The World Needs Uncles, Too
There's a special circle of hell for the person who first put a gift shop in the middle of a museum exhibit.
A little stand at the end of an exhibit selling tchotchkes? Sure. Exit through the gift shop? Of course. I don’t know how expensive dinosaur bones are, but I bet they ain't cheap. A museum's gotta keep the lights on just like everybody else.
But in the middle of an exhibit? Like, one minute you're visiting The American Museum of Natural History on an early spring day, learning about how "sharks replace their teeth every few weeks, over and over, for their entire lives," and the next minute, you turn the corner and BAM! Your nephew is holding a plush, merchandised version of a shark with big ol' cute eyes that he's already inexplicably named "Riptide" while your niece holds up a "Shark 20 Piece Mini Bucket Playset"—whatever that is—saying to her mother, "It's made from all recyclable materials so we should buy it, that'd be like helping the environment," because she's well on her way to becoming a future President of the United States, or possibly taking her place among the pantheon of great con artists such as Gregor MacGregor, Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Remy, and Charles Ponzi. Or, you know, whoever the bastard was that dreamt up putting gift shops in the middle of a museum exhibit.
You can guess the rest. The adults—myself, my brother, and his wife—do our best to explain that we can stop at the gift shop on our way out of the museum, but seeing as we arrived mere moments ago, wouldn't it be better not to carry around bags all day while we look at the rest of the exhibits? My niece—who would have aced the Stanford marshmallow experiment—sees an opportunity for a trade-up later in the day and places her shark bucket back on the shelf. My nephew, who we call Tommy the Tank and who has already bonded with this stuffed shark, creating a whole relationship in his mind based on aquatic friendship and eating people together, grips "Riptide" to his chest. Then comes the inevitable crying, then the going limp on the floor, then the tossing of the stuffed shark—because this isn't about Riptide anymore—as he attempts to run away from us and go find a kinder, more-willing-to-buy-stuffed-animals family somewhere else in the museum to replace us with.
When my brother and I find Tommy, he's literally bouncing off the wall. Repeatedly. Not so hard as to hurt himself, but with a steady rhythm. Smack. Smack. Smack. He walks into the wall over and over again, like a Roomba that's lost its navigation sensors, as my brother's wife and my niece catch up with us, none of us knowing what to do.
I'm never having children. It's a decision I made at a very young age and have never wavered from. There are a number of things I can point to in my childhood that led me to this decision. The town I lived in when I was young had the highest teenage pregnancy rate per capita in the entire state, which means I grew up doing my damndest to avoid procreating. My own parents were married when they had me, just to different people, meaning that my mere existence definitely complicated things for both of them. The list goes on. The end result is that I'm not having kids, no matter how many people tell me—as they did when I was a teenager, in my early twenties, late twenties, thirties, and still now, as I approach 40—"Oh, you just wait. You'll be a father soon." Simply stated, for a plethora of reasons, from emotional to financial, raising another human being full-time is not for me.
Yet during the pandemic, I felt a new responsibility to show up as support to family members and friends with children. My upstairs neighbors had a baby on May 11th, 2020. Soon I was in their apartment holding the child as they cooked lunch, playing with little Julian as he learned to sit up, and then to crawl, and then, finally, to walk. When I got a dog late last year, Julian heard me tell the dog to "Sit," so now he calls the dog "Sit" every time he sees her (and every time she does, indeed, sit). Julian also caught onto a shorthand phrase I use: "easy breezy"—my way of saying "don't worry about it" or "happy to help," or even a form of goodbye. Now when he sees me, or when his parents ask him, "What does Uncle Isaac say?," Julian exactly mimics the hand gesture that Brittany Murphy does while playing Tai in Clueless (while singing "Rollin' With My Homies" by Coolio) and says, "Easy breezy." It makes my heart burst every time.
There are my friends who have a seven-year-old named Tadzio, who I befriended in 2021 as his parents dealt with school closings and re-openings and closings again. His favorite night is game night. "The dragonborn pulls his ice sword from the chest of the fire giant, who immediately explodes in a cloud of steam, fire, and lava!" I bellow as I watch Tadzio pump his fist in victory. "I told you the ice sword would work!" he yells back. Tadzio and his parents have come over for an evening of nachos and Adventure Begins—an introductory game for kids interested in learning about Dungeons & Dragons. The night has been a success, and the next day Tadzio and I will play swords in the backyard as he describes to me the ghosts that only he can see (I think they were cows).
These stories are many. And they are small. Short. Usually only half a day, or maybe even simply an hour or two. But together they add up to something meaningful. Not for the kids—not in any deep way, at least—I mean meaningful to me. There's Lou, my friends' three-year-old who only refers to people as "that guy"—as in, "What that guy do?" when he's interested in what you're doing. Lou enjoys leading group yoga sessions, demanding that every adult in the room follow him in his stretches. My back is all the better for it. There's my friends' kid Gray, short for Grayson, who just discovered the Marvel Cinematic Universe and would like me to share every last crumb of comic book knowledge that I might have with him—oh, and also, would I be interested in seeing his Pokémon collection? Each of us is learning from the other (yes, I watch Pokémon now, and you know what? I get it). There are the twins—two sons whose father Brooke is close friends with the aforementioned upstairs neighbors. They spend their summers at Camp Half-Blood in the park—a "fully-immersive day camp experience that allows you to transform yourself into the modern-day heroes of your favorite mythological stories" based on the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan, which is a fancy way of saying that the two twins have Nerf swords that they enjoy pummeling me with. (As I write this, it dawns on me that I engage in a lot of sword-related activities.)
There's another one of my nephews, my sister's kid, who has a skateboard that he got for Christmas when he was far too little. But he's been growing, and they recently paved their driveway so its asphalt is clean and smooth. I hope to visit this summer and teach him how to ride. I sometimes do Sunday dinners at my friends' Emma and Michael's place, where I listen to the new songs that their children, River and Miles, have dreamed up for their band, The Skull Crushing Golf Carts (although I hear they're thinking about changing the name to Vampire Zombies). Then, I read them William Steig's Shrek! before bed. Turning out the lights after they drift off to sleep, it’s as if for a moment I’m Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules instead of some guy who showed up to dinner empty-handed and already three beers deep.
My friend Chris and I take his daughter, Nell—who was born in the early days of the pandemic—for walks in Prospect Park. Or more accurately, we walk while she sits in her stroller, taking in all the wonder that is trees.The proper reverence is clear on her face. Chris and his wife, Jessica, put me on a list; they're expecting their second child soon and have assembled a mishmash team of neighbors willing to babysit Nell in case they have to rush to the hospital. "Don't worry, you're sixth on the list," he says to me. "The likelihood that it'll come down to you is... low." Still, what an honor to be asked.
Chris and Jessica are still working on a name for their second kid. We talk as we walk, and I get to participate in trying to figure out a name that fits their parameters. Me—someone who will never have a child of their own—dreaming up baby names! The two parents agree that they want the name to be easy to spell, recognizable, yet still unique, and it has to be six letters or less. Chris is a programmer, so he tackled the issue the only way he knows how: by compiling names from every census report dating back to the late 1800s and running all the data through an algorithm he specifically wrote to find names that fit their criteria, i.e. maximum six letters long, easy to spell and pronounce, but never in history being too popular—Chris and Jessica having both grown up with achingly common names. ("I wasn't only one of many Chris-es growing up," Chris tells me, "I was one of two Chris Chans in my class.") In the end, they don't use a name that I pitched (apparently "Zoltar" is a little too unique), but I'm happy to report that Callie was born last month. I look forward to meeting her.
Do I see all of these children constantly? Of course not. Is community-driven child rearing anything new? Absolutely not, but it has, I suppose, been new for me. Whenever I spend some time, even a little bit of it, goofing off with a friend or family member's kid, I can see the small respite it gives to the parents. And let’s not forget my own selfishness. I feel a lightness of being—an unanchoring in my heart—that seems harder and harder to come by these days. It’s a feeling I relish. I revel in it. To be fair, in certain ways, not having a child is a very selfish act on my part: it allows me great financial freedom, the ability to travel more and focus on my own life, instead of doing my damnedest to raise a healthy little one. But the non-selfish part of not having children for me is that I can literally show up for people who need the help, especially in this country where healthcare and finances don't make it easy to raise a child. That’s absolutely a problem in this country, but a problem I alone will not be able to solve.
Come read your kid Fox In Socks for the hundredth time while you take a work call, though? That I can do.
In June of 2020, I knew a couple of things: one, that my brother and his wife had been alone with their kids since March, and two, that while we didn't know much about this new virus, most science stated it was safer to be outdoors. So I decided to figure out how to get from New York City up to New Hampshire entirely in the open air. Early in the pandemic, maybe on the third day of lockdown, my sister-in-law had told me that she’d come around the corner to find Tommy—yes, of "the Tank" fame—holding a rock. Where did the rock come from? Nobody knows. He hadn't been outside. All my sister-in-law knew was that he stood there holding the rock, locked eyes with her, and then threw the rock from inside of the house into the yard through a plate glass window—a window that would still be covered in cardboard by the time I came to visit (because of the lockdown, nobody could come out to fix it). It was in that moment, my sister-in-law would tell me, that she knew 2020 was gonna be a real fucking mess.
With that in mind, I found a boat that goes from Pier 11 on East 35th Street in Manhattan—which I skateboarded to from my Brooklyn apartment—to Martha's Vineyard. Then I took a boat from Martha's Vineyard to the mainland. I'm not the best planner in the world—I ended up sleeping on a bench for a night in Martha's Vineyard—but I made it. My brother drove down the coast to pick me up. Not a bad deal, as doing so would allow him and his wife the first night they had to themselves since the pandemic began.
I made the two kids mac and cheese, but not before we had dessert for dinner: ice cream and sprinkles gulped down on the leather couch in the living room, where eating usually isn't allowed, while watching way too many episodes of Full House (a show I now realize is very much about what I am describing in this very essay). Early on in the evening I had them clean their playroom, a Sisyphean act, as it would be dirty again the next day, but one that I knew their mother would appreciate. I envisioned myself as a kind of Dirtbag Mary Poppins, making my way up the coast by skateboard and boat, here to give the parents a break and the children a night of hilarity and fun.
Which is how it went. At first. But a few hours in, the children—hopped up on sugar—were starting to bicker. The leather couch actually had ice cream spilled on it, and I was trying to figure out the best way to clean it without leaving a stain. The TV was still going because I couldn’t figure out which remote control turns it off—whatever happened to having buttons on the actual TV? Then, I heard a yelp from the kitchen. My niece was refusing to share something with Tommy. He lunged out for it. She pulled it back. A growing anxiety in my chest quickly flipped over into rage. It happened so fast. A flash. I wanted to reach out and hit my niece for being so unkind. For not sharing with her brother. I didn’t. But the feeling was there. I can't ignore that it was there.
Later, when I tell this story to other friends who are parents, they are unsurprised. "Sometimes you want to hit your kids. You don't, obviously, but sometimes you want to." But for me, someone who did grow up getting hit, the flame felt too close.
In the museum, though, with Tommy bouncing repeatedly off the wall, there is no urge to hit him. I look at my brother, my sister-in-law, and my niece. When we first got to the museum, Tommy was tearing through the rooms, all of us doing our best to keep up. At first, I say, "You guys should divide and conquer, "meaning that my brother should go with Tommy, rushing through the museum, while my sister-in-law, my niece, and myself could move through the halls at a more leisurely pace.
But then I see it. My brother wants to take in the museum too. All three of them want to stay in the museum. There's a butterfly exhibit with real live butterflies, and my brother won't admit it, but he was a real sucker for dinosaurs when we were kids. "Divide and conquer," I say again out loud. But I don't mean my brother and my sister-in-law each taking a kid; I mean me and Tommy splitting off from the group.
"You guys go. Enjoy the museum," I say. I can see my sister-in-law thinking that I might be biting off more than I can chew. "We'll be fine. I'll text. We'll all meet up later." My brother and sister-in-law hug Tommy, who is no longer bouncing off the wall, but sitting on the floor looking up at us, curious as to what's about to happen. The three of them go. They will have a wonderful day in the Natural History Museum. An entire afternoon and then some. Not one but two butterflies will land on my niece at the butterfly exhibit. If she ends up going to NYU in the future, I feel like the college should send some of the tuition to the museum in thanks.
I turn to Tommy, putting my back against the wall and sliding down to sit beside him. "What do you wanna do, buddy?" French-speaking tourists step over us to get to the Hall of African Mammals. "What can we do?" Tommy asks. "Whatever you want," I say. He doesn't hesitate. "Can we leave?"
It's in that moment I realize: he wasn't ripping through the museum to try and see as much of it as possible. He was trying to finish the museum as quickly as possible. Like speedrunning a video game. The place was packed, noisy, overwhelming. As someone who always chooses quiet bars over loud clubs or packed parties, I could relate. Tommy was overstimulated and there, sitting on the floor, giving myself a moment to tap into my own emotions, I could tell I was overstimulated too.
"Let's go."
We pick ourselves up off the floor, walk under the gigantic dinosaur fossils in the front hall, and make a beeline for the exit. Outside, all of Central Park stretches in front of us. We will end up walking over 20K steps that afternoon—not bad for a five-year-old who won't let me carry him, not even once. We will run through the Sheep Meadow and ride the Central Park Carousel. We will eat hot dogs and pretzels bought from street vendors while laughing at the butts of statues. I will make him a crown out of branches while doing my best to stop him from picking up broken glass, which he keeps referring to as "park treasure" (eventually I let him keep a piece that seems worn down enough not to cut him). I buy him a balloon made by a clown—not the sword balloon that I was hoping he would choose to go with his crown of sticks, but an elongated Spider-Man, because hey, kids really do love Marvel. The Spider-Man balloon will eventually partially pop and then entirely get blown away by a gust of wind—which we will stop to watch, Tommy laughing at Spider-Man flying through the air instead of crying like I was worried he might—but not before I buy him a Spider-Man-shaped popsicle while we watch a game of recreational softball at Hecksher Field.
"I want to climb the biggest rock in the park," Tommy tells me. So I take him to Umpire Rock and we scale to its top—past people enjoying picnic lunches and sunbathers soaking up the first rays of summer. "Now what?" he asks me, after we've reached the top. I hoist him onto a perch, a rock on the top of the rock, so he stands a little taller than I do. "Now?" I whisper in his ear. "Well, now you yell, 'I'm the king of the park' as loud as you can."
He does. He yells, "I'm the king of the park" at the top of his lungs. The picnic-ers and the sunbathers look over, some of them smiling and some of them frowning and most of them not really giving a shit at all, but he yells it again and again and will continue to say "I'm the king of the park" for the rest of the day.
Before all that though, my nephew exits the museum and walks calmly down to the water. There's a bench by the Central Park Lake and he sits on it. He is peaceful—he won't be for long, but in that moment he is peaceful—and he looks out over the lake. "This is nice," he says, taking in all the serenity.
That night on the subway ride back to Brooklyn, he will fall asleep, exhausted, his body curled against mine. It is indeed nice.
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