Stubby Teeth: a new short story

My story Stubby Teeth was just published in Barzakh Magazine. I'm honored to be in its pages.

So the story is a response to something my

professor Josh Henkin told our class when I was a cocky first-semester grad student at Brooklyn College. He said (and I'm paraphrasing, and he said it better) that it's impossible to write a story from the point of view of an inanimate object, a pet, or a small child, because stories are based on characters being able to act on their own, and a good story is all about your characters taking agency.

Well, I was young and eager and full of chutzpah. I was also a young father, underslept and full of conviction that not only did babies have agency, they were running my whole damn life. I went home and, right away, started writing this story.

I hope you like it.

Stubby Teeth

His mother was gone, and she had never been gone before. And now he was in a very big room with a very big woman who was not his mother, and several toys, and a smattering of other kids, and no mother. The walls were white. There were no windows, and no mother. He screamed.

The scream lasted several minutes, until he had run completely out of breath. He rubbed his stubby teeth together while he gathered the oxygen for more.

A pair of woman’s hands—long fingers, chubby knuckles—sandwiched him, his back and his stomach. They rubbed and rubbed, and though he tried to squirm out of their tractor-beam pull and fight the rhythmic alternation of palms and fingertips, those large hands with their pod-like palms, steady and insistent, and their confident beat lulled him into complacency. Just why was he agitated, again? He no longer remembered.

The woman spoke to him, slow and warm. Gradually, he realized that she wasn’t trying to communicate a specific meaning or directive, as his mother did when she spoke, but rather to give a sort of human background noise, like music during his mother’s yoga or television when he was supposed to not talk to her, a meaningless string of syllables as she guided him to an area of the room with one thick oceanic carpet, on top of which sat a gaggle, a small herd, of other humans, small humans.

Read the rest

(Barzakh's cover by Mali Fischer.)

Book Deal, Big Deal, Amen

Update: go here to get the actual book!

The deal for my new book, My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs, was listed in Publisher's Weekly this week! It's still about a zillion years away from being published (it's a picture book, and we don't even have an artist yet), but I'm excited. I'll let you know when I know anything -- although I don't really know anything at all, yet.

Except that the book is written. I do know that. And I was reading it at 5:00 this morning and getting all sorts of chills, the good kind and the kind that you get when something inhuman is watching you from a dark corner of the room, and I think you'll like it.

Here's the sale notice:

Children's: Picture book
Matthue Roth's MY FIRST KAFKA: RUNAWAYS, RODENTS, AND GIANT BUGS, a charming and delightful - or, at least, an oppressive and unsightly - introduction for precocious children, Goths, and literary nerds, to Robert McGuire at One Peace Books, by Marissa Walsh at FinePrint Literary Management (World). 

5:05 a.m.: The baby screams.

A day in the life.

Dude Week

I'm not really sure how it started, but I wound up guest-editing the mommy-blog Kveller.com, where I work, this week. We're calling it Dude Week. Let me try that again: We're calling it

And among our guest columnists are an Orthodox rabbi's husband, my boss, and Mayim Bialik interviewing her husband, since we love her at work and her man is, like, lovable squared. And he has what might be the best line of the week, which I can't repeat due to POSSIBLE SPOILERS, but you'll see soon.

Anyway, this morning I kicked it off:

We don’t write about our kids. We write about ourselves. I’m not saying this to be offensive, and I’m definitely not complaining: Look, babies sleep 18 hours a day. Most of their waking hours are spent doing slight variations on very simple tasks: feeding, peeing, vomiting, crapping, and crying. Just mention the phrase “the miracle of birth” around a new parent and they’re likely to pelt you with any one of the above-mentioned substances. 

Mommy-blogging isn’t about learning how to take care of your child. Despite what diaper companies and daytime TV commercials would like to convince you, you are born knowing how to care for your baby. Neanderthals raised babies successfully. Sloths sleep 18 hours a day, and they raise children successfully. Freaking Libertarians raise babies successfully.
Read the rest > 

Breastfeeding Sucks

On the Kveller blog, and in our personal lives, I've been freaking out a bit. Cholov yisroel formula has been embargoed by the FDA, and I've been doing some of my rare journalism to figure out what's going on.

One thing that parents are best at -- and yes, readers, I'm talking about you, and I'm talking about myself as well -- is trying to tell other people what to do.
Maybe it's natural. Maybe it comes from being parents. You're forced to order your kid around. So, why shouldn't the rest of the world do what you say, too?

Kveller recently ran a story on a shortage of baby formula in the Hasidic community. As can be expected, it was summarily attacked, on here and on my way-too-sharey Facebook page. Mostly, it was that knee-jerk "a-ha!"ness of parents who see a mention of bottlefeeding and leap to point out the wrongness inherent in a parenting style not their own.

Breastfeeding has become a badge of honor. A few months ago, when a brand of formula started advertising itself as "the healthiest choice," tons of parent bloggers (myself included) pounced on it. In parent-heavy environs like Park Slope, there's a type of bottle that actually advertises that the milk inside is breast milk -- which is so self-righteously snotty, conceited, and straight-up ill-willed that it's a good thing I wasn't drinking breast milk when I heard about it, or I would've spit it across the room in shock.

My wife is an ardent supporter of breastfeeding. And our baby drinks formula.

Both of our babies started out on a boobs-only diet. In both cases, however, we had at one point to face the reality that she just didn't have enough milk.

My wife was the first to admit it. The fact that I'm saying this is a testament to her openness and honesty. Not to get all sexually-bifurcated on you, but if this happened to men, we would never talk about it. I mean, the male gender invented the term "pissing contest." If someone were to tell us that a part of our bodies were insufficient? A check-outtable, oversexualized part? Forget it, we'd never step outside again.

But my wife, she knows how to face reality. Her mother is one of the top lactation consultants in Australia and a mother of seven, and she had to supplement feeds for all but one of her children. There are a million things that can cause a situation like this -- stress, exhaustion, genetics, or simple dehydration. Or it could be something more sinister. For us, it was one of each.

When our daughter was 6 weeks old, my wife got a virus. It led to her becoming dehydrated, which caused her milk supply to crash. She was in bed for days. I had to get all Michael Keaton on her, playing at being a single father, jumping rooms from the baby to her and back again. I can't imagine how my mother-in-law (or anyone else) dealt with newborn twins. (Actually: Maybe by getting stressed out and losing some of her milk. Duh.) It was hard. She recovered, but her milk supply took months of hard work to build up again. For our second child, the reason was less dramatic, but we had to face facts. There simply wasn't enough.

We were hard workers. We were vigilantes. We only wanted what was best for our babies. We had homebirths, only fed our kids organic food (my wife made most of it herself), and I read the bejeezis out of every parenting book I could get my hands on. That was the hardest part of this recent formula shortage, and the frustrating lack of answers from the FDA -- we'd decided to only give our baby cholov yisroel formula, since we believe it's especially important on a spiritual level.

So yes, breastfeeders and overachievers, I'm with you all the way. I'm on your side. I hear what you're saying.

But sometimes, you need to just shut the hell up.

Sweet Child of Mine, Please Shut Up

As someone with an OCD work ethic -- a perpetually cleaned-out email inbox, 10-minute "editing" sessions that end up being four hours long -- it's really difficult to deal with this strange notion of a crying baby, to which the normal rules of logic do not apply.

Something that worked 100% last time -- stroking her back, holding her just so, with one cheek smushed up against the crux of your elbow and the other draped loosely over the fingers of your other hand -- will have no effect whatsoever the next instance that she refuses to go to bed. And sometimes, doing one little thing -- like stroking her forehead just above her eyes -- will cause those eyes to grow heavy, sink, and shut in no time at all. Just one more way that G-d screws with our minds. And all the time she's crying, you are powerless to make it stop. You try and you try, but the truth is, she's the one who's going to decide when to go to sleep, not you. You just keep praying to yourself silently: Stop crying. Please, just stop crying.

But the thought that's been going through my head lately is of this story.

This is an awful thing to read, and unless you're one of those goth kids who still peeks at their own healing scars under a band-aid, feel free to skip to the next blog post.

It's a story about a Lebanese terrorist who was apprehended in 1979 after killing an Israeli policeman and bludgeoning his 4-year-old daughter to death with a rock.  He was freed in July, 2008, as part of a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hezbollah, shortly after I started being a professional Jewish blogger -- which meant that I was reading and writing about pretty much everything that happens to the Jews. Including this, which was a pretty big story.

But that's not the most horrifying part. While he killed the policeman and his daughter, the policeman's wife was hiding inside the walls of their house with their younger daughter. The baby was screaming, and the mother, while trying to quiet her, suffocated her in the process.

I have really bad luck singing lullabies to my kids. I get distracted by the crying and by watching them, and I can't think of any songs to sing. All the obvious choices -- "Rockabye Baby," "Dona Dona," "Sweet Child O' Mine" -- all go out of my head. I'm left grasping for whatever song I can think of, which is usually an Ani Difranco song, but has been known to be worse things. One night, the only song in my head was Ice-T's "Cop Killer," which I promise doesn't mean anything (I have good friends who are cops) but represents a period in my life when I was screaming a lot, too.

In some way, her crying is a reminder of our own mortality. We spend most of our lives not having control over everything, even our bodies, when they should be going to sleep but aren't. In another way, though, it's just my baby expressing her inner pissed-off-ness. I still stroke her back, but sometimes I force myself to take a mental step back and let her scream. It's all gonna be okay, baby. But that doesn't mean you can't express your feelings on the matter.

(Crossposted at Raising Kvell, which is where the picture comes from. The editor found it and I love her dearly, but it is kind of gross. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned and expressing my subconscious heterocentrism and don't like naked dudes with chest hair? Sorry. Still true.)

Lag B'Omer: The Lag Blog, Pt. 2

aLast night: campfire was every bit as awesome as we wanted it to be, except the kids were asleep. This was probably better for all concerned, because Boruch and Itta were doing musical stuff, Karen was tending the fire, and I would have been grabbing all three of them by the scruffs of their collars and held them in the air and not let them walk anywhere because there were ticks and an open fire pit and I am pretty much the typified neurotic paranoid parent who never lets my daughter out of the house, except to stand in the sun for 10 minutes twice a week to get exactly her recommended dose of vitamin D. Yeah.



This morning: Taking the Monsey Bus back to the city. Monsey being the place that it is [thanx, Chaviva], I expected the bus to be packed with every sort of Hasid -- the roly-poly kind, the diamond kind, and the opens-three-hardcover-books-on-your-lap-at-once kind -- but found that, pleasantly, it was filled with every sort of Jew, like a mini-Israel crammed into the narrow borders of a Greyhound-type bus. Hot girls in tight pants with sunglasses bigger than the circumference of their faces. Yarmulke-less balding dudes with cell phones that look like Star Trek phasers. And, yes, the roly-poly Hasidim.

At one bus stop, there was nobody waiting except for two pint-size boys in identical white shirts and argyle vests, heads shaved except for their payos. They couldn't have been more than five and six, respectively. As the bus rolled to a stop, the driver joked to the person in the front seat, "You think they're going to 47th Street?" -- a wink and a nod to the street where all the Hasidic diamond merchants work.

The bus pulled over, and a passenger leaned out. "Where you headed, boys?" he asked, then repeated the question in Yiddish. "Monroe," they replied -- saying the word like it had never referred to a president of the United States, much less pronounced in English. They moaned the M through their noses, rolled the r, and hooted the o from the apex of their mouth, not the back, owl-like.

Next to me, two men talked about their respective kids, all of whom had gone to Meron the night before for the holiday. My traveling companions were both old, and both Orthodox, but, you know, casual Orthodox -- colored shirts, knit yarmulkes. Their kids had gone Hasidic, with twenty grandchildren each and wives in burqas, the whole deal. But they talked about them like rebellious teenagers. Their crazy bonfires, the crazy praying. It was pretty utterly awesome. It inspired me to crank up the Sonic Youth on my headset all the way, startling the hell out of the dude sitting next to me, who was learning Talmud out of three books at once.

We're taught that a plague killed off thousands of Rabbi Akiva's students because they did not treat one another respectfully. I feel like the massive party that happens in Israel every year -- and like, in some small way, my bus ride -- are all tikkunim, or healings, of that rift.

And the trip took under an hour -- less than the time from Brooklyn to here! If the bus ride is this exciting every morning, I think we may have a new neighborhood to consider.