Boy, Girl, Boy

I like to call my first son “Boy.” I think it comes from The Simpsons, back when it was good. In the early days at least, this was how Homer would refer to Bart. It always seemed very funny to me, as the term knocks children off their pedestal and reduces them to their subordinate role within the family. I believe we overparent, and part of the appeal here is that Boy is the most low-effort thing you can call your son, unless you gave him a name that was even shorter. There’s also the rise of gender theory, and when I was more of a rightoid a few years ago this was something I worried about, so I figured you couldn’t give a kid these days too many reminders of his biological sex.

Boy arrived in 2019. At first, I didn’t understand why people liked children. When my son came out, he was purple, unreactive to most external stimuli, and had a head shaped like Marc Andreessen, which the doctor reassured me was normal. Parents are always looking for signs of intelligence among kids, but in the first few weeks that means something as simple as they will smile or their eyes will follow an object. To me it was hard to relate, and I think the whole modern idea that you should be bonding with a new baby in the first few months is a kind of overcompensation for the fact that they’re sort of hard to care about.

My model of parenting

But slowly, gradually, the lights come on. And it was clear pretty early on that what distinguished Boy, befitting as my son, was his intellectual curiosity. First it was transportation vehicles. His knowledge of cars, trucks, and trains surpassed mine before he was three years old. Now five, he goes through math workbooks for fun, and is already at third grade level. He recently got an award at his kindergarten for superior math and reading skills. This made me very proud, as most of the other kids at the assembly we attended got fake awards like “for being a good friend.” He can find most countries of the world on a map, and knows their flags. Lately, he’s become very interested in money, collecting coins and dollar bills and bragging about how rich he is.

One thing that alienated me from my family growing up was that they had zero intellectual curiosity. It may have happened at some point, but I can’t remember an instance of any close relative ever reading a serious book. In the MAGA era, some of them have gotten really into Trump, but, as with most of his fans, their increase in passion for ideas has not coincided with a similar increase in knowledge, which makes them even more annoying. Boy is going to know a good bit about science and math, and also politics and history. For the first time in my life, I’m confident I’m going to have a blood relative I can relate to on an intellectual level.

Boy gradually becomes more aware of the way the world works, and I get to watch him take each individual step on the path to making sense of it. Not too long ago, he began to understand that the borders of countries are not static, but change throughout history. I’ve explained to him the concept of “government” and he randomly asks to see a picture of the government of North Korea, or the United States, or Afghanistan. He gets presidents and kings, but not parliaments. War is this thing where men with guns start shooting each other, which he finds fascinating, and he listens with rapt attention as I describe the sequence of events from 1939 to 1945. We’ll be discussing whether Mussolini or Stalin was more Elite Human Capital in no time!

Still, I worry about Boy. He has friends, and other kids seem to like him. He comes home with love letters from girls, which is unsurprising given his height and beauty. But there’s also a passivity to his character with regard to everything except fulfilling his intellectual curiosity, and a tendency to get discouraged easily when he’s not able to quickly complete some physical or mental task. New people make him nervous. When upset, he shuts down and doesn’t want to talk about what happened. Worst of all, he’s sometimes a follower. I see him deciding what he wants to do based on what other kids are doing. My hope is that he has enough in himself to overcome these weaknesses, and I don’t think it’s too early to suspect that whether he does will be the central question of his life.

I can’t help but compare Boy to myself as a kid. We know Boy is going to be different from other people. But I want to see independence, a certain distance from others rooted in a justified feeling of superiority. To put his unusual intelligence towards critiquing and overcoming the prejudices of the cattle, not creating elaborate justifications for them like some economic nationalist scumbag. Boy feels like the project I was destined to face, given to me as an experiment to find out what would have happened if during childhood I was fed the wisdom I only received as an adult.

Two years and nine months after Boy, we got Girl. I don’t think she has ever felt real pain in her life. Sure, she sometimes gets hurt or cries because she wants a toy. This happens quite a lot. But I’ve never sensed that she has, for any substantial amount of time, truly felt fear, embarrassment, sadness, insecurity, or rejection. If you think that two is a little young to experience such things, then Boy stands as a refutation. Girl has hurt my feelings when she has preferred her mother, but I don’t think that I’ve ever hurt hers.

She arrived with an ingrained sense of humor. To spend time with Girl is to experience a never ending stream of silly wordplay, make believe with objects, new dances that I don’t think any toddler has ever performed before. Tantrums over nonsense suddenly broken by her darting straight into my arms laughing. Girl makes up songs, like “Kick, kick, kick your mommy” while we’re driving. Recently, she grabbed a butter knife and started carving my arm while going “Cut, cut, cut your daddy.” From the consistent rhythm and beat, I can assume these are her own variations of a song she heard somewhere, though I doubt either of these were the original lyrics.

Sometimes, the children will be causing trouble, and a parent tries to force compliance by threatening to leave them in a store or parking lot. Boy will take the possibility seriously and become scared. He even sometimes thinks we’re going to abandon him when we’re not trying to give that impression. Recently, he was sitting in the car while I got out quickly to pay for parking at a machine right next to us, and he started screaming like he’d just become an orphan.

The “I’ll leave you right here” bluff has never worked on Girl. When she was younger and we’d start walking away, she’d plant her feet and look at us. We’d turn around, and she’s got her arms folded and a grin on her face that says stop pretending, we both know you’re not going anywhere. Eventually I would have to drag her by force. Now the bluff is sufficient to get her to start moving, as Girl knows enough to understand that in the end she is coming with us no matter what. She takes her defeats as easy as the victories.

Still, calling bluffs sort of remains her thing. Girl was recently climbing all over me and I said she was going to fall. She started daring me: “I want to fall! I want to fall!” Approval from her parents isn’t something she ever seeks, either because she’s secure enough that she has it, or she doesn’t need us any more than she needs the rest of the world.

Wife sometimes tries to discipline the children. Boy is easy to manipulate emotionally. Tell him he’s disappointed you, and he’ll start crying until he’s reassured. With Girl, you can physically force her to do something. But she’s completely impervious to your guilt trips. Girl knows annoyance and frustration. She knows bruises and scratches. She doesn’t know pain.

Girl’s preschool teacher recently told me that she’d been having “disagreements” with other kids. This meant that someone will be playing with a toy, and she’ll grab the object and claim it as her own. Social desirability bias says I should be disappointed. Whenever I see parents with their kids, they’re always telling them to “share” as if this is the highest virtue one can develop. Generosity is fine, but in my experience the world is much more lacking in independence and vigor. I’d much rather Girl be the one taking the toys away.

Wife says that the way they behaved in the womb predicted their personalities. Boy was restless, constantly moving and kicking. Since being born, he has never slept all that well, and for a long time was waking up in the middle of the night. Girl just laid there and didn’t move much before coming out. She’s always been a sound sleeper.

Girl goes through life singing and dancing, making funny faces at her dad. Boy is silent or asking a question about the exports of Uzbekistan. He’s usually looking forward to the next time we’re going to LEGOLAND or the house of a friend. Boy’s mind is always somewhere else. I think finding contentment is going to take conscious effort when he becomes capable of it.

Girl being less fragile than Boy extends to health, just as it applies to their emotional states. Throughout the winter, he is tortured by fevers and uncontrollable coughs. Girl coughs and produces snot, but I struggle to remember instances of her temperature ever being elevated, or an illness significantly affecting her mood. She loses her mind when hungry, crying, screaming at us, demanding a toy and then throwing it in our faces when she gets it. But a few bites later and she’s inventing dances again. Girl stuffs her face until she complains about her tummy hurting, and then demands to keep going. Boy is very picky and eats little. When he was smaller, he would send crackers and chips back for being broken or misshaped. It’s like the intellect is such an overwhelming portion of his personality that it crowds out the capacity to enjoy physical sensations. Girl is chubby, Boy is thin.

I don’t worry about Girl. At least for now. It’s not difficult to see how traits that are adorable in a two-year old can cause heartache as a teen. Thankfully, Ozempic has arrived just in time to solve what I’ve always worried would be her greatest weakness. I trust the science, so believe more in big pharma than my own parenting ability to shape them. Having children is a radical gamble, not a project in which I can expect to mold the ultimate results to my liking.

People sometimes talk about how parenthood has changed them. I feel like the same guy. I’ve become more radically pro-choice, having had the experience of waiting for prenatal testing results, but this is to be expected. Otherwise, what else can I say? Maybe I’ve taken a more philosophical approach to death. When I’m gone, Boy, Girl, Boy will still be here, and my concern with their growth and ultimate well-being overshadows just about everything but my commitment to the traits that I care most about in myself. I’ll pay reparations to the shrimp, but I won’t give my life for them, no matter how many zeros you add to the number I could save. With the kids it isn’t even a question.

One cool thing about writing a Substack is that if I’m debating an issue with someone, I can sometimes say I wrote an article on that topic and just refer them to that. A lot of essays have their genesis in arguments I find myself constantly having (see here and here), which allows me to plant my flag, have my view on the record, and move on. My work can similarly serve as a substitute for parenting, if not a complement to it. I’ve written articles on common problems like overcoming anxiety, attracting women, and losing weight. The children will hopefully benefit from this work, in addition to whatever pearls of wisdom I may pass on to them in person.

Two days ago, Boy 2 arrived. He’s the biggest one yet, and by far caused the most problems as a fetus. That’s all we can say for now. I held him. His eyes were barely open. The nurses talked about the importance of “bonding” and “skin-to-skin” contact but this is all nonsense. We sit there pretending that the first moments matter, but it’ll be a few months until anything resembling a personality forms. So we wait. I’m not going to pretend like there’s anything else to do. I’ll keep reading and posting. He moved around a lot as a fetus, he has a full head of hair, and he doesn’t look like he founded Netscape. That’s a good start, but we’ll only know more later.

Wife says she’s glad Boy 2 is a boy. The original Boy may need someone in his life, while Girl won’t. The boys are five years apart, which will matter during childhood but be insignificant when they grow up.

As adults, we all learn life is fleeting, but in the years during which you’re raising children, the timeline is compressed. Just as you’ve gotten used to one iteration of a kid, they’ve transformed into something else. The passing of months or even weeks causes major changes in how children look and behave. One reason Girl is adorable right now is that her social intelligence and sense of humor are so far ahead of her verbal skills. So she’s constantly telling elaborate stories laced with social subtlety almost exclusively through her voice intonation, facial expressions and bodily movements. Boy’s math is so advanced that he’s on word problems that are paragraphs long, but struggles to read them so he’s hit a roadblock, one that I’m sure is going to be very temporary. He wants to understand World War II and likes old reels of planes taking off and dropping bombs but doesn’t really get concepts like diplomacy and the balance of power. I watch videos of Boy in 2021 and realize I don’t remember anything about what he was like. There are too many stages and the process is too rapid for much of it to get stored in one’s permanent memory. You can lose touch with an adult friend for ten years and then pick up right where you left off; a month away from a toddler on a business trip means you’re going to be surprised by what you find when you come back.

So I write. In the decades that come, this article will serve as a record of what I was thinking in the days after Boy 2 was born, and what brought me pride, joy, and pain when I reflected on the little people his brother and sister were in the moment and what they might still become. I know by now that this moment will soon be nothing but a few vague impressions in my mind. Here I’m just trying to hold on to as much of it as I can.