by Jim Gaffigan
Negotiation seems to be the predominant form of communication in my daily dealings with my children. “Dad, if I take a bath, can I watch a movie?” “What do I get if I clear the table?” I always seem to be on the losing end of arbitration. I constantly feel like I’m bartering with my children. I suppose this is part of the parent-child dynamic. I’m sure that throughout the centuries, sons and daughters have bartered with their fathers and mothers. I wonder if Jesus negotiated with God about some of the stuff he had to go through.
“Jesus, you are dying on the cross for all Mankind.”
“Well, if I do that, can everyone have Sundays off?”
Notice the response is always a question. The question is the primary form of communication for little kids. They learn to speak, and the questions commence. Anyone with kids knows about the questions. “Daddy, what are you doing? Daddy, why are you doing that? Daddy, how long are you going to be doing that? Daddy, why are you putting on headphones and having a beer for breakfast?” I sometimes believe preschool was created by a parent who needed a reprieve from the incessant questions of a three-year-old.
Of course, these never-ending questions require answers you are not qualified to give. How do you answer, “Daddy, why are you a stand-up chameleon?” or “Why don’t dogs get the chicken pops?” When my son Jack was four, he pointed to a car antenna and said, “Look, Daddy, stick.” I clarified: “Actually, that is an antenna.” Jack then asked, “What’s an antenna?” After realizing I had no idea how an antenna worked, I explained, “It’s a … stick. A metal stick. You nailed it, buddy.”
Even all their so-called statements will contain a question in the subtext. “I’m hungry” is really “Why don’t you feed me?” “I have to go to the bathroom” is “Can you clean up this pee on the floor?”
Another endless form of questioning is under the “Are we there yet?” category. If you ever mention something fun that you are going to do with your young children, and there is any time that will elapse between the very moment you bring it up and when you are actually doing the fun thing, you will be barraged with questions during that entire time period. If you tell them that you might go to Disney at some point in the coming year, you have opened a Pandora’s box.
“Are we going to Disney now?” “How long ’til we go to Disney?” “Is it time to go to Disney yet?” “How many more hours ’til we go to Disney?” “What does ‘three months’ mean?” “Is it three months yet?” It is crucial that you withhold as much information as you can about this fun future event until thirty seconds before you arrive. Or ten seconds, depending on your question tolerance.
Out of necessity, all parents of little kids actively attempt to curb the unnecessary questions by speaking in parental code to each other. Parents will write notes, whisper, or spell things in front of their children. Once Jeannie said, “Don’t tell anyone about the i-c-e c-r-e-a-m.” I remember thinking, “Who’s in the emergency room? And why do I want a Dilly Bar?”
Of course, there are many things you shouldn’t say or do in front of a three-year-old. Everyone knows you’re not supposed to argue or curse in front of young children. What you’ll learn is the only time a parent really needs to argue or curse is when they are with young children. If you don’t believe me, wait until your kid spills a drink on your computer. We tried a “cursing mug” where if Jeannie or I cursed, we’d have to put money in the mug. Two hours later, our son threw a ball and accidentally broke the mug. And, yes, I cursed when he broke it. Even more important than not arguing or cursing, a parent should never say the words “ice cream” in front of young children. Little kids only hear a commitment. “Yeah, I’ll have ice cream.” You can’t explain to them, “Daddy was just saying the words ‘ice cream.’ It doesn’t mean we are having it right now. Do you understand?” They will, of course, nod and say, “I’ll have chocolate.” I’m not exaggerating about saying “ice cream” in front of a three-year-old. Test my theory at your own peril. You don’t believe me? Go on, try it. I dare you. Have you done it yet? See, I told you. Now don’t you wish you had followed my advice? Wait, you didn’t really do it, did you? I feel like I can’t trust you anymore.
Bring in da Noise
The definition of children should be “young humans constantly making noise.” Whoever first coined the phrase “the pitter-patter of tiny feet” to describe the noise that young children make was way off. That is like confusing a stick with a forest.
If children equal noise, then having five kids is like living on a construction site. Noise from our children is a constant in our house. Silence is startling to me at this point. Once, a moment of silence actually woke me up: “What’s that? Is a tsunami about to hit?”
Like an orchestra that is always rehearsing, my children provide a wide variety of sounds. There should be a children’s song “If you’re happy and you know it, keep it to yourself and let your dad watch the football game.” There’s crying, humming, tapping—and that’s just when they are asleep. My son Jack actually makes noises of video games in his sleep: “Beep, peep. Ba too! Ba too!” The scary thing is we don’t have a Play-Station, an Xbox, or a Wii, although he asks for one daily. He is actually dreaming about playing video games. Well, we all can dream.
The good news is that the night noises are barely audible from another room. They just mix in with the other city sounds. The bad news is that the night is quickly over. The worse news is that children are at their loudest in the morning. Of course, it’s not just the mornings, it’s all the time. I’m pretty confident I’ll never have to tell my children to speak up. Our apartment may be small, but at least our children talk like they are on a helicopter. Maybe this is why grandparents eventually lose their hearing. It’s not age. It’s necessity. Why do you think grandparents love your children so much? It’s because they’re half deaf.
I don’t want to give the impression there is any consistency to the noise levels—we are talking about children, after all. There are different volumes of loud, and kids know their cues. If you get a phone call, children intuitively know to speak louder, based on the importance of the call. If you are removing a toddler from a wedding or a funeral, they will understand they are supposed to scream. This is why there’s virtually no difference between carrying a two-year-old and playing the bagpipes. You might as well be wearing a kilt.
Screaming. Did I mention the screaming? Screaming is usually associated with horror films and roller coasters. This is why I usually look like I’ve just watched a horror film on a rollercoaster. Kids love to scream. Frightened, happy, bored. They scream. I’ve actually learned to love the sound of a vacuum cleaner. It’s just so peaceful.
It’s amazing how you get numb to a certain amount of the screaming. I’ve learned to focus on work with screaming in the background, like a surgeon in a MASH unit while being shelled. Incoming!
You also learn to decipher the many types of screaming. I’ve had thoughts like “That’s the ‘I had too much sugar’ type of screaming.” “Oh, that’s an ‘I don’t want to take a bath’ type of screaming.” Then there’s the “Did someone just get their hand caught in the door … let me get out of bed and run and find out” type of screaming.
There is a tipping point with screaming where the screaming eventually becomes contagious. If one kid starts screaming, even the children that were docile or napping start screaming. I was never a screamer, but now I scream. Well, maybe I’m not screaming, but I raise my voice over really important things like washing hands. Initially, I was shocked. Wait, why am I raising my voice? Now I know. I yell because my kids don’t hear me otherwise. To them, my normal voice doesn’t register. They only hear, “Carry on. Don’t acknowledge I’m even talking to you. Carry on.” Unless, of course, I scream.
If you come to visit us at our apartment building, there is no need to ask what apartment we live in. Just follow the screaming.
An amazing source of income.
The Chud People
Like many of us,
I grew up in the type of neighborhood where you had to go outside and look in your neighbor’s driveway to see if anyone was home. In New York City, if you live in an apartment building, there are likely people living beside you, below you, and above you. You can hear your neighbors leave for work and come home at night. You know their traffic patterns and when they take a shower. Sometimes you can hear when they are arguing or even when they have a cough. The unspoken NYC apartment etiquette is that neighbors should make every effort not to deliberately disturb each other or look each other in the eye.
Many people in New York live above or next to a bar or a nightclub, and I am sure that is incredibly annoying. I am also sure that the nightclub scenario would become much more attractive if one were faced with a choice between that or living in the apartment under my family.
We have five small children climbing, jumping off furniture, throwing themselves on the floor in a fit, and for no reason at all just tapping. Not to music. Just tapping. No reason. Just tapping. Tap, tap, tapping. Annoying, right? We’ve lived in our apartment for six years, and we are on our third set of downstairs neighbors. Living there presently are two brothers from Italy who seem to be visiting the U.S. less and less since moving into the apartment. Hopefully we are not damaging our country’s relationship with Italy.
We make efforts to stop our children from making noise, but it’s like trying to stop the sun from coming up. We’ve explained to them that there are people living downstairs. We explained that our neighbors don’t like the knocking and the bouncing of a basketball at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning. We have explained and explained and explained, but alas the thumping continues. In the entire time we have lived in the apartment with our children, there was only one incident when I could even temporarily stop the incessant banging. I was telling my then four-year-old daughter Marre that she couldn’t jump up and down because she was disturbing the people living below us. Suddenly she stopped and looked at me very seriously and said, “Wait, there are people living in the floor?” Thinking fast, I replied, “Of course there are people living in the floor. They are called the Chud people, and they get angry when they hear noises. Please don’t wake them up or else they will climb up here and come after us!” Evil? Yes. But it freaked her out and stopped the noise for at least an hour, at which point she forgot about the Chuds and resumed jumping up and down. Progress, not perfection.
When the neighbors living below us inevitably decide to move out, they always make the polite request that we hide our existence from potential new tenants. We comply because we feel horrible for having had them suffer under the weight of our world for a couple of years. We agree to help them trick new neighbors into moving in below us just like we agreed to help our former downstairs neighbors trick them into moving in below us. We are very ethical in our dishonesty.
Hiding the fact that our apartment is essentially a nonmovable clown car is not easy. We must remove all proof of children from the hallways. This involves taking in scooters and strollers into our already cramped apartment. We scour the halls for any telltale plastic toy or a dropped goldfish cracker. We remove our children’s holiday artwork from the front of our door. Our pre-Italian downstairs neighbors, Steve and Andrea, actually offered to buy us lunch so my family wouldn’t even be in the building during an open house. A really kind way to say, “Just get the hell out of the building!” I thanked them for the kind offer and instead took it upon myself to get our chaos the hell out of the building for a couple of hours.
There was once a surprise visit by a very serious prospective tenant. Our neighbors called us at the last minute. We really had to scramble. It was too late to take the kids out for fear of exiting the building and running into the unsuspecting buyer with a gaggle of foot-heavy toddlers. When we heard the Realtor in the hallway with the nice couple, we shooed all the kids into a back room and told them they had to play “the quiet game.” I forgot at the time that a two-year-old does not understand the rules of “the quiet game” or any rules of any game. I clapped a hand over her mouth, and suddenly it became the scene in The Sound of Music where the von Trapp family is hiding in the convent from the German SS.
As we continue our search for a new apartment, our “must have” list does not include anything about “prewar,” “original moldings,” or “good neighborhood schools.” We just need to find a place where the downstairs neighbors are deaf or some other example of people who can’t hear that is not offensive to deaf people. Either way, I just don’t want those Chuds to come after us.
Monsters
Kids are actually afraid of monsters. I remember being afraid of monsters as a kid, but now it seems pretty absurd. My son Jack is a confident, outgoing six-year-old, yet at night, monsters are a sincere concern of his. He’s not making it up to get attention. To him it’s a realistic possibility that there is a monster in the hallway, and he needs me as a security escort to go to the bathroom. He is not at all concerned about a domestic terrorist attack or an economic disaster, but he is terrified of monsters.
Personally, I think that the concept of an old white guy with a beard in a red coat coming down a chimney in the middle of the night or a fairy with a tooth fetish sliding things under my pillow while I sleep would be way freakier, but no, for kids it’s monsters.
Monsters are no different from fear of the dark. Why are children afraid of the dark? Because monsters live in the dark. You can tell a kid there is no such thing as monsters, and they will look at you like you are naive. “Right, Dad. There are no monsters. And we didn’t really go to the moon either.” And they walk away from you like, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Where does this fear come from? It’s just the fear of the unknown. They can’t describe the monsters nor can they verbalize what these monsters will do to them if they ever actually do encounter them, but they know they’re out there. Watching. Waiting. We never really completely lose the fear, but as adults we just give the monsters different names, like “Bankruptcy” and “Cancer.” If our stockbrokers and doctors lived in our house, we’d be running to their room every night, too.
Of course, some kids aren’t afraid of monsters at all. My three-year-old, Katie, wants to sleep in her bed with monster dolls and be told stories of zombies and werewolves. Maybe she is just the type of person who literally is “embracing her fears.” I’m not exactly sure why one kid in particular is so scared of monsters, but he’s waking me up almost every night to tell me they’re there. And like any good parent, I explain to him that there are no monsters, but if he doesn’t get back in bed, I’m going to let the monsters in his room.
Nothing in Common
I’m not a man with many hobbies. Besides eating, sleeping, watching an occasional football game, and, of course, eating, I just like spending time with my children, although I’m consistently amazed at how little I truly have in common with them. I’m comfortable with the fact that a two-year-old doesn’t really grasp the “hide” or the “seek” part of hide and seek. And I’m not expecting to watch The Wire with an eight-year-old, but I would think there would be some overlap in interests. I realize their time on this planet has been short and sophistication is not something they can even pronounce, but I’m constantly stunned by our lack of commonalities. Nothing in my life has ever been as important as pushing the elevator button is to my three-year-old.
My six-year-old son, Jack, actually doesn’t like mashed potatoes. Yes, mashed potatoes, one of the greatest things on earth. The ice cream of potatoes. I know, I didn’t think it was possible either. He of course loves french fries, hash browns, and baked potatoes, but mashed potatoes might as well be sewer sludge. “Ewww, mashed potatoes!” Little kids simply have bad taste in everything.
Little kids’ taste in clothing is baffling. I’m not a big believer in fashion, but I know that if you ask a three-year-old boy to pick something out to wear to the park, the outfit will definitely clash and most likely not include pants. “Okay, why don’t we wear pants and a shirt instead of a pair of
goggles and a hat.”
Little kids are the only sober human beings for the past fifty years to enjoy a parade. And it’s not for kitsch appeal. People walking down the middle of the street to a drumbeat are fascinating to them. I always end up with the heaviest kid on my shoulders, watching the back of someone’s neck get sunburned. It’s no picnic.
Any time you eat outside with a kid, it’s a “picnic.” Kids love picnics, or, as I call them, “eating uncomfortably on the ground while swatting flies away from your food.”
Little kids’ taste in music is just as baffling. That Barney song, really? It’s a total rip-off of a million other bad songs, and Barney gets the credit? I smell a lawsuit. My three-year-old daughter, Katie, figured this out subconsciously because she frequently does her own mashups of these obviously plagiarized tunes.
[Singing] “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy fam-i-ly, with a knick-knack paddy-whack, give a dog a bone, this old man … is com-ing to town!”
They love all these horrible songs that are often about other people’s misery. Everyone knows that “Ring Around the Rosie” is about people dying of plague. The “Old MacDonald” song is clearly about some poor farmer who lost his farm to foreclosure. He had a farm. Why doesn’t he have a farm anymore? The economy. Yet little kids smile and clap as they sing it. It’s just cruel.
