You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story by Annabelle Gurwitch & Jeff Kahn

Author:Annabelle Gurwitch & Jeff Kahn [Gurwitch, Annabelle & Kahn, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography, United States, Social Science, Family & Relationships, Sociology, Cultural Heritage, Biography, Jewish Studies, Jews, Case studies, Interpersonal relations, Man-woman relationships, Marriage, Personal Memoirs, Marriage & Family, Parenting, Married people, Kahn; Jeff - Marriage, Parenting - United States, Man-woman relationships - United States, Married people - United States, Jews - United States, Marriage - United States, Gurwitch; Annabelle - Marriage
ISBN: 9780307463777
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-23T04:30:44.234000+00:00

He Says

Who knew that fun was so bad? To Annabelle all manner of fun is equivalent to a sugar-coated junky kid’s cereal: it might be tasty but it’ll rot your teeth and give you type 2 diabetes. Bad, fun, bad! Fun, you and your buddies silly, goofy, and laugh riot are not welcome in Ms. Gurwitch’s House of Superstructured Seriousness. So, fuck you, fun, and the funny little horse you rode in on!

There must be some kind of balance between structure and spontaneity in the face of the complexities of child rearing in the early twenty-first century. You would hope that we might find some middle-ground flexibility. Alas, Annabelle sees flexibility as a threat to her parenting agenda. I’m less coparent and more, mortal parenting enemy.

I’m not completely as averse to rules and structure as Annabelle alleges I am; it’s just that I have some experience with it and I’m not the biggest fan. My family wasn’t so much Father Knows Best as Father Knows All and Don’t You Dare Cross Him. He was a sort of benevolent, generous, and sometimes even silly dictator. My dad was equal parts Groucho Marx, Santa Claus, and Saddam Hussein. A dictator is still a dictator and let’s not forget how “weird” I was to him as a kid. To say I was the black sheep of the family really doesn’t paint me black enough. My mom was super overprotective of both my sister and me. I was the only person I knew growing up who had babysitters younger than I was because “a girl, even a younger one, is more mature and responsible than you are to take care of your sister.” Gee, thanks, Mom. I wonder if she ever knew how humiliating it was for me, a high school junior trying to get a freshman babysitter to tuck me into bed.

As was every Jewish boy I ever knew growing up, I was expected to get good grades. Unlike most of them, I didn’t. This must have been a big disappointment to my parents. In eleventh grade, on my New York State-mandated Regents geometry exam, I got a 56 out of 100. I only got a 56 because the geometry genius I had cheated off of all year finished the test so quickly that I could copy only about half the answers. My father was furious with me and insisted on making me take the test over. I told him that he should be satisfied with a 56 because I was never going to do better. He wouldn’t listen to reason, forced me to study all summer, work with a tutor, and take the Regents exam again. Months later I asked my dad if the test score ever came back. It did. I asked what I got. A 19. I couldn’t help but laugh at my sheer ineptitude. It was so bad, I was almost proud of myself, but my dad couldn’t even look at me when he told me. It must have been humiliating for him.

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