Dad Is Fat (22 page)

Yet for some reason, now that I have kids, I eat candy all the time. I’ve never
bought
the candy, but it is constantly ending up in my house—it’s my children’s candy that we have confiscated for safekeeping. Suddenly I have this big bowl of temptation in my cupboard beckoning me to eat it. It doesn’t have to be good candy. I’ve eaten an entire bag of stale gummy bears on more than one occasion—in the past month.

I don’t think of it as stealing. Hey, it’s my home, and those kids don’t pay rent. Most of the time I don’t even
want
to eat their candy, but late at night I’m confronted with the predicament: eat my kids’ candy or feel my feelings. Eating the candy always seems to win. Now, there are parents who would not raid their children’s stash, and they are called weirdos or anorexic. What would
you
do if you had a bag of mini chocolate bars in your house? Let your kids eat it? Throw it away? I’m pretty sure throwing away candy is a crime in some states. Let’s be serious, you would eat the candy. You would eat the candy to save your children’s lives. It’s a heroic action, actually. (By the way, I’m not eating
all
of my children’s candy. When I pilfer
their Halloween bags every year, I take only the Snickers, Reese’s, and Heath Bars. I thoughtfully leave them the Now and Laters, Wax Lips, and the wrappers. I’m not a criminal.)

Future generations will look back on our propensity to give candy to children as something preposterous, like giving cigarettes to babies. Sometimes it feels like candy is being forced on parents. My son’s preschool had an annual fundraiser that involved selling a case of chocolate bars. Really? Chocolate bars? Part of why we are sending our kids to preschool is so they wouldn’t be at home begging for candy. This always felt comparable to raising money to fight heart disease by selling steaks. A three-year-old is not going to go around selling chocolate bars. I certainly am not going to go around selling chocolate bars. The solution? Write a check, and Dad eats a case of chocolate bars.

Don’t worry, my kids barely notice any of their candy is gone. Recently my eight-year-old, Marre, asked, “What happened to my Valentine’s Day candy?” Like a good parent, I lied: “I don’t know.” Not missing a beat, she responded, “Oh well, I’ll just have some of my Easter candy.”

There’s always another birthday party, another holiday. Birthdays and holidays are just drug mules smuggling candy to our children, and we are the corrupt DEA agents fighting the losing war on candy.

For today’s kids, it’s an abundant candy universe. They don’t even have to try for it; they are of the “treat bag” generation. Sure, my children still beg us for it, but that is because they know we have it. When I was a kid, we never had candy in our house. It was a reserved fantasy that came true on Halloween.
You would binge on it one night a year after trick-or-treating, have a horrible stomachache the next day, and spend the rest of the year dreaming about candy. I remember watching a Rolo commercial as a kid and longingly thinking, “One day …”

Before I wrap this essay up and eat some of my kids’ candy, I do need to address two candies in particular. One is evil, and one is a lifesaver, and no, I’m not talking about Life Savers.

Probably the most destructive candy is chewing gum. Ever give a three-year-old a piece of gum? It always seems like a good idea: it will keep them occupied; it’s not candy, so they won’t be ingesting handfuls of it, and all little kids absolutely love gum. If they know you have a pack of gum, you suddenly have absolute power. You can lord it over them: “If you behave in the supermarket, I will give you a piece of gum.” Kids will do anything for a piece of gum.

Of course, you think that the worst thing that can happen is that they will swallow the gum. “Don’t swallow the gum! It takes seven years to digest!” In reality, you should encourage them to swallow the gum, because the worst thing that can happen is them losing the gum. A lost piece of chewed gum will wreak havoc on everything in sight and end up in places that will shock you. Kids cannot keep gum in their mouth. Half the fun of gum to a three-year-old is stretching it out, rolling it in a ball like chewable Play-Doh, and eventually losing it somewhere. You will discover that that piece of gum somehow has
fused itself to the butt of your pants and become intermingled with the fabric of your jeans forever. Give a kid gum, and the bad karma is instantaneous. That gum is guaranteed to somehow find its way into the clothes dryer and ruin all the school uniforms at once.

The other day I submitted to the begging of my three-year-old, Katie, and gave her a piece of gum that five seconds later was firmly embedded in her hair. She had to get that emergency haircut with that isolated spike that screams, “I was playing with scissors,” or “My idiot dad gave me gum.” I don’t want to get all political, but I am definitely pro–gum control.

My kids love lollipops, but not as much as I love lollipops. My love of lollipops is not about eating them; it’s about how quiet they make my children. It is virtually impossible for a three-year-old to whine and complain with a lollipop in her mouth. “Waaah! I don’t want to sit in the ba—[
suck, suck
]. This one is cherry.”

If you ever take your kids to a situation where they must be quiet, bring lollipops. They’re like flavored muzzles. Mothers-to-be should be given bouquets of lollipops at baby showers. At the hospital, people should hand lollipops to new fathers and say, “Here, you’re going to need this.” It’s the parent’s secret weapon. What about the sugar? Well, Dr. John makes sugar-free lollipops. (No, he did not pay me to write that. He does not even know who I am. I don’t even know if Dr. John is a real
doctor or if he even exists. I have to assume lollipop Dr. John is different from the musician Dr. John, who sang that song “Right Place, Wrong Time.” By coincidence, that song could be used to describe any parent with a kid who needs a lollipop. Dr. John is most likely not the musician and just the “Mama Celeste” of lollipops. Of course, if you do exist, Dr. John, I think you should send me a case of sugar-free lollipops as a reward for mentioning you.)

A rare moment of silence from Katie and Jack
.

There is no sugar in Dr. John’s lollipops. They are sweetened with a natural sweetener that we will likely find out in ten years is a hundred times worse for you than sugar. The sugar predicament is strange. It’s always like, “Sugar’s bad! Sugar will rot your teeth and make you fat! Use these yellow packets
instead.” Then, like six months later: “Don’t use those yellow packets—they cause cancer! They even cause worse cancer than those pink packets of fake sugar we told you caused cancer six months ago.” You are always forced to face the dilemma “Do I eat the sugar that will make me fat,
or
do I use this other stuff that will kill me? Hmmm. Eh, what’s a little cancer? Cancer makes you lose weight, right?” What was I talking about? Oh, yes. Lollipops. Why did you change the subject and start talking about that other thing that no one wants to say out loud? After all, this is a book about kids and being a good-looking dad.

Kids love holidays. As a kid, I used to measure the year by which holiday was coming up. The most important time of the year was the “Holiday Season”—the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. It encompassed so many holidays, including Hanukkah, Christmas, that African one that’s even harder to spell than Hanukkah, and many others. That time period is clearly a season of holidays. A holiday season. No matter what faith you belong to or what tradition you follow, everyone is partying. You’re shopping, you’re cooking, you’re getting together with family, you’re eating food that’s bad for you, you’re eating more food that’s bad for you, and of course you’re eating food that’s bad for you.

Holidays are also an opportunity for kids to unlearn every good habit they’ve learned during the rest of the year. They don’t go to school. They get to stay up past their bedtime. They get candy and presents for doing nothing. Childhood utopia.
The “Holiday Season” was always the longest one, so it was obviously my favorite.

Now what’s happened since I was a kid is that all holidays have become “holiday seasons.” If you don’t believe me, go into any drugstore. The day after New Year’s Day, the Valentine’s Day aisle appears. The day after Valentine’s Day, the same aisle is filed with shamrocks and leprechauns.

Halloween is no longer one night. It’s a week if you’re lucky. A month if you live in New York City. I don’t know how this happened or what the logic was. “Well, Halloween lands on a Tuesday, so let’s have the kids dress up every day for a month.” There are even Halloween greeting cards now. As a result of this extended Halloween “season,” kids end up having more than one Halloween costume, like they are competing in a beauty pageant. “What costume do you want to wear to school?” Then “What costume do you want to wear to the parade?” Then “What costume do you want to wear to trick-or-treat?” Then “What costume do you want to wear to the swimsuit competition?” When I was growing up, I barely had a Halloween costume. I mostly remember cutting a couple of holes in a sheet for eyes and going as a ghost. Wait, maybe that was just in that Charlie Brown’s Halloween special. I just remember going as either a ghost or a bum. Not a homeless person, but a bum. It was a less sensitive era.

Now there is mandatory parental participation in holidays when you have young children. Of course you want to share the experience with them, but no matter how jaded you might be, you just dare not ruin it for them. The tradition of chopping down a pine tree and putting it in your living room may
seem like the behavior of a drunk guy, but you do it sober. You carve pumpkins, paint eggs, anything for your kids. Somehow a couple of years ago, I even became one of those dads who dresses up with his kids at Halloween.

This is how much I love my kids
.

I can’t believe it either. Yes, it was Jeannie’s idea, and I’ve done it more than once. I just wish I had known before how similar Captain Hook looks to Captain Morgan when you run into drunk people who really like rum on Halloween.

Even though my kids still measure the year by holidays, there is barely any downtime between them. Add in birthday parties, and the fun never stops. If the holidays used to be a time that kids unlearned their good habits, now the five minutes between holidays are the only time for them to unlearn their bad habits. This holiday conspiracy created by the evil
drugstore corporate giants is threatening to create an entire generation of spoiled monsters. Just another hurdle for parents who don’t want a house full of these holiday-possessed demons but also don’t want to be the only parents who threaten to “cancel Christmas” every time their kids misbehave. You become caught on the horns of a dilemma. When your treat-bag-generation kids are getting treats constantly, you lose the specialness of treating them yourselves. Now, truly the only way to really treat your kids as a reward for good behavior is to
not
treat them to treats. And then you know you are treating them well. I think my head just exploded.

This is how bad I need a drink
.