American Babies

Tibor, the Hungarian teacher with whom I am exchanging positions and homes, has visited the several schools in Barcs and is helping us enroll our daughters. We have wanted to do the same for him, but this has become a mortifying experience: how do I explain the narrow limits of our social services that first, through liability and regulations, swell the costs of delivering child care and then kick all but the poorest working parents to the curb if they cannot keep up? Why, when so many American families are forced to survive off two incomes, and why, when studies show the long effects of early care, does our government leave its parents to patch it together until public schooling begins at kindergarten or first grade?

In the tiny town of Barcs, which has 12,000 residents, there are multiple public schools, including a school for the arts. Children can join public nurseries and pre-schools at the age of three. So when Tibor has described the kind of situation he wants for his youngest daughter, he is describing something that is part of the accepted landscape and that makes absolute sense and of course Lilien should have that experience.

But I’ve been looking. And Stephanie’s been looking. We’ve been looking for the kind of common-sense thing a big city like Seattle must certainly have, which is a decent, affordable pre-school with available seats. We’ve found decent care, and also universal waitlists, and tuition more than double the cost Tibor originally said he could make work “until Lilien turns five and we can place her in kindergarten.”

From a practical perspective, such care is the economical thing for a country to provide its families, an investment with more powerful returns than anything else I can think of.  From a moral perspective, what is wrong with us?


David

Minivan Dad Gets Hungary

The past three weeks--since my teaching exchange to Hungary was first officially proposed by Fulbright--started with sleepless nights and then lingered, sleeplessly, for another two weeks, giddy excitement to start, strenuous anxiety to keep it going.  This was due almost exclusively to the steps needed to make the exchange official, which included a series of forms for me to fill out, for my principal to fill out, for my doctor to fill out, and for a parallel set of forms to reach completion in Barcs, the little town in Hungary where my counterpart lives.

I applied for this Fulbright teaching exchange in October of 2009, after toying with the idea for years and maybe not expressing it out loud, and after watching the very unpleasant film, Revolutionary Road with Stephanie, my wife, a gloomy film that nevertheless pushed me--again, not out loud--to wonder why the hell I shouldn’t take my family off the trajectory and see what happens. Fulbright had a dozen countries teachers might apply to, and I chose placements that didn’t require fluency in other languages but did require a cultural shift.

I once had a strong sense of adventure. The things most nutritive to me lay in conversations with strangers and the architecture of lives in different contexts. I have very sharp memories of a trip I took the summer before college, a month on $150 through Idaho and Montana. The color of the glacier melt in the Rockies, the taste of watery spaghetti in a Spokane hostel, the shriek of Souxie mixed with the wind through the open windows of my car: all of it had a manic energy I now realize was part of a heaving grief, because this trip occurred only a couple months after the death of my mother; nevertheless, it’s a ferocious vibrancy I’ve wanted to re-engage for years.

Now I am a minivan father. I don’t really want that twenty year old’s mania, nor his angry grief. I find richness and balance and joy dancing with my three daughters, or running them in circles in our minivan home.

Still, the desire for adventure is by no means gone, though opportunities for the same seem more and more exhausting to pursue. It’s that exhaustion, that stultifying relief when the weekend calms down enough for nothing to happen, that worried me—yet the worry took the form of the same low grade hum made by so many things in my head, that include what the kid in fourth period said, or an e-mail I need to write, or an idea for how to assess a particular skill.

I know what can happen when a body moves itself to an entirely new context. Ways of being present themselves as happy questions and my soul uncloses itself in answer.

So the prospect of moving to Hungary for a year, with Stephanie, with Sophie, with Amelia, and with Maisie, the prospect of leaving my minivan behind for my counterpart to try out with his family, is a thrilling one.

Sleeping has been difficult since the required forms began their protracted journeys through our district offices. The red tape story is the kind of story I like to come home and tell Stephanie, who listens, because she loves me; they’re the kind of story I like to tell friends, because I have become boring.

And I can finally say so out loud.