Unsolicited Advice For New Parents

For anyone that's expecting, just had, or planning to someday have a baby, I offer this advice. After all, what is advice other than a repackaging of one's regrets?

If you're reading this, you obviously know that I've been keeping a rarely-updated blog about my experiences adapting to (and dealing with) fatherhood.


I originally wanted to start writing earlier (even before Kai's birth), but didn't -- and after he was born I was always so busy or so tired that I didn't get around to it.

If you're considering doing something similar, I hope you don't make the same mistake I did. If, like me, you try to write something but the words don't come out right, just get them down anyway and worry about rewriting it later. You'll be glad you did. My son is only six months old and I'm already sad and nostalgic for all the memories that I don't recall without a picture or an old email to create the spark.


For example, this picture makes me sad:

I don't know why, exactly. I think it's because looking at it I'm struck by how big his binky looks in his mouth. He was so tiny, and he's getting so big so fast.

When I spend the day with him, I admit I start thinking that I want him to go to sleep for a while so I can read some blogs, or catch up on my DVR backlog, check Facebook, etc.


But then I look at a picture like this and find myself just staring at it for a while. I think that I should have spent more time holding him, playing with him, reading to him, talking to him, singing to him. I should have taken more pictures. I should have recorded more video. I should have sat by his crib and just watched him as he slept. I should have written more of my experiences and feelings down so that later, I can go back and read what I wrote and remember how I felt, knowing that someday, when he's older, I might share these experiences with him.


And before anyone says "it's never too late!" or "every day is the first day of the rest of your life!" or the infinite other clichés, let me just preemptively say "I know!"

I will try to be better. I will try to keep perspective. But I lament what I've missed.

Death To America...

...courtesy of the Republican Party.

I've thought for years that the Republican Party and the people who continue to support them are simply bat-shit crazy. The things that the Bush Administration has done to erode our freedom in the name of security would cause any true "small government" Republican/conservative to recoil in horror.

What the Republican party has become is essentially a cult. The things that GOP politicians, pundits, and just regular people I know say to defend their party and the actions of the Bush Administration make no sense whatsoever. Ask any of them if they would want the power they've given President Bush to President Clinton, or Obama, or Hillary, or John Kerry, and they'd shit their pants.

Leave aside the idiocy that is the "tea party movement". Leave aside the idea that global warming is just a "myth". Leave aside the idea that the "free market" solves everything. What has bothered me the most about the Bush Administration and GOP politicians, pundits, and supporters, has been their blind support of dismantling some of the most core foundations of our government.

These Republicans, these so-called "small government conservatives", continue defend the government's claim that it can wiretap, detain, and imprison American citizens -- without getting a warrant, without charging them with a crime, without providing access to legal counsel. Indefinitely.

Think about that. On President Bush's word alone, any American citizen could've been taken to a military detention facility, often outside of our country's borders (Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, or any number of CIA "black site" secret prisons) and held indefinitely.

And this week, President Obama was legally compelled by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to release memos drafted by the Bush Administration's legal team that essentially said that it was legal to torture people.

And what to Republicans say about it? Do they say that it is horrible that our government is now doing the same stuff that led us to bring war crimes charges against the Germans and Japanese for doing to our troops in WWII?

Of course not!

Republicans say that these torture methods are "enhanced interrogation techniques" and that our entire national security depends on our ability to do this. More over, they say that now that these memos are public, that the techniques are "ruined" because our enemies will train to withstand them.

What fucking insanity!

First of all, these interrogation techniques were used by the Chinese and Koreans in order to extract false confessions to use as anti-American propaganda. Torture isn't used to get reliable intelligence. It's used to get useful information for political purposes.

For years, the Bush Administration has told us that the reason we went to Iraq was because our intelligence agencies failed -- they reported links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and that Iraq had WMD.

It has been reported this week that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were disappointed with the intelligence agencies because they did not prove that such a link existed, and that most of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq said that there were no WMD anywhere. In response, the Bush gang authorized increasingly abusive interrogation tactics, with the explicit directive to find evidence that the Saddam-al Qaeda link existed.

In other words, they were looking for a false confession. They were looking for propaganda. They were trying to invent a reason to go to war with Iraq.

And second of all, President Obama had already banned these techniques, so even if they were "ruined" it wouldn't matter since we don't do them anymore anyway.


Remember when people used to protest the Bush Administration or the Iraq war? Remember how the GOP called us "anti-American", or that we "hated the troops", or that we should support the commander-in-chief in a time of war? That protesting the government was treason?

And what now? On Obama's first day, did any of these same assholes live up to their own moronic standards? Or did they publically announce that they wanted our President, our commander-in-chief, to fail? Have you recently heard them talking about wanting Texas to secede from the Union?

Somehow in these lunatics minds, criticizing the invasion and occupation of Iraq is treason, but calling the President a foreign-born socialist fascist terrorist-sympathizer, hoping he fails, and wanting to secede, is patriotic?

The GOP is now distilled to a cliché: The lunatics are running the asylum.


What, you may ask, does any of this have to do with a blog about my parenting experience?

Everything, actually.


My parents were both fairly conservative. My dad is a life-long Republican who never misses an opportunity to tell me that Social Security is the biggest scam in the world. My parents raised us as Greek Orthodox Christians, and my brother and I were altar boys. My sister was in Missionettes, a conservative evangelical Christian (Pentecostal) wannabe version of the Girl Scouts.

But my sister, brother, and I are all pretty liberal. None of us are religious. All of us have basically developed political and religious views that are essentially the opposite of the environment in which we were raised.


My biggest fear is that my son will do the same. I suppose I can tolerate it if my son grows up and wants to believe in some religion or another. I can even tolerate it if my son wants to be a conservative. These, in themselves, are relatively harmless.

But what if he grows up to be the next Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich or Dick Cheney? How can I prevent that? How does someone even become that crazy?


I worry about becoming the kind of father that obsesses so much about protecting my child that I will end up doing more damage than good. Not in the medical or physical sense -- I will not ever dip my kid in antibacterial gel, or scream if he eats some dirt or a worm, or forbid him from climbing a tree or learning to surf or riding a dirt bike.

But I don't want him ever going to church. I don't want him to be around people who make anti-gay or racist comments. I don't want him around people who think that poor people or black people or Mexicans or Muslims are scary or inferior.

Is this the ideological version of putting him in a bubble? If so, what happens when it pops?