I’m fairly fascinated by this whole Eliot Spitzer thing and admittedly, pretty disappointed. I’ve had high hopes for Eliot for the past couple years, ever since he began making major busts on Wall Street as the Attorney General of New York. It was very clear when he ran for governor of New York–and won by an astonishing 69 percent (69, Eliot, you Dog!) that he was on a path that would soon lead to a run for president. To me, this seemed like a very good thing, to have someone who was intelligent and experienced, who stood up to bullshit with fervor and intensity run for president. Admittedly, I don’t really understand the hullabaloo over Obama. Certainly, of the three contenders now, I will vote for him, but I don’t really understand why people are so excited over someone who was state Senator for seven years and a US senator for four. He’s a great speaker? Well, so is Al Sharpton. So is Michael Moore. Hitler, obviously, knew how to hold a crowd’s attention. ***Note, the listing of these three people as great speakers, especially in connection with Barak Obama, should in no way be misconstrued as commentary on their common morality or lack there of.***
I digress. Eliot Spitzer seemed to be sprinting down the track–maybe in the Steeplechase?–ready to overcome any obstacle in order to get him to his goal of right overcoming wrong. And maybe I was too easily taken in by Eliot’s charm, the fact that he would go after CEOs and huge Wall Street institutions, but it just seemed encouraging, like maybe the law could actually prevail over corruption. Well, there were lots of accusations about Eliot’s use of the “law” in order to get what he wanted. And once he became governor, there were more accusations and a general inability to get things done. And now this. Eliot’s demise because he bought the services of high priced prostitutes using e-mail and moving money through bank accounts. One would think a man with as much intelligence as Governor Spitzer would at least–if engaging in illegal, extramarital affairs–not conduct it over the internet. Wow. The man lives in New York. One would think, with a couple hundred dollars in cash, a pay phone, and little imagination, he could have satiated these urges in a less traceable manner. Farewell to that presidency. It rests in the presidential purgatory along with Gary Hart among others.
But, to the children–since this WEB LOG is nominally about raising children and not the political ramblings of some half wit–of Mr. Spitzer. He is the father to three teenage girls. Ouch. Really? They range in age from 17 to 13, each two years apart. That makes the oldest five years younger than the alleged prostitute,
Ashley Alexandra Dupré–formerly Ashley Youmans–or “Kristen” as she was known. I have a bad feeling the producers from Big Brother are already in touch with the eldest Spitzer daughter in hopes of having her on next season’s show. You have stories like this, talking about how this kind of thing will, you know, “risk the well-being of his daughters.” Yeah, I guess it might. What insight.
This is a story that promises many astonishing revelations and tonight was another one. The times had a story on Ms. Dupre and with it included a link to her myspace page. At this time, her page–she’s a musician; I know, I smell publicity stunt too!–has over one million plays. What the hell? A myspace profile for the the prostitute a mere three days after the story broke? I mean, what did we ever really learn about Gennifer Flowers? Do you even remember her name? Her songs? Even Monica Lewinsky–you know, same president, different lady–what did we learn right away? It took some time before the hat making business came out.
On a side note, Ms. Dupre comes originally from Wall Township on the Jersey shore. Close to Pt. Pleasant Beach, NJ, where Lisa my babies’ Mama was raised. When we leave New Jersey, the limousine service to the Newark Airport? Out of Wall. As a man given to vast generalities, I immediately asked Lisa if all girls from Wall are prostitutes. I already assume that all men in New Jersey are involved in the mafia and want a “hot slice” in their mouth. She could not confirm or deny this generalization of Wall girls.
As for my own children? Well, Madee and I went and bought new shoes. Eban has been sick. He’s getting better. They’re both pretty broken up about Eliot.

I somehow inadvertently made Wednesday night my night to post on this, my web log. I guess because it’s more or less at the end of my work week and so I don’t have to get up super early the next day. But, after getting up early four days in a row, caring for children at work, and then caring for my own children at home, I’m pretty goddamn tired on Wednesday nights. I might have adjust this set up.
I feel as though I have the same dynamic with a lot of customers and even sometimes employees as I do with my children. It’s always a struggle to get people to listen, to respond when spoken to, to use their words, to not throw a tantrum when they don’t get their way, and to say please and thank you. Because I have these interactions and dynamics on multiple fronts throughout my day it is slowly–though accelerating–driving me out of my fucking mind. Soon I think I’ll begin snapping at the people around me like I snap at my children. Why not, really? I mean, my sons are inexperienced. They should get the most leeway. I should really snap at grown folk, adults who’ve had their whole lives to learn how not to act like assholes.
At New Seasons tonight I saw the cover of the most recent Mothering Magazine which listed an article titled: “How To Be An Authentic Parent.” It’s so hard to know what someone might mean by “authentic” in terms of parenting. I consider myself an authentic father just because I successfully impregnated the mother of my children. But maybe that isn’t enough in today’s crazy world. Or does “authentic” mean–as Holden Caufield might interpret it–that you act the same in front of your children as you do around anyone else? Well God bless Google and it’s searching abilities: it might not be helping the Chinese people, but it sure does come through for me.
Now I’m not positive that the Mothering article is about the exact same school of thought as what I found, but I can only assume that it’s related to authenticparent.com, which is run by a woman named Naomi Aldort who is a family counselor and an author. What I got from looking over the site, is that being an “authentic” parent means staying out of your kids way. Read for example, “Getting Out of the Way.” Nothing about the site or the article particularly struck me, though I think it’s impractical and like many progressive–hippyish, I don’t know what to call it–parenting styles it is predicated on a number of factors that are somewhat class–ist: the person must have the time, energy, and patience that is nearly impossible without high income and a decent education. There are exceptions to ever situation, I know, but in general if you’re poor and work an hourly job you dislike, you’re less likely to have the time, energy, and patience to actively observe and assist your child’s play without interfering.
I digress I digress. Ms. Aldort goes on to say that it’s important to not praise children, because it will “…foster dependency on external validation and undermine the children’s trust in themselves.” Again I disagree, but whatever works for other people, kudos to them. Then, at the bottom of the article Ms. Aldort has a link to her son’s website. Her son is a child prodigy cello player and the site goes on and on about all the awards he’s won and has numerous quotes from people saying how amazing he is. And it sounds like he is amazing. But seems a little incongruous with being an “authentic” parent. Phonies.

I just read a pretty fascinating and disturbing article in the New Yorker about water torture techniques used by American soldiers in the Philippines–following the war against the Spanish in 1902 or so–during the fight against rebel forces. It more or less involves forcing water into someones body until their stomach is grotesquely distended and then using your foot to force the water back out and then begin the process all over again.
I’ve never been subjected to this kind of conscious torture, but I often feel as though I am a prisoner being driven to insanity at the hands of some kind of super genius captors. My children just don’t listen to me. It happens often. It drives me totally fucking insane. I know what to expect. I know what will happen and yet still, it makes me fly into a rage that I just can deal with. It’s not simply that they don’t listen, but then whine, protest and cry when they have to deal with the results of not listening. I ask them to clean something up. Clean it up in time to do this, I say. They ignore me. I ask again and again. They ignore me. I explode, they do some kind of half-assed variation on original request and then we don’t do what I promised, because there’s no time.
Intellectually, I don’t totally understand it, because I know what’s happening and how it will happen, because it is almost always the same. But still, it is so infuriating. I always think back to a twins class we took when Lisa was pregnant. We watched some videos, shared some stories, looked at some diagrams, etc. Then a woman came in who was–and is still I assume–a single mother of twins. She talked about how insanely hard it is to have twins, especially when they’re new borns, and talked about the frustration. They will scream and cry, she said, and it will drive you totally insane. You’ll want to pick up the baby and just throw it across the room, she said. Whoa, Lady, I thought, maybe you, not me. I was in my final year of liberal arts education and feeling perfectly capable of overcoming any obstacle with simple reason and intellectual understanding. How could I let myself get to that point, I thought then, I understand that the baby will cry because it has needs. I can meet those needs. If i can’t meet those needs, well, I will understand that and not let it affect me. I thought something like that then and I was proven horribly wrong within a couple months or so, whenever they started to really scream, and I’ve been unable to intellectually overcome the irritation ever since then. Fuck you Lewis and Clark!

My home was a scene of chaos earlier, more so than usual. Chaos that can only come from the introduction of more children into one setting. My brother and his family stopped through town on their way to Salem to spend the day with our grandparents. Grandpa Bill is a state senator and with the Oregon Legislature in a special section, Bill and my Grandma Janice are in Salem as opposed to their home in Springfield. You might recognize my grandpa from a quick appearance in Bowling for Columbine. Shockingly, Michael Moore used a quote of Bill’s out of context. It comes from a Today show interview Bill did when he was mayor of Springfield. Fifteen year-old Kipland P. Kinkel went into his high school and shot up a cafeteria full of people, killing four people. This was the morning after he killed his parents and tried to booby trap their house. The Thurston High shootings were pretty huge at the time and were pretty much the worst that had happened in terms of school shootings. A couple months later, two kids went to school with guns and since then, people don’t really remember Thurston High School or Kip Kinkel. (Oh God, it’s so easy to digress with the power to link to anything at anytime. Like this!)
Jack, my nephew was born in August of 2001. My brother Christian is the oldest son and so it made sense that he and his wife Alissa would have the first grandchild in the family. Midway through the pregnancy though, I as the youngest child asserted my right and obligation to steal the spotlight. I went ahead and impregnated my girlfriend with twins shortly before entering my senior year of college. That pretty much insured I got the attention the so rightly deserved. Lucky for Jack though, instead of being doomed to a life with no cousins, he got two in one shot only seven months after he was born. And about a year after the boys were born, Alissa gave birth to Lilly, breaking the curse of male domination in my family. My poor mother.
Jack, Lilly, Eban and Amedeo all get along really well. Maybe too well. The energy level of the room explodes. They immediately begin running around like maniacs, jumping off the couch, screaming, slapping, laughing, and crying. One of the common misconceptions about raising twins is that it’s somehow easier, because they “entertain each other.” This idea is total bullshit for a number of reasons which I’m sure I’ll address numerous times. I love the idea though of one of my sons dressed like Don Rickles running through a routine, you know, just to “entertain” his brother. First off, they never did wipe each other’s asses. Nor did they feed each other, dress each other, bathe each other, or calm each other. Following the logic that twins are easier, quadruplets should require no caregivers at all. These
kids should be doing community service in addition to raising each other. Secondly though, what people don’t consider with saying “entertain each other” thing, is that two children together are not simply double the bodies and double the needs. The energy level between them is multiplied. All behavior is affected by the energy and reaction of this other kid. It’s like fucking with chemistry: adding one chemical to another in a beaker isn’t just going to increase the volume (obviously, I am not a scientist).
After a couple hours and multiple talkings-to by myself to my children, all the kids calmed a bit. Madee and Lilly read quietly together on the couch, while Eban and Jack wrestled between the curtains. Jack and Lilly were rounded up and ushered out the door with no tears at all. We said our goodbyes and the Earth’s shadow moved away from the moon. And Kobe beat Shaq.

This, I admit, should have been my first post. An explanation of who I am and what I am writing about. But, for whatever reason, I didn’t want to begin that way. Perhaps it’s my contrarian values. For whatever reason, I dove right in with a diatrabe sparked by an innocent–and ignorant–question from the cashier at Fred Meyer that. “So they’re different,” she asked, since I was buying my twin sons different colored foam swords.
My sons were born almost six years ago. I was twenty two then, finishing up college. They were born on St. Patrick’s day, 2002. Being born on a holiday is really awesome to some people I think, as much as I could tell from the reaction of the hospital staff. Lisa–the boys’ mom–and I were actually hoping they wouldn’t be born on St. Patrick’s day, so we didn’t really share in the staff’s enthusiasm for the coincidence. Being born on Halloween would be pretty sweet, but other than that, personally I lean toward non-holiday birthday celebrations. It’s amazing to me now, as we come up to their sixth birthday, to remember their first and the run up to invading Iraq. There were grumblings about it that day and the next I think–I don’t remember which day we had the party–Bush addressed the nation.
So here we are almost six years on in my sons’ lives–almost five years into the war (you know, since I already made the connection)–and they are in kindergarten. I am here to report on the parenting life. The good and the bad. And the real ugly. My name is Will. Thank you.

I took horseback riding lessons when I was four. It was taught by a woman on her farm outside of Ontario (Oregon, not Canada, where I grew up). She had identical twin daughters around my age, a little older perhaps. They were fully capable on horses, even at that age. They looked totally natural riding around, while I gripped the reigns and squeezed my legs as tightly as possible when I rode, though I was always being towed by an adult as well. One of these girls was kicked in the head by a horse around that time and somehow was ok. I never knew her later in life, so who knows how ok she actually was/is.
These girls were the first identical twins I knew. Later, I became close friends with sisters who were fraternal twins. They were totally different from each other in every way and were simply sisters who had been born on the same day. It wasn’t until I was in college that I became friends with identical twins and again, they were totally different from each other, but they looked exactly the same. All of this is to say, I’ve had experience with twins, but never had any kind of real fascination with them. Sure, I’m curious about what it must be like, and as a child imagined having a twin myself. And I’m always intrigued when I hear stories of twins with singular languages only they can understand. Beyond that though, I don’t see twins as any kind of phenomenon.
I wasn’t prepared then, when I became the father of twins for the amount of interest and ignorance the general public has surrounding twins. My sons are fraternal–and I swear to god they are, though they look alike*; I have to convince people enough it drives me fucking insane–and have names that do not rhyme or alliterate. We do not dress them alike, though they have naturally over time adopted their own color schemes: Amedeo, red; Eban, blue.
People constantly ask if they have different personalities. And this question is asked by a wide, wide swath of people, from friends and family to strangers and aquantences. From the highly educated to the non-educated, it does not matter, the question gets asked. What always strikes me though, is this idea of how sad it would be to have these two kids who are exactly alike. Two beings who share not only their looks, their clothes, and every goddamn second of every goddamn day, but on top of that, their very personalities? Are you just keeping one around for emergencies then? Just in case something happens, it’s important to have a backup. My sons are very, very different from each other in ways that are sometimes easy to identify, but mostly not. They both can be assholes, they both can be sweet, they’re both very funny, they’re both good at sports, though different ones.
The fact that so many people view twins as being identical in every way–including personality–intrigues me more and more as I realize how widespread it is. I don’t understand it really, but obviously it’s there. Maybe someday I’ll go back to school and write a doctoral thesis on the public perception of the personality of twins.
*Those are my sons on the Doc Watson album cover, but I should say the picture is several years old. It was taken by their mother, Lisa Bogan, an amazing photographer. They look more alike in that picture than they do now. Really. I swear. I’m not the liar here. You’re the liar!