Brett Berk

The Gay Uncle leaves for Alaska this afternoon. “What the fuck?!?” you ask. Well, he’s been invited to do a reading from his stellar book The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting at the preschool at Congregation Beth Sholom in Anchorage (frozenchosen.org No joke!) He has no idea what to expect up there–besides an adoring audience with every parent in the city–but is salivating over a planned meal of arctic wolf, bald eagle, baby seal, and grizzly bear bladder (and flossing afterward with blue whale baleen). His boyfriend and fellow Guncle, Tal, will be accompanying him, so they’ll be visiting the big park in Denali (and probably every junk shop that exists in the entire state). And he was hoping to finally have an opportunity to wear the Robert Rauschenberg-style coyote fur coat on which he wasted his last royalty check, but thanks to global warming (and spring) it’s apparently in the 70s up there, so oh well. (Fur is forever.)

He will keep you posted on every occurrence during his voyage North-to-the-Future (follow him on Twitter for full effect), and is planning a big article about Parenting in the Frontier, as well as one on how Levi Johnson is going gay-for-pay.

Kid cursing? Who the fuck cares? Read the Gay Uncle’s counter-intuitive take on how to handle an incipient young garbage mouth in his MOMLOGIC column this week. Go ahead, click the shit out of this link!

Looking for that perfect gift for the mom in your life? Get her a copy of The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting. Use this secret link to purchase a copy that has been personally inscribed to the mom of your choice and signed by the Gay Uncle himself (must order by Wednesday, 05/06 at noon EST). Or use any of the individual links below and to the right under the image of the book on this page (just scroll down a little and look right) to pay the same price for an unsigned copy from Gunc’s cooperating chain or independent sellers: Amazon, B&N, Powell’s, St. Mark’s Books. Guaranteed to make any mother laugh at least once.

First the widespread adoption of gay marriage in the heartland, then all this piggy peril, then the hot winds of hell collapsing the Dallas Cowboys’ practice bubble in Irving Texas. And now???? The Gay Uncle’s friends at MOMLOGIC are reporting on a trend of mothers using Twitter to give the play-by-play on their labor. And he’s not talking about factory work. He’s talking about 140 character, serial, sometimes sardonic delineations of the whole push-and-shove of hustling a baby out their va-jay-jay. The existence of this practice leads the G.U. to ask two interrelated questions.

a) Why?
b) How?

In honor of Twit-Moms Trendies, Gunc is going to run a contest this week. Best 140 character (or less) fake labor/birth tweet wins a copy of Romi Lassally’s True Mom Confessions: Real Moms Get Real. Leave your entries in COMMENTS below.

The Gay Uncle received a very compelling question this week, one that takes as its subject a twining web of resentments, involving young children, objectionable gifts, and mother-in-laws. “Dear Gunc: I am having trouble with the grandmothers giving copious, unwanted gifts. These gifts normally are from China, overly packaged, cheap and are often relegated to the bottom of the toy box moments after opening. There have been times when a certain grandmother has been told she may not buy our daughter something while at the store. On a later date, the same grandmother has returned to the store to purchase the item. I used to go by the philosophy that gift giving was a grandmother’s prerogative. However, my daughter now greets her grandmothers with, ‘what did you bring me.’ I feel embarrassed every time I need to over-fill the recycling bin or go to a second garbage can because of all the toy refuse. Please address.”

The Gunc abides. The short answer is that parents should feel entitled to set whatever boundaries they want for what comes into their house. It’s their one absolute fiefdom, and until a tree lands on it or it gets foreclosed on, they should be able to enact any restrictions they see fit, so long as they’re not physically injurious to anybody and don’t involve silly costumes or nudity. If your child had a nut allergy, you wouldn’t allow grandma to bring a can of cashews over just because she wanted to or because she thought they looked cute. Of course, if you want this to work, you can’t be passive (or passive-aggressive) about it. Set the rule, discuss it with the M-I-L, ask her to respect it, and set up repercussions if she doesn’t abide (e.g. We’re not coming over for Memorial Day, or We’re sending you to a home.)

Of course, every good solution requires a trade-off. (That’s why it’s called compromise: you feel compromised whenever you do it.) In this case, you must adhere to the understanding that grandma does not have to abide your rules at her house. Her casa is her domain, and she can implement whatever protocols she wants over there, so long as they’re not physically injurious to anybody and don’t involve silly costumes or nudity (and no Pig-Latin either; it’s asinine). This patented Gay Uncle formula affords a sense of control, achieves balance, and conditions all parties to practice mutual respect. Try it!

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE NEW AND IMPROVED VERSION OF THIS HILARIOUS POST ON MOMLOGIC. WITH CAPTIONS!!!

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

One of the Gay Uncle’s colleagues over at MOMLOGIC recently posted a piece about why she washed her son’s mouth out with soap. Apparently, the boy wouldn’t stop saying things like “poop”, “poo-poo”, and “poopie”, and the mom wouldn’t stop letting this behavior annoy her–a perfect swirlie of immature brinksmanship. So once the kid inevitably crossed the line a final time, mother squirted some pineapple hand soap into his mouth and had him swish it around. The outcome? The boy pumped his fist and said, “Yes! I ate soap!”

Gunc would like to give this mom a piece of advice: Dial it Down. Why?

1) Stooping to your child’s level to engage in absurd and inane battles–and then allowing their behavior to incite you to perform irrational and potentially injurious acts–inevitably leads to nothing but further conflict.

2) Like using torture to acquire sensitive information, or employing the death penalty as a means of deterring future murders, extreme practices like soap-gargling may seem like they’re making an impact, but they are actually completely ineffectual. Studies prove it. (If you’re a doubter, just note the boy’s reaction.)

3) Getting so out of control that you are reduced to behaving this way demeans you as a human and undermines your authority as a parent. Your job is to model control, and to employ effective discipline that will help your child find their own center. Remember the G.U.’s mantra: “PRETEND YOU’RE THE GROWNUP!”

4) Soaping out a “dirty” mouth is both retro and metaphorical, neither of which means anything to a young kid.

So what to do instead? Well, for starters, Gunc would suggest that you not worry so much about your kid saying words like “poop”. (Ever heard the expression, “Choose your battles”?) Still, if you think it”s not appropriate, say so. But keep your invocations calm and straightforward, and then let it lie. If you lose your mind every time your child a word you don’t approve of, they”re going to quickly learn that this is an excellent way to get a rise out of you, and this will only encourage them to do it more. If you”ve already dug yourself into this hole, or find they”re cursing to accomplish this end, your best bet is to calmly tell them once that it”s inappropriate, and then ignore it. It may take a while, but I fucking swear it will go away.

The Gay Uncle hates Earth Day. Not because he hate our Earf. In fact, he loves it. (It’s his main habitat!) And certainly not because he hates holidays. Any excuse to start drinking in the morning is good for him. He doesn’t even hate all the downering attention-to-wanton-destruction associated with this celebration: the stats on how many cubic miles of rain-forest trees have been chipped into toothpicks or Chinese packing crates, the number of baby bald eagle skeletons that have been discovered in the stomach of a voracious invasive species in Nova Scotia, the miles of new natural gas mining pipes that have been laid under our pristine national wilderness. No, he hates Earth Day because of the smugness: the grotesque perfomative sensibility that says if you spend a few hours picking up a teensy fraction of the shit you throw out each year, you’re somehow a saint. You want to do something to really help the earth? Gunc has heard that there are warehouses full of paper products that will be pulped (using extra dioxins and rings and rings of benzene) if no one steps up to adopt them. Now that’s waste! So do your part: buy a copy of The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting today. Links to booksellers–corporate and independent–over to the right, and an opportunity to purchase a personally inscribed copy right here. Honor your mother!

The Gay Uncle is all about families. So it makes sense that he would promote his own whenever possible. This is one of those times. His younger brother Derek is in a band called The High Strung, and they have a new record out today. It’s called “Ode to the Inverse of the Dude”. Why? Gunc has no idea. (Is it an acronym? A Leibowski reference? Some sort of gender-fuck?) He also has no idea what the cover art is supposed to represent, though it reminds him a bit of something from the Monty Python TV show, which is super. Anyway, the album is amazing. You should buy it and listen to it in your minivan. You should rock out to it while warming up organic chicken nuggets. You should play it for your baby (it’s melodic!) Click here or on the aforementioned cover to get to it on iTunes. It’s also available wherever music is sold.

The Gay Uncle was recently in Chicago for work, driving around the city for hours each day, and then spending even more hours inside the homes of average consumers, prodding them to explain how they make decisions–about EVERYTHING. Well, being in “traffic” in Chi-Chi allows for lengthy conversations, as nearly every destination requires an hour’s drive through endlessly repeating low-rise neighborhoods. (A friend of Gunc’s once referred to the Windy City as, “New York turned on its side.” The Gay Uncle prefers his own description “600 square miles of Williamsburg.”) But the commutes were great, only because the G.U. got to hear many embarrassing stories from one of his favorite colleagues. The mother of two boys–Adam, 9 and Joshua, 5–this woman is full of anecdotes. (Loyal readers may remember her from this piece, Room For Sex.) Apparently the other week, the younger boy was urinating, and though he’s fully toilet trained, when he finished, he somehow required a change of clothes. “What happened?” his mother asked. The boy shrugged. “I got pee in my underpants.” The mom cocked her head. “Really? Again? How? I pee all the time, and I somehow manage to do so without getting my clothes sopping wet.” The boy looked at her as if she has sixteen heads. “Mom. Everyone knows that penises are hard to control.” Gunc hopes he gets a new line before he begins dating. (Or summer camp.)