Schuyler had two distinct child-rearing strategies that - independently - have served us fairly well.
Number 1 (which relates to number 2): Schuyler didn’t put much faith in diapers. This was partially due to her untreatable eco-anxiety. Fun fact: every diaper takes 450 years to degrade. Moreover, though, Schuyler believed that diaper deprivation was an efficient means of potty-training. So, our daughters often toddled about the house in their birthday suits. And, it worked. The girls were essentially “housebroken” by age one.
Of course, this tactic didn’t come without some risk. I stumbled over a desultory turd on the living room floor more than once. Still, free-balling it, as it were, produced an accelerated path to being diaper-free – one that I was grateful for as wiping up mustard-hued baby glop was never a preferred pastime.
Number 2. Schuyler and I resolved to haul our kids everywhere with us. Schuyler wasn’t about to let a couple of babies curtail her yoga retreat business. A sizable section of her closet was devoted to slings and backpacks. Multiple times a year, she’d load herself up like a packhorse and abscond to the jungles of the Osa Peninsula.
We also enjoyed a robust social life that we weren’t keen on forfeiting post-partum. So, to the occasional chagrin of our friends, we dragged the girls with us to parties. We’d often bring a throw with us and fashion a little nest in the corner and let them sleep. This policy allowed us to maintain a protracted adolescence, full of friends and revelry.
It’s when these two strategies overlapped that trouble knocked.
One memorable evening, we attended a wonderful soiree at our friend Kira’s house with bare-bottomed Lolli in tow. Kira had a magnificent brownstone in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. We had many friends at the party but no one dandier than John Currin.
John is a painter of significant repute who falls distinctly into the category of our “fancy” friends. John and his wife, the sculptor, Rachel Feinstein have been generous enough to invite us to many lavish dinners over the years. At these affairs, we’re often branded as the quaint hippies. We ogle the luminaries like Mick Jagger and Jeff Bezos from the kid’s table and enjoy our mac & cheese.
Kira’s bash was more pedestrian and it was going off. The music was thumping. People were dancing. And little Lolli was mercifully snoozing on the couch. Unbeknownst to us, before nodding off, Lolli had made a significant deposit on Kira’s living room rug.
The steaming heap was a tractor beam for John’s Hermes loafer, which, upon sinking into the pile, skidded forward, causing John to lose his balance and spill his martini on his fitted trousers.
Kira, a mother inured to baby scat, grabbed the loafer in question and eyed it meticulously. “Schuyler!” she bellowed. Schuyler made a half-hearted attempt to deny culpability and blame it on the cocker spaniel, but upon closer inspection of the fecal residue on John’s posh loafer, one could clearly see undigested flax seeds and quinoa. The hippie parents were busted – brown-handed.
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