toilet train your baby by three months if you just watch their cues, according to a study in Zambia. But Gabriel started to fuss to go on the swings, so I had to take off.
Shame.
I then went to the mall to get G's passpoprt pictures taken. G. has stranger anxiety these days, so when one woman stood up with the camera, and the other put her hands around his waist, he started to cry and reach for me.
The finally let me hold him on the stool, but he would not look at the camera. "Ok," I instructed to the woman with the tamborine, "you hide behind the photographer, and pop your head out, say "peek-a-boo!" three times, and he will look."
It worked, but I felt bad making her perform like that. Baby times can be strange times.
