Two men and a baby now so wonderfully ordinary

It’s hard to imagine any parents prouder or more adoring than the couple I met in a local park last week. They were sitting in the shade of a tree, coaxing premixed formula from a hospital issue-bottle into the tiny, mewling mouth of their newborn daughter. I sat beside them, my own three-month-old chubby-kneed and Buddhaesque by comparison.

“She’s beautiful,” I said, and they beamed in unison. A flicker of concern crossed the dad’s face. “She’s just two days old. She’s very small – she was three weeks early,” he said.

I told them that my baby was three weeks early too, and we all looked at her dimpled elbows and then at their baby’s tiny, flailing arms, and marvelled at how much could happen in such a short time.

“Do you live around here?” I asked.

“No, we live in Germany,” the other dad said.

“We’re just here to get her.”

“Well, good luck with her. She’s lovely,” I said again, and watched them pack up and leave, two dads and their beautiful baby girl, as happy and anxious and proud as any new parents.

I thought about how that was a conversation I could never have imagined having five, or even three, years ago, and I marvelled for the second time about how much can happen in such a short time, how quickly the extraordinary can become ordinary.

Special and wonderful and beautifully ordinary, all at once.

Meet the Bumper Brats . . .

I’ve been mesmerised by bumper stickers since arriving in California, or more specifically by the ability of some Americans to reduce all of life’s big questions – climate change, sex, religion, politics and their shopping habits – to a 10in strip of weatherproof vinyl.

I doubt if anyone has ever been prompted by a bumper sticker to pull the car over and leap out on the sidewalk shouting: “You know what, I too would rather be a tree-hugger than a neo-conservative, war-mongering, climate-destroying corporatist!” But still, they have a certain transparent, pithy efficiency. You don’t pick a fight over a parking space with a guy whose bumper sticker reads: “Don’t Laugh Your Daughter Could Be In Here”.’

But the ones that disturb me most are the ones declaring the driver to be “Proud Parent of Student of the Month at Whatever Elementary”. They are everywhere I look, begging all kinds of perplexing questions – like what happens when the Student of the Month becomes Surly Teenager of the Year and gets arrested for dealing in marijuana outside Taco Bell? Do the parents rush out to the garage to attack the fender with a razor blade and a can of deodorant, or leave it up there in the expectation that it will one day (when, say, the former Student of the Month is 50, working in insurance sales and his modest academic achievements are a fond memory) become cute again?

Decorating your wedding veil with your children’s art is tacky enough (yes, Angelina, it is tacky.) But splashing your child’s accomplishments all over the rear of your car strikes me as a particularly reckless means of creating hostages to fortune.

Of course, these parents don’t think like that: but that’s because they are the same adoring, overinvolved folk who will one day soon be calling up my university lecturer friend – she swears this happens regularly – to quiz her about what exactly 19-year-old Brittany “needs to do for her graduate thesis”.

I’ve heard them described as “helicopter kids” or the “teacup generation”, this cohort of cosseted, fragile kiddults, with their co-dependent, permanently hovering parents, but I now think of them as Bumper Sticker Brats: self-publicising narcissists, raised to crave praise and recognition like a junkie needs morphine.

By all means, tell your kids you’re proud of them. Just lay off the vinyl declarations. Your car’s bodywork – and your child – will thank you for it.

Why judge a victim of abuse?

America has been gripped by a scandal involving former NFL star Ray Rice, who was caught on CCTV in an elevator delivering his wife, Janay, a punch to the head that knocked her unconscious. The tape spread across the internet with a speed for which only shameless voyeurism can account, and the controversy extended all the way to Congress.

But when Janay Rice issued a statement last week blaming “the media and unwanted opinions” from the public, she suddenly found herself on the receiving end of that same public’s wrath.

Why do outcries involving women in abusive relationships invariably end up turning on the victim?

There are many complex reasons a woman might choose to stay in an abusive relationship – fear, financial worries, low self-esteem, even misplaced loyalty. What anyone in an abusive relationship needs is support and time, not judgment.