26/9/97

Me, An Embarrassment

If only I were perfect like all the other daddies...

    I guess I've been missing the signals. Either my children have become socially sentient or I've turned into an old fogey. In any case, one recent day, suddenly, I became aware that I'm an embarrassment to them.
    Only a few months ago I wrote about how the little 'uns often put us on the spot by saying the wrong thing. It didn't occur to me that I would soon be writing about how we mortify them.
    I took a seat at their grade one Hanukka party, and Odelia left her circle of friends and plunked herself in my lap. She smiled. "Please do me a big favor, Daddy," she coaxed sweetly. "if you have to shout at me, could you wait until later? You know, I mean, even if I do something really bad."
    I hadn't recovered from that one when, a couple of minutes later, I was nearly bowled off my chair by her sister. One of the fathers got up to light the candle and sang the prayer. A terrible thought came to Nomi; her face flushed, and her mouth dropped. She turned to me and whispered: "Daddy, are you going to do that too?" No, I said. Her entire being released a monumental sigh of relief.
    I asked what was on her mind. "I was afraid you would sing too."
    "So what? I can sing."
    "But in Hebrew, in front of all my friends -- Daddy, your accent is embarrassing!"
    I was thunderstruck. I felt like a thick-tongued Polish refugee in the New World. I saw the fear of shame on my child's face, and now I understood the humiliation of a first-generation immigrant.
    But -- but I speak English, for goodness sake! Perfect, flawless, unaccented English, the language that rules the world, the tongue of envy for everyone not born with it.
    I have carefully safeguarded my rotten Hebrew accent as a source of honor. It marks me as a hallowed Anglo, endows me with a superiority complex among natives whose most fervid wish is to speak this august language as melifluously as I -- and this, for my children, is humiliating?!
    Of course, in their social milieu, which happens to be populated by six-year-old Israelis, English is on a par with Russian, Amharic and Spanish: fringe communication of social aliens.
    My children are very deft with accents, probably because they're linguistic products of a Brit and a Canuck, plus two-dozen-odd oddly-accented people who helped us raise them the first two years. The triplets heard English as she is spoke in Holland, the Philippines, Arab Jerusalem, Russia, Japan, South Africa, the American Midwest, Northeast and Southwest, even, for goodness sake, the Molucca Islands.
    There's another substantial influence as well: sometimes I hear a word or two that they can only get from TV: none of their friends speak Cockney, jive or Brooklynese. 
      By now, at the age of six, they can mimic an array of accents, and comfortably switch from British to Canadian to Israeli to American in the same breath.
    But there's nothing like mocking Daddy's Ivrit.
    "C'mon, Daddy, say 'pilpel.'"
    "Pilpel."
    "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Say 'Dror.'"
    "Dror."
    "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Say 'Ron.'"
    "Ron."
    "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
    "But girls, 'Ron' is an English name."
    "No it's not."
    Go argue with six-year-old kids who know everything.
    Ultimately I pull one out of the hat that gets 'em every time: "Oh yeah? Say 'Power Rangers.'"
     "Parenjas."
    And when I laugh, they look at me queerly, humbling my presumption to think I'm right.

ITג€™S NOT just the way I speak. My girls behave like there's a blinking neon sign over my head with an arrow pointing at me and the words "Freak of Nature." They scrutinize me from my flat feet to my glabrous scalp, dismayed that their daddy is so flawed. It seems I'm too bald, too fat, too old to be walking around in public; they'd prefer I had reconstructive face surgery, filled in my bellybutton, shaved my chest and put some muscle on my tushy. There's a bump on the middle finger of my left hand that places me in a class with Aesop's ogres; a minuscule mole on my neck looks to them like a tremendous pile of cow dung.
    Why can't I be perfect like everyone else's daddy?
    I often take them with me on errands in town, but once, to my surprise, they begged off -- and I mean begged.
    One of them explained: "You might cough." (I had bronchitis at the time.)
    "So? I'll cough."
    I might just as well have been saying I was liable to puke, drop my pants, greet passersby out of context or transmogrify lycanthropically. They were wide-eyed with horror. "But everybody will look at you!"
    It's bad enough everyone looks at our car. "Shouldn't we get a new car, Daddy? Ours is old. And ugly. And slow. And dirty."
    Yeah, but it's cheap, dependable, no one wants to steal an '84 Renault and it doesn't lose any value every time the paint gets chipped. I pointed out that we should probably consider ourselves lucky: people are always asking if I want to sell it.
    "Well next time, say yes."
    The world's worst-dressed man? That's me. "Aw, Daddy, you can't wear blue with  brown!" (They're also fluent in Italic.)
    "Yes I can, because it's very, very light brown."
    "Oh, noooo..."
    And God forbid I should ever wear anything with a trace of pink.
    Their mother is not perfect, either. "I wish Yehudit was my mommy," one of them said wistfully. "Because she has long hair."
    They regularly ask if we're poor, and I assure them we're not, and explain that terms like "rich" and "poor" are relative, that to a family with no food we're rich, but to a billionaire we're poor, and then I ask if they understand and they say, "Yes, but why are we poor?"
    I suppose all little children make gods of their parents (and parents of their gods). And I would guess most parents like it that way. What, I'm going to tell them I was a bum in school? That I can't swim? That I don't know everything? (My wife is no help in this department. I grumbled recently that my kids may soon be smarter than me, and she said, "Don't worry, that happened already four years ago.")
    Yet for all that, I'm the one they want to marry. And that really worries me. I'm bald, fat, old and ugly, I'm growing a pile of cow dung on my neck and I speak like a moron: this is their taste in men?