In my experience, nothing legitimate stuffs your inbox as rapidly as a parent email chain run amok. When a controversial issue sets off a few parents whose comments set off a few more parents, and on and on—before you know it, you’ve received 68 emails and are under the brief delusion that if you weighed in, your fair and wise take on the issue would set all minds at ease and put the emailing to an end. A few years ago I resisted the temptation to enter an epic email battle over the location of my daughter’s fifth grade graduation party. But this weekend I did something that reminded me all about it: I took my eight-year-old son to a sports bar.
Lets begin with the sports bar The Wicked Monk in Bay Ridge.
It’s a big room with lots of big-screen TVs visible from any angle. There’s a big, long bar with lots of standing room around it, but a big share of the room is taken up by tables for eating, drinking, and watching. When Adam and I arrived at 7, there was actually a decent number of kids with their parents, though I’d hardly describe crowd as familial. The Wicked Monk is not Brooklyn’s version of Shake Shack.
What was I thinking? I was thinking that my son loves sports and would love being surrounded by all those big TVs dedicated to the NFL playoffs. I was thinking he’d appreciate that I was treating him like a big boy who could handle a new adventure that was generally off-limits to kids. I thought there was a good chance that he’d enjoy the company of this particular group of friends—who are much more sports minded than I—and that they’d enjoy him. To be honest, I didn’t give much consideration or credibility to the idea that, even at his age, I was sending him the wrong signals about booze, sports, and life, but maybe that’s exactly what I was doing.
Which brings me to the email debate a few years back, which I refrained from writing about back then out, because emotions were raw and, for me, it wasn’t an issue worth the risk of damaging acquaintanceships with a lot of people who I liked and enjoyed sharing our children’s grade school years with.
As I remember it, there were several passionate cross currents, with some parents thinking that a daytime event at a bar-restaurant with a dance floor would be a fine space for the party while others thought a bar/lounge environment, even in the day, was inappropriate. There was also an issue of scale and taste, of festive versus simple, eventful versus affordable. The good news was that, ultimately, a small group of parents reconvened and worked together to find a space that addressed the concerns of those parents with the strongest reservations—and the kids had a good time.
But it was instructive to see that even parenting, which allows many of us to find kinship over our similar challenges, can slip into the divisively personal and political. It was also instructive for me, more particularly, to see how some other parents–who may have been more personally familiar with the harms of drinking than I–felt very strongly that a setting with alcohol (even if was strictly off-limits to children) was just a bad idea for a school celebration.
On Saturday night, my group of friends—which included no heavy drinkers but a few gamblers—were wonderfully attentive to Adam. He even got to play one of his favorite cards: that he knows the name of every professional football stadium. When Adam started tiring out around 8:30 and asked if we could go, everyone stretched out their hands to the middle of the table, one hand on top of the other, and gave him a big whooping group send-off.
“It was a lot of fun and we tried to be a good influence. I think the burger and chocolate cake kept him on track and away from the evil influences. He’s a great kid and already more mature than any of us at the table that night,” one of my friends wrote on Facebook the next day.
“The bad thing was not Stu getting [Adam] drunk, but Kenny [the retired police officer] talking Adam into betting his allowance on Denver,” wrote another. None of that happened, of course.
What happened was that Adam and I had great time. If anything, he seemed a little overwhelmed by the new environment and looked to me, more than usual, for social cues.
But we returned to form in the car service ride back to the city, when I kept nodding off and he kept waking me up.
Eric Messinger is Editor of New York Family. He can be reached at emessinger@manhattanmedia.com
