Hello! Word is there’s been lots of mommy/ daddy warcrap over the past few weeks. How’s that coming along? Is is safe to come out yet?

The latest wave of weirdness is this new thing where parents have to tell you if they love their children more than their spouses, or vice versa. Because calibrating your love barometer is an important source of life data. Because you can apply a regression model to determine that love as a function of x, and then:

• extrapolate that love to predict ordinate love levels throughout the life of the abscissa;
• use the first derivative to determine the instantaneous rate of change of that love at any moment;
• use the second derivative to determine if your love has reached an inflection point (and it’s time to see a couples therapist); and
• integrate that love function to calculate the aggregate amount of love you have received.

If all this feels like complete nonsense, your table is waiting here in the Restaurant of Every Parent in the World.

Can you raise awareness by "disappearing"?

The thing about divorce with kids is that you start too many sentences with “the thing about divorce with kids.”

Another thing about divorce with kids is that, at the peak of the fight, when your love has somersaulted into hatred, you start thinking, “My life would be so much better if she wasn’t around anymore.” Your fevered, anguished mind takes you to dark places, where you fantasize about getting a phone call that the plane your ex-wife was on plunged into the Pacific. Or the gym says she had a massive aneurysm on the treadmill and was dead before she hit the floor.

You don’t want her to suffer, necessarily. You just want her gone.

Because then, the constant source of your unyielding stress suddenly evaporates. No more haggling over dissolution and finances, no more forced interaction with the living embodiment of your failure. And you have total autonomy over how and where you raise your kids.

You’re not proud of these thoughts, but you acknowledge them. And then, as the stress eases, the parameters of your new life coalesce, and you can think clearly about what’s best for your kids, you realize that losing a mom is a terrible thing for any kid to endure. And growing up without one is even worse.

Which brings me to No Mother’s Day.

(See what I did there? I wrote a provocative headline about the TRUE THINGS THAT ALL PEOPLE MUST ACCEPT BECAUSE THEY ARE TRUE that is far more bombastic than the piece itself. And now, I’d like to spend the next several paragraphs discussing corn subsidies.)

(Still reading? Thank you. Most people would have read the headline and run to get their pitchforks.)

Over the next several days, you’re going to hear a lot about this week’s Time magazine cover story about attachment parenting. The official explanation is that Dr. William Sears’s “The Baby Book,” the movement’s purported “bible,” is about to turn 20 years old, and Time wanted to explore the extent to which the doctor’s methods have transformed parenting.

Unofficially, Mother’s Day is Sunday, and Time wants to celebrate by exposing the bruise all mothers carry over their perceived inadequacy and poking it with a sharp stick. Predictably, the article itself is a perfectly benign treatment of AP’s origins and nothing nearly as incendiary as the cover, which will eventually just stare up at us dully from the landfill.

Less will be made of the companion piece written by Nathan Thornburgh, titled “The Detached Dad’s Manifesto,” which makes a far bolder statement than anything in the cover piece.

There’s another issue to this Akian Chaifetz story to which I wanted to dedicate a separate post: His parents are divorced, and his father Stuart tells us he has primary custody. This is a big deal for me, as a divorced father, because a viral video is showing the world a dad tasked with the primary care of a child — and an autistic child, at that. There’s a part of me that wants to get all Citizen Ruth on this man and parade him around as a lionized patron saint of awesome dadhood. Which he clearly isn’t. None of us is.

The thing that stuck with me about the audio tape was the last bit about how Akian, who was scheduled to go home with his mother, asked if he could see his dad. The boy was clearly trying to cope with the abuse he’d endured by seeking out his most familiar source of comfort, and this monstrous crudstain of a human being, who until recently masqueraded as a teacher, shot back with a dismissive “No.” She seemed to delight in making the kid more miserable.

People who know me know I’ll go pretty far to give someone the benefit of the doubt and to understand that everyone makes mistakes when they’re not at their best. I certainly don’t wish this teacher extended pain and suffering. I only want what Stuart wants: for her to make a formal apology and find another line of work. But as a divorced dad, the idea of using divorce as a bullying tactic gets my blood over 212 Fahrenheit.

I’m saying this because my 10-year-old son recently experienced something similar.

By now, I hope everyone has had the chance to see this video, of the father confronting the teachers who bullied his autistic son. I hope you’ve been able to keep your food down as you heard this kid’s teachers tell him to shut up, call him names, and taunt him about his parents’ divorce. I also hope you’ve had the chance to read some of the great reactions among the Babbloscenti here, here, and here.

If you haven’t accomplished these things, go ahead and do so. I’ll wait.

Why am I writing about his now, days later? For one thing, I want to keep this story alive in people’s minds. News comes at us from myriad angles every day, and the perfectly legitimate reaction is to desensitize ourselves to the bludgeoning. But I want people to remember this story, to get hopping, stinking, spitting mad about it, and to take this further than just contentment over a firing. We need to demand an explanation why these teachers have not lost their licenses. We need legislation to overturn tenure when a teacher has been so unimpeachably busted like this.

This story hits me from several angles. But believe it or not, not all of them make me want to throw up.

"You DELAYED immunizations? You bastard!"

You know what America is really good at? Hyperbolating differences of opinion into “wars.” (And making up words like “hyperbolating.”)

Everywhere you look, there’s a War on Something. Terror. Drugs. Christmas. Salt.

And lately, setting aside for a moment all the Wars on Women’s pay, choice, and dignity, there are myriad Wars Within Women: Moms vs. the Intentionally Childless. “Single” moms vs. “co-parenting” moms. Bottle vs. breast. WOHMs vs. SAHMs. The list goes on and on.

You know why we have all these “wars”? Because there is strong passion on both sides of every one of them. People care deeply about this stuff, because they’re deeply invested in what matters, and What Is Right For Our Children. Topics are debated, insults flung, and women lay into each other like Peter and the Giant Chicken.

What do the dads have?

Recently, Magda and I started a policy of getting together once a week or so for coffee, so we can confirm scheduling, compare notes about the kids (and the DARLING THINGS THEY SAY OMIGOSH), and check in ever so slightly about each other. A State of the DisUnion, as it were. I can’t speak for her, but I find these talks invaluable because they’ve told me so many things.

Like, for example, never to speak for her.

I know I sound Pollyannish when I say this, because there are plenty of divorced and divorcing parents whose searing, white-hot mutual hate is an unlimited, exothermic burst of pure awfulhood. But the thing about that kind of hate is that not interacting only makes it grow bigger. Without any new input, your fevered mind further de-humanizes your ex until the person you once loved as a human Jekyll takes the irrevocable, irredeemable form of a monstrous Hyde.

I look at these coffees as a way for us to Jekyll Up.

Last week, one of the hot-and-bother fodder topics on the web was “kiss feeding,” as practiced by Alicia Silverstone and her 11-month-old son, Bear. If you haven’t seen the video of her chewing Bear’s food before passing it from her mouth to his, it’s hard to imagine why she’s suffered such tremendous scorn and derision. Because people who read the web are known for being open-minded and kind, and willing to butt out of something that is not their business in any way.

I’ve seen how the media have treated Alicia–the lazy “Clueless” jokes, the assertions of her utter superfluity in “Batman & Robin”–and I don’t think people are seeing the long-term value of pre-chewing your child’s food. I can’t stay silent and watch her twist in the wind, because … I do this with my boys as well. The difference is that, since my sons are in elementary school, we’ve added a crucial element to kiss feeding: distance.

We call it “French Kiss Feeding.”

Basically, when it’s time for dinner, my sons and I take positions at opposite ends of the kitchen, I take a bite out of whatever food I’ve cooked for them, chew it, and launch it over to them. The first volleys are directed at one son particularly, but toward the end, everything’s a jump ball. The boys leap and lunge spectacularly, until they’re mostly full.

And the great thing is, now that they’re old enough, they’re starting to use FKF on me and each other. We launch food at each other using all sorts of permutations. We’re even getting close to perfecting our two signature moves: the 2-on-1 Juggle and the 6-4-3 Double Play Relay.

I can feel the waves of your revulsion shaking the shingles off my roof, but please hear me out. Teaching your children to feed themselves in the traditional way, with their own utensils, teeth, and saliva, is perfectly fine. But French Kiss Feeding (or FKF, as it will one day appear in a medial journal near you) has a number of developmental advantages:

It teaches the importance of teamwork.

FKF relies as much on the giver of the food as it does the receiver. Feeding your child in this way creates a specific parent-child bond that says, "We're in this together."

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I hope this piece has opened your eyes to the many virtues that FKF can help instill in your children. Perhaps using FKF will help your child grow up as strong and emotionally well adjusted as Bear Blu–who after all, is named after the world’s most famous wilderness bad-ass.

Photo Credit

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Read more of Doug’s work on his personal blog, Laid-Off Dad.
Check out Doug’s Twitter feed @LOD.
Read Doug and Magda’s blog about co-parenting, When The Flames Go Up.
Check out the Dad 2.0 Summit’s Twitter feed @dad2summit.
Read all about him on his About.me page.

About a year ago, while my older son and I were browsing in his school’s book fair, he asked me if he could read The Hunger Games. I hadn’t read it, but since it seemed like enough of a cultural phenomenon (and a way to support the school), I bought the hardcover trilogy. Then I asked Twitter whether it was a cool idea to let  a 9-year-old boy read it, the 90% of the responses fell along the lines of “HELL NO.” So I decided I had to read it first and judge for myself.

And then I forgot all about it, until the ubiquitous marketing campaign began in earnest after the Super Bowl. And now that I’ve read it, I’m adding my HELL NO to the top of the pile. Nor will I see the movie, in part because I already know the story, and I want it to exist in my imagination. But also: A movie about kids killing other kids is just PG-13, because it was released by a deep-pocketed studio, but an indie-doc like “Bully” gets an R?

Oh, MPAA. You’re such a bunch of MPAA-holes.

As you may know, Magda and I used to be married. The wedding seems like ancient history now. In fact, we’re a month away from what would have been our 14th anniversary, which means our cells have regenerated twice over since that fateful day in 1998. Each of us has become two entirely different people!

What seems like an eternity is actually just under 5-1/2 years since we first realized our marriage was kaput. And I feel very grateful to tell you we’ve reached a degree of stasis. We’ve found houses that are a walking distance apart, in an area safe enough to let the boys walk to and from whenever they like. And from all accounts — *knock every piece of wood within arm’s length* — the kids are doing OK. It helps, of course, that our kids were young when we split. (We’ve been apart for more than half of our 10-year-old’s life, and just about all of our almost-7-year-old’s.)

The weird thing is that so many people have commented to both of us that we make it look so easy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth and that are diametric opposites, each at the far end of the spectrum of everything. It’s getting easier, but it was miserably rotten and hard for a long time. And now that I’m sitting here on the other side, in the relative calm after the tempest, I can look back on the things I did and think, “I guess that sort of … worked?”