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About Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dad


  
Confounding Fathers:
This section of the blog is about politics.  Fatherhood is about leadership, teaching, setting an example and equipping my daughter with the skills to nurture herself through a life full of challenges.  Politics and government should be about the same things: provide opportunity and resources while also encouraging personal responsibility.  That our current president could be elected demonstrates, to me, a crisis of fatherhood in this country.  If this tyrannical son of a bitch is what we think a good leader looks like, fathers are failing their sons.  The posts will make observations about our current political climate and, when possible, suggest new ways of doing things. 



Dad as Hell:
This section of the blog is about dealing with mental illness.  As a dad, part of my responsibility is to wrestle with my own inner demons so they won’t possess my daughter.  These posts will be about mental health struggles and may sometimes read like an essay version of an Eminem song. 





Dad Rock:
This section of the blog is about music.  Most music today is electronic but my interest in electronic music starts with The Postal Service and ends with Girl Talk.  I’m a guitar dude and guitar music today is branded Dad Rock.  In posts of this section, I’ll talk about music. 







Father Figure:
This section of the blog will be about health and fitness. 




 

  

                                                 

This is How we DeWitt:
This section of the blog will be about parenting and marriage specifically.  There will be anecdotes, observations and advice. I'm an awesome dad and an awesome husband.  You can be too! 


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More Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dad...

The Iceberg

I’m going to assume you know about the Titanic, the colossal boat that sank in the North Atlantic, not the 1997 film about the two lovers on the colossal boat that… well, I won’t spoil it for you.  You may not know that the Night Captain who spotted the iceberg was inexperienced and thought putting the engines in reverse would help; instead, the swirling water created a vacuum, pulling frozen doom even closer.  Still, the luxury liner was engineered to withstand a head-on collision with an iceberg. There would have been damage of course, but the ship, 1,503 people and that enormous diamond would not have been lost. However, the newby Night Captain thought it wise to turn the ship, trying to avoid a collision.  In so doing, the iceberg caught the side of the hull, where the ship was weakest, fastened together with cheap rivets to save money. As a result, water flooded areas no engineer imagined it could reach and, after a harrowing struggle, the ship was swallowed by...
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The Gifted Grift

From the age of eight I was placed in accelerated learning classes and told I was Gifted and Talented. GT courses again and again reiterated the idea I was special and I believed it wholeheartedly. I thought I was smarter than everybody. I was perceptive: I saw truths other people ignored. I thought I was better, more capable, quicker witted, sharper tongued, more logically coherent and just superior to pretty much everyone, even my GT peers. My success was assured.  My confidence in my success came from movies and books, rap songs and other capitalist pop culture promises of perfect romances and limitless wealth; it came from GT programs which told me I could be anything and which were relatively easy for me to navigate given the structures of a scholastic environment; it came from the fact I was pretty good at most of the things I bothered to try. By 22, I assumed virtually boundless capabilities were innate in me just waiting to blossom.  My success would be as glorious ...
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Some Practical Advice on Living With Monsters

Ever since becoming a dad, I’ve been grumpier than usual.   Some of my negative mood could be attributed to life as a new parent and adjusting to the new responsibilities which come with this new reality.   Some of my negative mood could be attributed to the insomnia which, like some Twilight Zone, Monkey's Paw plot twist, comes hand-in-hand with the new workload and stakes of parenting.   All your decisions have new weight to them, there’s a human being you have to keep alive and the twist is you get to do it all without sleep. Some of my negative mood could be attributed to the fact we bought a house and had to deal with realtors and lawyers and banks and movers and contractors and the rest of the people whose job it seemed to be to screw us over as we tried to make a home.   Some of my negative mood could be attributed to the junk food I ate as a coping mechanism for the aforementioned stresses, which paradoxically made me more anxious then groggier, neither o...
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Put Your Marriage in Jeopardy!

It’s polar vortex season which means it’s a nice time or year to stay inside. The idea of a few days bundled up indoors used to be daunting or carry the risk of boredom, but thanks to streaming video I now have access to just about every movie or TV show that’s ever been made. The hours can go by surprisingly quickly.   Shows these days are so engrossing it’s easy to zone out.   My wife and I turned on Netflix’s RUSSIAN DOLL and I think the only thing we said to each other during the entire four-hour run of the first season was when I turned to her after episode one and said, “So we’re staying up late to finish this?” and she replied, “Duh.”      We’ve watched a lot lately.   RUSSIAN DOLL (Netflix, A+++), FOREVER (Amazon, C), I’M SORRY (TruTV/ Netflix, B+) THE GODFATHER (HBO, fell asleep), OCEAN’S EIGHT (HBO, fell asleep), 20 TH CENTURY WOMEN (Amazon, A++++). It’s easy to snuggle, mesmerized, engrossed, sitting in silence and slowly drifting apart. ...
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