Mr. Mom (1999 – 2016)
I was living with my landlady and friend Kathryn at Cold Spring Newtown in Baltimore, growing my computer business, when I met my future wife. We had posted a room- for- rent sign in a local health food store and Lisa was the only respondent. Lisa started out as my roommate but by the time Kathryn sold her condo at Cold Spring Newtown some months later, Lisa and I were a couple. We moved into a rental house in Sudbrook Park in Baltimore County while Lisa finished her Masters program in Dance Movement Therapy. We were living on Olmstead Ave. in Sudbrook Park (designed by Frederick Law Olmstead) when we got married.
After a couple years of marriage we decided to have a child. Because one of our favorite films was Local Hero1 (1983) we decided in to take a three week vacation to Scotland in the summer of 1998 to make a baby.
Lisa and I travelled across Scotland, from the southern border as far north as Inverness, from Aberdeen in the east to the Inner Hebrides to the west. Sometimes we rode the Haggis Tour bus, but mostly we hitchhiked and camped in our tent or, for a treat, we stayed in B&Bs, hostels at at Findhorn2. The Scottish people were uniformly gracious; they took pity on us (often) soaked foreigners and even went out of their way sometimes to take us to our next destination!
We conceived our child in our tent during a blustery night at the foot of the Old Man of Storr, on the Isle of Skye. Nine months later we named our beautiful daughter Skye.
Both Lisa and I were the youngest children in our respective families so we both had little first-hand experience raising a child. Even more than that, I had always shied away from infants and toddlers, thinking of them as alien, fussy, fragile creatures. I think I had actually only one time held an infant when I visited my friend Marjorie who greeted me at the door by handing her son to me so she could finally have a break to take a bath! I was terrified at first, but quickly discovered that if I rocked back and forth and cooed and made other distracting movements, Kyle was pretty easily placated. My one and only experience with an infant gave me some confidence that I could cope.
But I was still worried about being a father because I didn’t think I would be able to answer all of my child’s questions about how to live her own life, as I was struggling with these questions myself. I mentioned this concern one day to my friend Carol who smiling, said something like, “Don’t worry about it. Your child will probably ask you a whole lot of other questions instead of the ones you are stuck on, which you also won’t know the answers to!” This reply was somehow strangely reassuring. . .
Lisa chose a water- immersed delivery at Mercy Hospital in Baltimore. Things didn’t go as smoothly as we planned and after many hours of exhausting labor Lisa agreed to receiving a shot of Pitocin to induce delivery. I took Skye right into my hands, there she was at last, looking and feeling like a wet, shiny silvery squid! As I held her she sneezed and immediately began to “pink-up”. I was so proud of her– I think I said (or at least thought) something like, “Didn’t even have to teach her how to sneeze.”
My first hours with Skye were magical. While Lisa was resting from the ordeal of delivery, the hospital staff led us into an empty adjacent small room3 where I sat down on the floor with my back against a wall and held my daughter against my chest. I instinctively opened my shirt so that I could press her bare skin against my own and pretty much instantly I fell into a kind of blissful trance. Normally my personality is such that I should have been overwhelmed with worry about the enormous emotional and financial responsibility that was just literally dropped in my lap, but instead I was all calm, peaceful, really happy.
And the next year and a half or so were the happiest days of my entire life– especially the time between 6 and 18 months when Skye changed and developed at a fantastic rate. Lisa and I both worked so we shared the job of raising Skye: I was Mr. Mom three days a week, Lisa was mom three days a week and one day a week Skye was looked after by a friend or family member.
On the days I was with Skye I would sing her songs (Monty Python’s Galaxy Song was my favorite, as well as Beatles songs from my adolescence, etc.) and I read her stories (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Joffe Numeroff and Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown were some of Skye’s favorite books) none of which could she understand at first but all of which she loved because my over-the-top renditions made her smile and laugh at my infectious enthusiasm! Even though I curtailed my instinct to be a smart-ass around her, it was dumb luck that Skye didn’t wind up becoming a class clown like her dad. I guess she got her sense of propriety and absorbed the rules of normal social comportment from her mom.
As we lived immediately adjacent to a small park (Sudbrook Park) we consequently spent a lot of time outdoors walking in the fields and woods. After hurricane Agnes (1972) flooded the area, about a dozen homes were moved out of the flood plain which left an otherwise- inexplicable asphalt road with concrete curbs right in the middle of the park. When Skye was very small I carried her in a infant backpack on long walks with our dog Ruby (a lab-mutt.) Sometimes a neighbor with small children and an Australian sheep dog would accompany us on these outings. There might be two or three adults and as many kids on these walks and even though we started the walk spread-out across the field, by the time we were returning home the dog somehow managed to gather us all up into a tight little herd!
When Skye and I walked alone I would point out objects (trees, birds, flowers, etc.) and sing the “ABC” song and each time when I got to the last bit about “Next time won’t you sing with me” I felt a tingling sensation thinking that time was coming soon! Every day I was away from Skye, I would come home excited to see how she had changed, what new thing she knew how to do.
I clearly remember one night coming home from work and talking with Lisa in the kitchen while Skye was around the corner in her “playpen” (basically the entire living room fenced in with baby-gates and piled full of her toys and pillows, etc.) I told Lisa that we had to be careful what we were saying around Skye (who might have been about nine months old at the time) because even through she only spoke a few words, I thought she was comprehending a lot of what we were saying. I told Lisa that I was going to try an experiment: I knew that her piano (a four-note little plastic toy) was stuffed in the bottom of a round wicket basket, covered up by plush animals, and I was going to go into the living room and ask Skye to play me a song.
Well, the next thing we knew, we heard the “ding, ding, ding” of her piano! Not only did Skye understand us when we were talking to her, she was “eavesdropping” on our conversations when we weren’t even in the same room with her! She was amazing!
Skye went from “scooching” (dragging her butt across the floor,) to cruising (walking by holding onto furniture, etc.) in a couple of months; from cruising to walking in a couple of weeks; from walking to running in just a few days! In fact I bought an early digital camera for $850 one Chanukah (a 1MP Sony digital camera that stored photos and short videos on floppy disks) with the intention of capturing Skye’s first unassisted steps but by the time I brought the camera home it was already too late: she was already walking on her own!
Skye’s verbal skills developed even faster. From speaking just a few words at 6 months of age she soon was able to form whole sentences with correct syntax by 9 months. After memorizing the A-B-C song, she learned the names of all the letters of her wooden set of letter blocks. Then she started counting and spelling. Every day she would show me new tricks– by the time she was eighteen months old we were having real conversations: I explained to her the difference between opaque, translucent and transparent and we spent days finding relevant examples inside the house, in the car and outdoors, etc.
This was all so encouraging for me: everything I threw at her she grabbed and digested. What a joy to watch and help a young mind discover the world! I had done a little teaching (I was a TA at UMBC for a few semesters) and had already recognized my love of, and modest talent for transmitting knowledge about history to students. But this was on an order of magnitude a greater challenge and success. From the outset I was intent on teaching Skye three things: to love books, dogs and the search for truth.4
Skye helped me build a treehouse (with our friends Curt and Doug pitching in) with a zipline that became a focus of her friend’s attention for a season. Skye and I grew plants from seeds and we measured and charted their growth in an Excel spreadsheet. And we read a lot together: I read out loud all of the Harry Potter and His Dark Materials books which we discussed. We also watched multiple film versions of the same stories (Robin Hood, Hamlet / Lion King, etc.) to glean understanding as to how various forms, contents and perspectives shape our appreciation of art and even our world. Having a dad who was a history major meant that my daughter was continuously subject to my analysis of current events through the lens of an understanding of the past. Throughout Skye was a human sponge who always asked penetrating questions and delighted me with her own independent viewpoints.
Lisa got us registered with the county government as a home-schooling family, and enrolled us in a co-op of homeschooling families in our area. Each parent taught a group of kids a different subject, usually at their own home and, just as importantly we thought for a child without siblings, Skye was able to socialize with dozens of kids throughout the week. These classes covered the normal range of subjects like math, science, social science, history, literature, foreign language, etc. I taught groups classes on philosophy and robotics. In addition Skye took private guitar, karate, pottery and dance classes and was for a short time a Girl Scout.
When Skye was of high school age we decided to enroll her in public school. We had heard a lot of good things about a “magnet” school in Towson called Carver that focused on the humanities and I was thrilled when Skye took the entrance exam and was accepted there.
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1 Pennan, Scotland became famous in the 1980s for being used as one of the main locations for the film Local Hero, and representing the fictional village of Ferness. Film enthusiasts have come from all over the world to make a phone call in the red telephone box in the village. The phone box featured in the film was a prop. The genuine telephone box, a few yards away, was hidden from view during filming by a prop shed. The Pennan phone box (+44 (0)1346 6210) has been a listed building since 1989.
2 As with our trip to Pennan, our stay at Findhorn was also inspired by a film. It was while watching (and reviewing) the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre that I first heard about Findhorn and the magic they were creating there.
3 Note to hospital staff: Of course the mother and baby are the primary focus of attention but the father is not entirely superfluous, yes? In short: a comfortable chair (or any chair or bed) would have been a nice touch, OK?
4 Skye is an adult now and I can say without hesitation that this transpired: even though her taste in literature does not tend towards the classics like mine does, she is an avid reader of sociology and fantasy novels; She not only loves dogs and cats, Skye works with livestock (goats, sheep, cows, horses, chicken, etc.) for a living; and Skye’s nose for BS is more refined than my own.