We've placed a bid on a house that's perfect for us in downtown Detroit. Wood smartly put the kibosh on my dreams of the Frank Lloyd Wright fixer-upper, and for not much more than the cost of a down payment on a house in San Francisco we hope to soon own our first home in a city that most people don't even like to drive through. I can't say that I blame them. Detroiters are notorious for not heeding traffic signals; you can't assume because your light is green that some guy won't blast through the intersection at 40 mph. When people out here in San Francisco ask me what Detroit is like, I say that while I've never lived there, it feels like it's somewhere between Mad Max and The Road Warrior: chaotic and menacing, but not quite post-apocalyptic.

But I have also been telling people how excited I am to live there, and that I think Detroit is incredibly beautiful.

We have been getting "the face" for awhile now when I say such things; you know, the one where they look like they're smelling a particularly turgid dog fart. It usually accompanies the words: "You're going to raise your daughter there?" The speaker's eyes then dart from side to side, anxious, as though the men in the white lab coats are about to get out of their white vans and rush us with straitjackets to take us to the loony bin. "Have you ever actually been to Detroit?" we've been asked four times.

It's really starting to piss me off, and probably setting me up to reflexively become one hell of an asshole about it. But before I get to that, a slight digression:

Despite my recent accolade as a mommyblogger and my honorary degree from vagina university, I am still a man. That means I am pretty dense about some heavy shit, like all the fucking insecurity and the "judgmentality" among interacting parents (particularly moms). Despite all the shit that went down a few weeks ago and all the veterans of the mommy wars banging their tin cups all over the internet, it didn't really dawn on me until my wife explained it recently: "parenting is a really fucking hard job," she says, "one that certainly makes me insecure. So we all slog through this job wondering if we're doing the right thing and always feeling terrified that we're not, and then when we encounter someone who has done some other thing, made some different decision, we take that insecure energy and turn it into judgmental hate." Now that I fully understand this subtext, I have heard playground interactions and seen blog conflict where all this runs like electric current through every passive (or not-so passive) aggressive comment. It makes sense. For many of us this is the first time in our lives that our every decision affects the future of someone other than ourselves, and that's an enormous, uncomfortable responsibility. I was reading MamaC-Ta's post from a few weeks ago about all the hate she was getting for dressing her kid the way she wants to, and I really started thinking about how all this insecurity and judgment boils down to a relatively simple chiasma:

(1) Parent A makes an intentional values-based decision to do something (i.e. formula feed, co-sleep, cry-it-out, let her baby watch television, leash or spank her kids, or feed them junk food).
(2) Parent B makes an intentional values-based choice not to do the same thing, often creating a false sense of both insecurity and superiority in Parent B, who feels that it takes so much more effort and sacrifice to make the value-based choice she has made for her child.
(3) Parent B resents (and judges) Parent A for making the "easy" choice.
(4) Parent A feels the blatant judgment from Parent B, often creating a sense of guilt or insecurity for making the choice she has made. Parent A now resents (and judges) Parent B.

In any interaction, multiple values-based conflicts may exist at once, creating a tangled web of judgment and insecurity. Nearly every values-based parenting choice exists on a continuum between two dichotomous poles. Any time a parent takes a strong position or makes a particularly "polar" values-based decision (i.e. "No TV! Only wooden toys!" or "TV teaches my babies to read! They learn so much more from their leapfrog toys than they do from wooden blocks!") the judgment just becomes intrinsic to the choice. You really can't win, unless you learn to just accept that judgment and insecurity are a part of this process, and ultimately if you have a strong sense of personal values you just make decisions according to those values and try not to ignite the insecurities in the other side. Easier said than done.

We're learning that one of the most contentious of these values-based choices is the decision about where to raise your children. Despite having known quite a few awesome, successful people who grew up in the city of Detroit, we keep hearing from ordinarily politically-correct liberal people that we simply cannot raise our baby in Detroit. Some list proxy excuses like bad schools, personal safety, and corrupt city government and nonexistent city services to try to convince us that it's the wrong decision. The bottom line is that Detroit is black and for many people that's enough. Does all this judgment add to any insecurity we have about our decision to live in the city? A little, and I've written about it honestly before. Is that insecurity going to stop us? Hell no.

But what it is really threatening to do is make me really resent the people who imply we are making the wrong decision, that we are making the wrong choice and jeopardizing the safety and future of our little girl. I recognize that it's all just part of the chiasma: some judge us as crazy or simply bad parents; others resent us because they assume we think we're better than them. It's the latter that I am most concerned about, probably because our general views are less divergent. I think our decision to live in the city is viewed by those sensitive about living in the suburbs as a rejection of their decision (or sacrifice). In other words, we are choosing to live in a place they perceive as too dangerous to live not because we like danger but because we would never live in a place as lame as the suburbs. And that part is true. Wood and I would never live in the suburbs. But I'm not going to turn this into a "why Dutch doesn't want to live in the suburbs" post. That must be such a tired subject among actual metro Detroiters. I'm just not going to argue about how statistically it's more dangerous to commute for 90 minutes a day on congested highways than it is to live among black people.

When Wood and I were 19 we drove to Canada with Wood's college republican friend and a group of her high school friends who all grew up in Farmington Hills, an affluent exurb of Detroit. In Canada, the drinking age was 19. To get there, though, we had to drive through downtown Detroit. It was late, but some concert must have just ended at Joe Louis Arena and we got stuck in highway gridlock not far from the Detroit/Windsor tunnel. Everyone in all the other cars was black. The tension in our car was palpable. The Farmington girls were terrified. They started talking about the people in the other cars as "they" and "them" and one even went so far as to call them "animals." I couldn't hold it in anymore and I got into a shouting match with her. It was a certain kind of ugliness you don't get to see too much, given how privileged people are taught to be so careful with their words. For the rest of the evening I had a headache and I didn't want to go into any of lame clubs these girls were dancing in, nor did I have any desire to drink. Wood sat with me out in the empty streets of Windsor, her new boyfriend driven to contemplative silence.

It's infinitely tricky to explain why you see beauty in a place where so many others see only ugliness, without also explaining that you see ugliness in the places they find beautiful.

God knows not everyone from the suburbs is like those girls from Farmington Hills. I know plenty of people who grew up in the suburbs who are now living in the city that their parents' generation abandoned. I also know plenty of people who grew up in the suburbs, raise their kids in a streetcar suburb, and are completely awesome. I love how beauty can flourish amid all different kinds of ugliness, how it can overcome its context, whether it be urban blight or suburban sprawl. You are ultimately unique from the circumstances that shape you. You don't have to think the way everyone around you thinks. You are not condemned to be a bad parent just because you had bad parents. You can make values-based decisions and stick by them no matter how many people tell you that you are wrong.

From this bully pulpit I will share some of the beauty I find in a city that so many have told us contains only ugliness. I may share ugliness, too. Like everywhere and everyone, I'm sure it has plenty of both.

. . .but how can I do that when my gutter collects things like the tip of an enormous black dildo?

The protean Austinite Paige McGuire (formerly of Miss Domestic fame) has specifically requested that we enter her "Shitty Mixtape Challenge." What is this "Shitty Mix Tape Challenge?" you ask. Well, I'm not quite sure. Paige is way too cool for stuff like "rules." She links to this video, and assumes we can figure it out for ourselves. She's kind of like that guy Jesus talked about who taught the other guy to fish rather than just give him fish, you know, right? Basically, the mix just has to be really, really bad, and embarrassing to play from a gigantic radio raheem boombox while walking around an anonymous urban environment. We here at Sweet Juniper love rules so we have created several additional ones to those Siobhan imposed upon herself for her excellent entry:

1. All songs must currently exist on one of my hard drives.
2. All songs must either (1) have been represented in Wood's cassette collection that I perused upon my first visit to her ancestral home in April, 1996; or (2) must have been in the catalog of the deejays who did our wedding.
3. No Eddie Money.

You can listen to our shitty mixtape entry here (but I don't know why you'd want to):

1. Eddie Murphy & Michael Jackson: whazupwitu?

Something tells me that this song could potentially have been the source of the funniest of all the "Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories" in a parallel universe where Dave Chapelle didn't go crazy. This song is proof of the limits of Eddie Murphy's talent that came long before Daddy Daycare.




2. The West Coast Rap All Stars: We're All in the Same Gang

If you had a Delorean with an operating flux capacitor, wouldn't it be nice to go back and tell the Traveling Wilburys that it's a nice idea when you're all stoned at Neil Young's birthday party, but please, don't make that album. Or the other one. Same thing with all those people in "We Are the World." But imagine if you could have put a stop to this monstrosity: Tone-Loc, Above The Law, Ice-T, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, J.J. Fad, Young MC, Digital Underground, Oaktown's 3.5.7, MC Hammer, Eazy-E, King Tee, Body & Soul, Def Jef, and Michel'le all rap on this "positive" 1990 single recorded purportedly to combat gang violence in LA several years before several of its featured stars made millions as "gangsta" rappers. It's so bad the earwax oozes out of my ears into my brain just to get away from it.

3. PM Dawn: I'd Die Without You

If I ever tried out for American Idol, this is the song I would sing. And I would totally sing it to Randy.





4. Paula Abdul (duet with "The Wild Pair"): Opposites Attract

I owned the cassette single to this, and used to listen to it while mowing the lawn. I didn't buy MC Skat Kat's solo album though.





5. Jermaine Stewart: We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off

This song reminds me of all those pamphlets that the Mormon chick I took to prom used to show me.

This month's edition of children's books that you wish celebrities would write: "Come Sail Away" by Styx. I was a one-year old when this song was released in 1978, but my parents must have played it a lot because I freakin' love it, man. It's the kind of song that should conclude every drunken wedding. But have you ever thought about the lyrics? I think it would make a great kid's book: arena-prog-rock pirates, ninjas, robots, angels, aliens. That is the stuff children's books are made of.

Okay, I am taking nominations for future editions of children's books you wish celebrities would write. It doesn't have to be musicians, just celebrities who don't suck, or, like Styx, who do suck but are awesome for complicated ironic reasons (like mustaches). Also, here is the flickr set with downloadable images.

Juniper has learned to turn on the television. She stands there less than ten inches from the screen, flipping through all four channels, looking for "babies." It also seems she prefers it at full volume. Despite my proclivities regarding the tube, I did not leap from where I sat across the room screaming, "Nooooooooooooooo!" in slow motion. We figured we'd let her see what it was, and hopefully get bored with it.

Tonight while we were getting her bath ready we heard the television crescendo in the other room. The channels changed every four seconds. Brady Bunch: "babies!" Pistons Game: "ball!" Evening news: "eyes!" George W. Bush's immigration speech: "Dada!"

[pause while Dutch looks to Wood with dread]

"No Juniper," her mother said. "That's not dada. That's our dictator. Can you say dick-tay-tor?"

"Dada."

Why? Oh why, Juniper? Anyone but him: Jerry Springer. French Stewart. Jared the subway guy. Why couldn't she have called any of them "dada."

I guess I should just prepare for the worst: