thoughts

It turns out if you have striking, dark blue hair that fades up to a sort of silver and glows in daylight a lot of people stop you to tell you, “Cool hair!” Any time I leave our building for a walking meeting it’s interrupted by at least one comment.

The occasional street comments or catcalling I’ve previously experienced have been occasional homophobic comments and threats, because I apparently walk very gay (???), so the first few times strangers called out to me I was on the defensive. I was certain they had to be mocking or belittling me in some way. Then, for a few times after that I just blushed and gushed, “thank you so much!” And now I just reply out of reflex, “Thanks!”

It took a week for my response to become reflexive. I’m not tired of the comments – it’s kind of people to notice! Yet, I colored my hair for me and not for a single other person on this Earth. I also know that if I reset my hair to dark brown, or even bleach it again, the comments will cease. I will return to being an unremarkable guy on the street.

I also know that the hair changes people’s perceptions of me. Demographically, people are saying “hi” to me who usually would not give me the time of day. My hair signals some element of counter-culturism to them – shared membership in a club. Similarly, I cut a peculiar figure on the train reading my comics or wrapped around a laptop.We all know appearances can be deceiving, but I don’t suspect people assume I’m off to direct a multi-million dollar book of accounts!

All this makes me wonder how must it feel to be a woman, whose mere existence seems to invite both kinds of comments – the violent catcalls and the appraising mentions, and the assumptions of your facility or lack thereof. As a feminist and someone who tries to be a good ally, I have read countless articles and followed movements like Hollaback, but it’s one of those things you don’t appreciate until it happens to you.

Actually, this is on my mind not because of it happening to me, but because of EV.

She is a striking little girl. All of our friends tell us she’s the perfect blend of E and, the classic curly-haired Italian toddler with hints of E’s Chinese heritage across her features. Everyone we know has seen her before, and they know us, so they’re not making a lot of comments about her appearance past the normal “oos” of cuteness. However, if we bring her to a store or to a place with people we haven’t met, here are the two comments we get most frequently: “Her hair is amazing!” and “She’s beautiful!”

Clearly I don’t mind the hair comment (it’s really quite incredible), and I’ll take “beautiful” over anything related to “princess” (and, yes, I’m still responding, “Oh, is that some level of Engineering degree? Princess in Engineering?”). Yet, this past week it’s struck me that I had to wait over three decades and dye my hair blue to get strangers to comment on my appearance, but it’s the first thing they do when they see EV. I’m not certain what parents of toddler boys get, but I don’t feel like I go around telling them “He’s so handsome!” as one of the first remarks out of my mouth.

My invariable response to the “beautiful” comment is “and she’s very clever.” People have surprised me in how much they get the hint and ask what she enjoys or if she likes books. Every so often we get someone who doesn’t take the hint. “What a heartbreaker,” they’ll reply, “just wait until she’s a teenager,” or some other such sexualizing nonsense about my two year old.

Which they think they have the right to say because she is a girl. Mostly we just shuffle away but someone eventually will catch my wrath. It will be words smooth and slick as the sharpest blade and I will slip it across their neck so fast EV will never realize what happened until they are crumpled behind us without a response.

We’re both happy to hear about you liking our hair, but we both already know we’re beautiful – you don’t have to tell us, and it doesn’t matter all that much anyway.

Despite being a parent for two years now and working at a startup a bit longer than that, I don’t think the idea of “Start-Up Parenthood” really hit me until earlier this summer. That’s despite my colleague Anita Andrews doing some very compelling and data-driven writing about the concept both on her own blog and our RJMetrics blog, The Data Point all this year.

I’ve learned there are two sides to the Start-Up Parenthood concept. One is the commiseration side – being able to discuss the ups and downs of parenting while also making a company profitable for the first time with your peers. That’s the same as it is for anyone in any unique industry.

The other side of the coin is the non-traditional, highly-flexible, very transparent world of start-up culture, and how that world accommodates your life events (or doesn’t).

The first week of July an avalanche of positive life events toppled onto the people close to me all once. They are not all my stories to tell, which is why this post is coming to you two months after the fact, but the upshot was that both our child care and E were suddenly unavailable to hang out with that toddler while I was in the middle of one of the busiest and most high-difficultly months of my career to date.

The answer? I left the office for a week with hardly any notice. Effectively, the least important aspect of my positive life equation was me physically being in an office from 9-to-5, or even working within those hours. From the CEO down to people reporting one manager below me, everyone at RJMetrics was okay with that. As a result, I got to spend an unadulterated week with my little girl, working during naps and in the evenings. It’s the most time I’ve spent with her in any one week since she was born. We had so much fun. I also did a lot of work. The thing that probably suffered most was my sleep.

My startup let me do that – it’s one of the many opportunities that come with the challenges of startup parenthood, an insane circus act of juggling chainsaws while swinging from a trapeze waiting to be caught midair in the mouth of a lion.

(And, I have the added bonus of my spouse, E, working in the same trapeze act – sometimes we’re bodies flying past each other through the air, others being the net that catches the other when we fall.)

Here’s the thing: I don’t think any of that exclusively has to do with me being a parent, or being married, or working at a startup.

I’ve seen these crisis weeks before. The week we bought our house. The month I was writing the first draft of my erstwhile book. The week E was recording and mixing an album with her collegiate acappella group. Some of my non-parental colleagues have had these weeks when they adopted a new pet, refurbished their house, or hosted family traveling from abroad.

It doesn’t take a baby to be busy, and it doesn’t take working for a startup for every second of every workday to contribute to the compounding future value of a business. Anyone can have a demanding job and everyone has a passion or a responsibility outside of work – and some of them can be as 24/7 and all-consuming as having a child.

I haven’t written about Start-Up Parenthood in so many words because I don’t want it to be a conversation just about a protected class of parents in exclusive unicorn jobs. It’s a conversation for everyone about flexibility and that the fiction of home/life balance is that you can separate the two from each other.

When we frame the conversation about a need for balance primarily around parenthood, it hurts everyone – parents, too. It makes it easy to turn the world into parents vs. not. I’ve never been interested in that world. My professional life was challenging and rewarding for a decade before having a baby, and it’s going to be just a vibrant for the following decade and beyond. I wanted flexibility pre-baby and never had enough of it, and now that I have it post-baby I am not going to hoard it from my colleagues who want the balance but not the baby.

Parents who work at startups are people who by definition have two unrelenting duties, plus many others. We can share and cope with each other while we give aspiring parents a glimpse into our lives. But we can also model what balance can look like for anyone – no matter their job or their family life. We can inspire anyone to find a way to do what they love in every waking hour and leave little time wasted.

I am going to start writing and talking about my own Start-Up Parenthood, and when I do I want you to know that it is a story about you, too, even if your hashtag would be #CorporatePolyamory or #ArtisticSingledom.

We all want love, success, happiness, flexibility, and balance, and #StartUpParenthood is just one model of having all of that and more.

EV is getting better every day at communicating with words, but her primary language seems to be the language of music and dance.

Last night she did a lot of sly smiling and edging around Liz and Patrick while they were over for dinner. That is, up until I asked if she wanted met to put the music on.

“Shake It Off?” EV queried?

“Really, do you want to use your one daily listen to ‘Shake It Off’ right now?”

“Michael Jackson?”

“Sure!” I replied.

She proceeded to boogie down to “Bad,” and then her second-favorite song, “Shut Up and Dance With Me.” After that, she was more like her normal, chatty self. It was the same when Gina paid us a visit last month. EV was all coy shyness until we had a dance party. Then, full silliness and reciting the periodic table of elements.

I never really understood how toddler shyness worked before. I’d meet a shy toddler, and her or his parent would say, “Oh, s/he’s just being shy,” and I’d kinda just shrug my shoulders and think, “Well, yeah, I’m a big loud stranger, that make sense.” I had never been on the other side of a toddler – the side where they are completely comfortable and at their most chatty and performative. I think I assumed those things were a polite fiction or exaggeration.

(Common Theme Alert: Getting older and being a parent has made me realize a lot of my flip judgments of people aren’t really fair. Maybe the J in my Myers-Briggs is finally ready to flip back to a P?)

Then I met EV. EV who speaks in whole sentences and sings entire songs when she’s in the house with E and I, and then clams up when a new person comes over to visit right up until we break out the music. It makes a certain amount of sense, I guess, since the friends of ours she knows best are Ashley, Jake, and Zina, because they come over to play music almost every week.

I guess she just associates trust with seeing people move their bodies to sound.

I can’t even begin to express how satisfying this is to me. I’m passing down one of the most important things my parents gave me, which is that unabashed, unfiltered, sometimes unhinged love of music. I spent so many hours rocking in a rocking chair singing along to Glass Houses and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and desperately trying to ape my mom’s moves as she broke it down to Michael Jackson and Rufus & Chaka Khan.

Hhere I am, doing the same with EV, to a lot of the same music, plus music I’ve grown up with, and even Taylor Swift, who I suppose is going to be her Michael Jackson.

That’s another post entirely.

I can’t decide if my age is beginning to show through my experience with electronics or if everything is now cheap and has terrible user experience design. Maybe both.

Around this time last year I got my first phone without a physical keyboard. I told myself, “All the kids are doing it – you have to live in the future sometime.” I’ve survived with it, and I can write emails with it in a pinch, but there’s no instance where I think to myself – “oh, let’s write for pleasure by swipe-typing.” That’s not a thing. If for some reason I do come up with an idea for a song while I’m on the go, I desperately paw through my belongings searching for a pencil. That I could commit the words to the screen with my fingertips rarely occurs to me.

I sit on the El with my laptop out and I realize I am now that demographic of older professionals with their outsized laptops on the train. Of course, I’m one of the only ones with blue hair, but that’s only a surface-level difference. I used to be the only person in all creation with a laptop on public transit, and that was my teeny netbook of old.

I felt that way today in the Verizon store. That phone with no keyboard has been gradually declining to accept a charge for its battery, and yesterday it finally gave up. “0% 0% 0%,” it flashes at me hopefully when I plug it in. That’s it.

That lead to longer than I like to spend in a retail environment spent on a physical, corded handset in the Verizon store, because no one at the store could even troubleshoot a one-year-old handset that won’t charge. It was sort of embarrassing – I felt like I was being punished. EV came with me, and she could not understand how I could be on the phone and need to stand in one place. After three levels of support, they decided I was telling the truth about it not charging no matter what I tried.

I remember some point in the past where I would hear about other people with their randomly-crashing computers and iPods that weren’t up-to-date and phones with bad charging ports and laugh a little laugh to myself. “They’re not using their stuff correctly,” I’d think, “or they just aren’t willing to understand how to fix them.”

Yet, here I am.Everything’s broken – blue screen of death on one laptop, deadly whirring on my MacBook, iPod won’t play songs all the way through, phone won’t charge. I expect my things to be pretty durable, but I’m not careless. I’m not the guy with cracked screens and missing keys (except that one EV pulled off my last MacBook – rookie parenting error, that). My relative care doesn’t seem to matter – I’ve gone from constantly connected and in-control to constantly on the risk of going completely incommunicado and at the whim of a bunch of circuit-boards.

All of that feels troubleshootable. If I had more hours and more time to try clever solutions I feel like I could fix half of those things, maybe more. But troubleshooting is a younger man’s game. Or, at least, a less busy man’s game. I don’t have time for that, and I don’t actually have time for any of these things to be broken, either.

I’m just afraid it’s going to make me that guy, who keeps buying the newest gadgets so he never has to deal with having an older one. It’s not my style. I’m a creature of habit and comfort. I don’t even like typing on a screen. I just want things to be as reliable as they were five or ten or fifteen years ago when I’d use them until they were just too slow to bear before upgrading.

Maybe I’m that guy already.

Not too much to say today, except our winning RJRetreat team enjoyed a victors’ lunch at one of my fav lunch spots, XIX at the Bellvue.

Why is it a fav? Aside from the view, the weird echo-chamber created by their domed ceiling, and the consistently good (and appropriately-portioned) prix fixe entrees, there’s that dessert bar…

(This particular outing also involved a supermarket-sweep style last-minute run to Banana Republic for respectable-looking clothes, because I made this big deal to my team (who had never been to XIX for lunch before) to “dress well” and then I showed up to work in a t-shirt and baggy jeans and got super-self-conscious which resulted in a 10:40am wardrobe change and a new pair of gray stretch jeans, mmmmm.)