American Parent

by Apple, Sam

• ISBN13: 9780345465047
• ISBN10: 0345465040
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-06-02
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

Part memoir, part journalism, part history, part downright strange and hilarious, American Parent takes readers on a unique tour of the world of new mothers and fathers. As Sam Apple embarks on his own journey into parenthood, he decides to put his background in journalism to good use by talking to a wide range of experts. Along the way, Apple visits with the mohel who circumcised him, enters a trance with a childbirth hypnotist, goes on a stakeout with a nanny spy, and attends a lecture on Botox for new mothers. Apple is full of questions, and none is left unexplored: Is the Lamaze method a Stalinist plot? (Yes.) Are newborns really fetuses that are born too soon? (Sort of.) Is there a universal theory that can explain the origins of circumcision in many diverse cultures? (Maybe.) Does it sting when you pour baby shampoo into your own eyes? (Big-time!) And yet for all the unusual twists in this storyat one point Apple fantasizes about a father losing his mind and refusing to remove his BabyBjornthe strangest twist of all might be that at its coreAmerican Parentis a deeply serious and personal book about the way emotionally vulnerable and confused new parents can get lost in the increasingly complex labyrinth of baby products, classes, and fads. Parenthood is the oldest subject of all. InAmerican Parent, Sam Apple makes it feel entirely new.

Author Biography

SAM APPLE is a graduate of the creative nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University. He has written for The New York Times Magazine and Parents magazine, and currently writes for Nerve.com. His first book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was a finalist for the PEN America Award for a first work of nonfiction. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Excerpts

Chapter One


Parents and Products

The Rise of the Baby Industrial Complex

Babies have a lot going for them. Their big eyes and fat cheeks are cute. Their skin is soft. They will laugh at just about any joke so long as you slap your head and fall down at the end of it.

It’s no surprise, then, that parents have always wanted to give nice things to their babies—even the earliest human civilizations had rag dolls and other simple toys. What’s surprising is the amount of money that new mothers and fathers in America now spend. Nothing in the history of parenthood compares to it. Part of the spending increase can be traced to the growth of the upscale baby products industry. Rich parents are now buying $15,000 handcrafted cribs and $1,200 Italian leather diaper bags with faux-fur-trimmed changing pads. Some of them are even scenting their babies with $53 bottles of baby cologne. But it’s not just the rich. It’s all of us. Revenue from the sale of baby products has almost tripled since the mid-1990s, and the average American child now receives seventy new toys a year.

I had my formal introduction into what journalists and bloggers have begun to refer to as “the baby industrial complex” during the second trimester of Jennifer’s pregnancy. Jennifer’s parents were in town, and the four of us had gone together to buybuy Baby, the chain of baby superstores that has become famous for its overwhelming selection—some locations have more than twenty thousand products for sale.

I had mixed feelings about the shopping trip. There’s a Jewish superstition against buying things for a baby before the birth, and I was in no mood to take chances. But I was also in no mood to interfere with all of the hard work Jennifer was doing to prepare for our son’s arrival. Prior to the pregnancy, Jennifer and I had been living as similar a life to the homeless as a middle-class couple with a comfortable apartment can manage. We have both always been diligent and organized at work, but we left that diligence and organization at the door when we returned home. We cobbled our meals together at the last minute and ate them standing up in the kitchen. If the pantry was empty and it was cold out, a dinner might consist of nothing but a spoonful of peanut butter dolloped onto whatever stray food item we were lucky enough to dig up behind the expired cans of soup. And then there was the pile of junk next to our bed. At first it was a small pile, but over time it grew so high that we began to refer to it as “Mount Saint Junkmore” and then simply as “Mount Saint.” After a while Mount Saint became part of our lives, as though we were powerless to remove it. I even began to take pleasure in searching through it for lost treasures.

I knew that we would have to change our slovenly ways before the baby arrived, but during the first months of Jennifer’s pregnancy, I spent most of my time thinking about all of the things I needed to do rather than doing them. Jennifer, meanwhile, was undergoing a dramatic transformation. To my great surprise and confusion, she began to clean even when we were not expecting guests. She bought curtains for our windows and a small soap dispenser for the bathroom. She made lists of items we would need for the baby and more lists of items we would need to get rid of before the baby arrived.

The new hyperorganized Jennifer bothered me when I first noticed her. I feared I was losing the idiosyncratic Jennifer I’d always known and loved, the Jennifer who had once unthinkingly walked into a college classroom eating beets out of a jar with her hands, the Jennifer who, in the middle of law school at the University of Pennsylvania, had decided to write a long work of nonfiction about colonial impersonators and then spent a semester hanging around an obese Ben Franklin look-alike.

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Excerpted from American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland by Sam Apple
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.