Brett Berk

Lying in bed this morning, but not wanting to break the spell of sleep and lug himself downstairs to the toilet, the Gay Uncle was reminded of an as of yet un-blogged about event that took place during his trip to Los Angeles last month. He and his boyfriend Tal had gone for a walk in Griffith Park with their close friend Dylan and his 5 year old son, Max. Somewhere along the way, they’d taken a wrong turn and gotten lost, and ended up wandering the streets of an adjacent neighborhood, trying to find their way back. Max became tired, and Dylan agreed to carry him on his shoulders. Having brought no provisions, and concerned for the boy’s ongoing hydration, Dylan soon stopped under a tangerine tree, resplendent with fruit. (These kinds of things pop up frequently in L.A.) Though Dylan is truly tall (standing at about 6’6″) even atop this friendly giant, the best citrus remained just out of the boy’s reach, and each one he selected appeared mealy or rotted or bug infested. Max began tossing the unsavory oranges away from him and, since the team was located mid way along one of the neighborhood’s many hills, the little balls of California sunshine bounced, rolled, and crashed into and under all manner of things–trash cans, old Saabs, front decks, cats. This was hilarious to everyone, no one more so than Max, who began giggling and guffawing uncontrollably with each additional toss. Gunc–always a fan of non-pain-inducing object tossing–encouraged him. But unbeknownst to the G.U., the boy has a hair trigger bladder, and all this hilarity and laughter seemed to set it off, and he was soon dampening his father’s deltoids (and clavicles and scapulae) with urine. Dylan took it in stride, not even yanking the boy down as the drip began to penetrate his T-shirt. “This always happens,” he said.

The Gay Uncle read two interesting details in a recent magazine article about traditional clans in New Guinea. He’s not sure yet how to put them together into his typical scathing indictment of contemporary American parenting, but they were just too juicy to let fly past without note, so he decided to post them here. Think of this as a kind of deep storage room for metaphors.

1) In the New Guinea Highlands, uncles play an extremely important role in raising children, so much so that nephews often don’t differentiate between them and their biological fathers. When an uncle is killed, his death is strongly mourned, and must be avenged.

2) In this same culture, pigs are important representations of status and wealth, so much so that when a new piglet is born, it is given an individual name, and sometimes allowed to suckle at a woman’s free breast when she’s nursing her own infant.

If you have any anecdotes that might fit with either of these bits–revered uncles, unexpected forms of breastfeeding, revered uncles unexpectedly breastfeeding–let fly in Comments below. Maybe it can be like one of those vocabulary assignments G.U. used to receive from his seventh grade English teacher (name: Eddie Eugene Elgoode, he kids you not) in which he’d have to merge a list of unrelated words into some kind of cohesive narrative. Could be fun!

It’s Canadian Appreciation Week here at Gay Uncle headquarters. First the Globe and Mail runs a stellar review of G.U.’s book; then, the number of Canadian visitors to the site soars, trumping the number of U.S. visitors for the first time ever; and finally, he finds this beautiful photo of Canadian flag on google.ca. As a way of celebrating, he’s decided to include a link to a Canadian-type bookseller from whom his neighbors to the north can order his book without dealing with overseas shipping charges. Go, Canada!

While visiting his family in Key West this past weekend, The Gay Uncle had the pleasure of running into his sister Roxy’s good friend A-M and her adorable children. You may remember A-M from one of G.U.’s earliest posts. If you do (or if you just snuck back to read it) you’ll recall that she was the nice lady who hadn’t yet come up with a name for her four month old son. Rest assured, the boy now has a name: Jorrdan He also has what might be the most amazing head that Gunc has ever seen. It’s perfectly spherical, devoid of hair, and is roughly the size and shape of one of your larger supermarket honeydews, placing little Jorrdan squarely in the 30,000th percentile for head circumference in the under-one-year-old category. Now, you may not be aware of this, but the G.U. is no stranger to super-skulls. He’s been known for his own planet-sized hat-holster ever since he was a child, when his nickname was (he kids you not) “The Wrecking Ball”. But though the colossal capper on wee Jorrdan has delayed the boy from learning to crawl properly (top heaviness literally forcing him to drag his sizable nugget around) and now requires the boy to attend physical therapy (to learn special deltoid-enhancing neck exercises so he can be the stick to this lollipop), A-M absolutely adores the idea that her youngest is big headed–now, at least; birth was another story. “It means his brain is super-sized too!” she said in her distinctive Long Island drawl. But while mommy’s proud, Jorrdan’s nine year old sister is very protective of Little Mr. Mega-Noggin, and doesn’t take lightly to people poking fun of him, mistaking him for a wind ravaged coconut palm, or pointing and shouting, “For the love of god, lie that child down; he’s blocking out the sun!” So in response to the girl’s sensitivity, A-M has asked that, in her daughter’s presence, folks either avoid the subject (impossible) or simply say that he has a “significant cranium”. A sensible and kindly request that everyone will no doubt abide. Everyone, that is, except the Gay Uncle. So this post goes out to tiny Jor and his Brobdingnagian brain-pan. Join the club, kid. Big Heads rule!

The Gay Uncle has fumed about it many times, but it was only this morning that he finally realized his true feelings: Signing to your baby is stupid! He’s sure that other people have loads of good reasons why it’s useful and beneficial and necessary, but here’s his anti-infant-ASL rationale:

1) Your baby has very little of interest to say that you don’t already know (I’m dirty, More milk, I’m dirty)
2) You look like an asshole when you’re doing it
3) There’s certain thoughts to which we just shouldn’t have access. For example, when they taught a captive gorilla sign language, one of the first things she said was “I’m sad because the hunters took my baby away.”

The Gay Uncle rushes into the loving embrace of his family this week, meeting up with them, as he does every year, for their annual Passover-By-The-Pool celebration in the Florida Keys. Besides providing him with a tan, a perpetual hangover, and a host of new material, G.U. relishes the chance to immerse himself in the increasingly tangled web of what some experts call his “blended family” (but which he refers to more frequently as his “blendered family”). Extra credit for anyone who can follow the attendance list: Both of his parents–divorced now for twenty six years–will be in attendance, as will his three siblings and their partners. And his father’s brother. Following in mom and dad’s footsteps, his sister’s ex-husband always makes an impromptu appearance. Of course, his sister’s current boyfriend will be present, with the four loving nieces they’ve sired between them. His common-law brother-in-law will hopefully bring his parents, and more than likely his lovely ex-wife and her current husband will pop by too. The ex-wife’s parents live in town as well, so there’s hope that they’ll stop in. His younger brother’s girlfriend’s mother often joins, and sometimes brings a new internet friend. “Uncle” Lawrence, one of Gunc’s closest friends from New York usually manages to jet in for a few days. And G.U. will be sure to set a few extra places for the assorted lounge singers, bar hoppers, bar owners, and drag queens that make up his mother’s makeshift “tribe” down there. It’s only fortunate that neither of G.U.’s other two siblings have any children, or we’d need to graft even more branches to this family thicket (forest? mangrove swamp?) He’s been thinking, maybe it’s simpler just to pulp the whole family tree. Add a little ice, juice, and rum, and you have a frozen drink. Plus, in this form, one can simply keep it all in the pool.

During the course of his twenty years working with young kids, the Gay Uncle has learned that there are certain inalienable rules governing children’s behavior. When running across a paved surface, a child will fall. When given a piece of chocolate cake, they will end up with frosting in their nose. And when asked open-endedly what they want to wear that day, they will choose something that closely resembles a Halloween costume or one of the Village People. So when his sister Roxy called to tell him the story of what transpired after a customer at her restaurant ordered a sixteen ounce fruit smoothie (served in a chilled pint glass) and gave it to her five year old, he was anything but shocked to learn that, after less than one sip, the beverage and its container ended up on the tile floor in a runny pile of yogurty shards. What was surprising was the way the child’s mother responded, grabbing the girl by her arm, dragging her feet through the mess, and yelling at her point-blank: “You are ruining my day.” This is akin to handing a child a fat red crayon, pointing them in the direction of a white wall, and then scolding them for “ruining my plaster.” (You gave her the gun, loaded it, and turned off the safety; should you really be surprised when it goes off?) Even more surprising was the way this mommy defied the unspoken kid rule–which covers ice cream, soda, and even smoothies: The first disastrous spill is always forgiven. When the waitress approached offering a no-cost replacement “Maybe in a smaller paper cup with a lid this time…?” the mother scowled at her daughter and shooed the server off. “No way. She is done here.”

The Gay Uncle is not a huge fan of receiving videos of people’s children. Not because kids aren’t darling and hilarious. They are. But, most of the time, when folks send clips to the G.U., they’re of things that are inane (infants sleeping); humiliating (parents singing to their offspring); boring (birthday parties where no one throws cake);or gross (birth). This point was driven home today, when Gunc was forwarded a QuickTime file from an old family friend. He’d already seen these people’s most recent on-line Christmas card, in which the family members’ heads were hauntingly transposed onto a herd of animated reindeer who danced (rather poorly) to Frosty the Snowman. So, since the link was described by the sender as “cute” he figured it might simply be another holiday click-and-add. He imagined hopping clip-art Easter bunnies, a bloodless re-enactment of the crucifixion, or maybe–since Passover was coming–some sort of Busby-Berkeley inspired ten plagues choreography. Instead, the film was of the couple’s young son receiving an Electro Encephalo Graph (E.E.G.) No matter how, or how many times, G.U. views this footage, he cannot convince himself that there is anything charming or adorable about a three year old kid with eighteen needles taped into his skull lying prone and anesthetized on a sterile-paper-covered table and having his brain waves scanned. (E.E.K.!!) Why, he wants to know, must this now be downloaded into his cerebral hard drive. He also wants to know: What are the contents of the strangest Kideo clip you’ve received? Let him know below in the Comments section.

The Gay Uncle is heading out to visit his in-laws for the weekend, but before he goes, he wants to do a little something to help spread the word about gay uncledom (and, more specifically, about his book.) Can you help him achieve this laudable goal? Forward a link to this site to two friends who don’t already know about the wondrous world of G.U. and ask them if they could please do the same. Then they’ll tell two friends. And they’ll tell two friends. And so on. And so on. And so on…

The Gay Uncle heard an interesting tale in his recent travels, that of a three year old girl who’d been tantrumming. Now, the G.U. generally has some great–if counterintuitive–advice about dealing with kids’ rages, suggesting that you treat them in much the same way the Forest Service deals with fires in the National Parks: build a firebreak about the flames and let them burn out (see chapter 4: Pouring Water on a Grease Fire). But this girl’s fits were a standard deviation or two beyond the norm. When she didn’t get her way, she tore through the house flipping over tables and yanking appliances out of socket like some abusive husband in a bad Lifetime movie. She even once pulled the flat-screen TV off it’s perch atop its console, and we all know the cardinal rule of every aspirational household: do not fuck with the flat screen! Given the extreme nature of this behavior, Gunc’s first response was to question what else was going on in the home. The list was relatively lengthy: bitter divorce, both parents recently moved, custody battle, no cooperation on how to deal with the kid. I’d be in a tizzy as well (what the G.U. calls a Pink Rage). There is no quickie Q&A-at-a-book-signing-type solution for these kinds of tantrums. But remember, your child’s responses to emotional situations–and thus the neural pathways their little brains are creating and will be using to deal with things for the rest of their lives–are profoundly shaped by what you do and how you act and react. Kids are resilient and they can handle change, even major change, effectively, but only if the adults around them–the people ostensibly in charge of the world–are acting like grown ups. During heightened emotional times–like during a divorce, a move, a sample sale–it is important to step out of the (Divorcing) Parenting Bubble and focus first on your child’s needs for some form of stability. The Gay Uncle recommended professional help (for the parents!) and maybe a nice long hug for the little rage-aholic.