My daughter and I are up late, reading our separate books in the shared space of my room. Hers is a fantasy novel, mine a collection of poems about industrial towns, factory work, bored schoolchildren, lonely mothers.
“There’s a word here I don’t know,” she says. “G-N-A-R-L-E-D.”
I pronounce the word for her, explain that [...]
Yesterday was a good day—no work, lots of productive and pleasant family time. Nora and I made waffles for breakfast; Mason and I built Lego spacecraft for various planetary missions, which we then enacted; and all of us, mid-afternoon, played Monopoly Junior (Maddie and Mason tied with $44 each, thereby evading a fight about [...]
A friend of ours says that when Nora talks, it sounds like she’s underwater.
Maybe.
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Yesterday Nora and Mason were playing one of those games in which the rules evolve constantly, such that the game, whatever it might finally have been, never occurs: it’s all negotiation and compromise and stalemate. At some point Mason must have violated some childhood rule of diplomacy, and Nora flung herself on the floor [...]
It’s six o’clock in the morning and I’m getting ready to leave when I hear from upstairs Nora’s bare feet running in soft staccato steps across the floor. Her descent down the staircase is trochaic—thump-thump—the right leg landing hard, bearing the small heft of her body while the left leg follows. Then she [...]
Tuesdays I wake up early and commute forty-five minutes to the high school, where I teach all day. From there I commute fifty more minutes to the community college, where I hold office hours and conduct an evening class. I usually don’t mind all the driving—the roads run through forests and past cornfields, [...]
Mason and Eleanor and I were rummaging through the basement, looking for a pair of pliers. We’d been assembling an Adirondack chair in the garage when a screw broke off in a knot of wood, and I thought we might be able to pry it out. “Maybe the pliers are on the washing [...]
On Sunday I woke up in a suspiciously good mood. Let’s say it was the weather that got me first: breezes tinged with salt, though we live near no ocean; leaves rustling, as they must, whenever there is a breeze; bees that looked like storybook bumble bees, landing in flowers that bobbed up and [...]
Our policy with Eleanor’s name has been (and still is) a simple one: call her whatever you’d like. For a long time we called her Ella, or I did, anyway; my mother and brothers still do. My wife prefers the trisyllabic heft of the full name, on which she performs jazzy variations: Eleanora, [...]
On certain Saturday mornings—if he wasn’t working overtime, if we weren’t going into the city for our magazine ministry—my father would make pancakes for us while my mother slept in. “Super-duper-flip-flop-flapjacks!” he’d call. He served them with tall glasses of milk and we, still in our pajamas, ate them faster than he made them.
The [...]
Yesterday Nicole had some afternoon appointments and Madeline was at a friend’s house and I assumed that, with only two children at home, I’d have a couple easy summer hours on my hands. Mason was wonderful, of course. He looked at books and played with cars and blocks and was generally pleasant to [...]
The New Jersey Turnpike was breaking our hearts—hearts that had been already beaten by the stop-and-go jerkiness through New York. The tolls broke our hearts. The skyline, streaked now and then by thin clouds and loud airplanes and ramps that rose and fell in undulations of concrete, broke our hearts. But it [...]
After three children, you’d think Nicole and I would finally be able to relax about the rough and tumble reality of childhood. Scrapes and bruises are familiar territory, fevers and rashes commonplace. Distinguishing between a cry of complaint and a cry of anguish is trivial in its simplicity. Vomit and urine and [...]
Yesterday we took the kids to their grandparents’ house for a barbecue and some time in the hot tub. My father-in-law grilled up the requisite burgers, sausages, and franks, and my mother-in-law laid out the table, and Nicole and I recklessly poured ourselves drinks we probably weren’t yet healthy enough to drink. As [...]
Our lawn, if you can call it that, was a mess this spring: patchy, weedy, strewn with fast food wrappers that had been blown by the traffic on our street to the clutches of our bushes, which have blossomed and faded already. The inground sprinkler system leaks. The walkway is cracked. The [...]
I was in line at the Science Museum, trying to fetch our membership card out of my pocket while holding Eleanor in one arm. Madeline and Mason kept ducking beneath a velvet rope draped between two posts. A man on a stool behind the counter—not the one informing me that the special exhibit [...]
Maddie and I are somewhere in Act III of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I’ve been braying around the living room for ten minutes or so while she tosses wreaths and necklaces at me. In the middle of the room a simple makeshift bower forms, and Mason tucks himself under my arm and tries [...]
Two thousand and seven was the year of car accidents, plantar warts, empty oil tanks, overbearing bosses, and late nights at my desk, which is really the kitchen table, which is falling apart. Also falling apart in 2007: the furnace, the window panes, the toilet, the hot water tank, the dryer, the cold water [...]
When we found out that Nicole was pregnant with a boy, I worried. Frankly, I was disappointed, and tried to mask that disappointment with jokes about Corinthian shepherds and Prince Hamlet and Luke Skywalker—examples, more or less, of the essential problem of fathers and sons as I understood it. Everything in my experience [...]
Today Maddie helped me pick up the leaves I’d raked—big, heavy wet leaves that have blown from every neighbor’s tree to our front yard, where they’ve been trapped beneath the bushes and around the flowerpots for the chrysanthemums that are dead. I expected Maddie to complain, because she always complains about work in any [...]
On the day before Thanksgiving Nicole was in another car accident. She was in a line of cars stopped at a light when a truck slammed into her from behind. She is sore but okay, and the pregnant woman whose car Nicole hit is okay, and our car is okay, except the hatchback [...]
I don’t know what precipitates all of the yelling and crying. One minute we are a happy family, and Ella is drowsy in her adorable way, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles and pouting until Nicole takes her upstairs for a nap, and then, suddenly, Maddie is screaming and Mason is whimpering and I [...]
My children have each needed, when they were very young, a song to calm them down at night, or in the car when they were screaming. Maddie was usually soothed by “The Ants Go Marching,” which I rather hated, especially since she wouldn’t stop whimpering until I had sung it twice. For a [...]
This summer Maddie started dictating her memoir. Back in August she wasn’t writing, or I suppose we’d have by now a manuscript scribbled on construction paper and bound up with string. Instead, she dictated most of it to us, usually from her carseat while we drove her to the playground, or a swimming [...]
Whenever my wife and I are talking and the subject of a vasectomy comes up, I deftly negotiate the introspective complexities of the issue—the unforeseen contingencies that might arouse in me the desire for more children, say, or the threat to my masculinity and virility—and express my view of the matter as simply as possible:
I [...]
What can you say about babies, really?
Ella was born on the heels of March this year, and spent most of April sleeping, which was probably a good idea because, even though I had the month off, I found myself tugged in several different directions professionally and don’t remember very much about her first few weeks. [...]
I love watching Maddie run; it’s one of the few physically graceful things she does. She keeps her chin up, stares straight ahead, and then the pink tip of her tongue punctuates her mouth: a bold dash clamped between teeth. She keeps her fingers loosely curled, her arms hinged at the elbows and [...]
The first word Mason ever said, uttered from the lofty perch of his high chair, was “cheese.” As in, give me some.
I’m pretty sure that the second word Mason said, even before “mama” and “dada,” was “no.” He would crawl up to the bookcase and start hurling my paperbacks across the floor, the [...]
A couple of years ago, Maddie loved nothing more than pirates. I suppose we played other games; after all, she frequently dressed up in her frilly princess clothes, and she pretended to cook in the wooden kitchen her grandparents gave her, and with fastidious attention she arranged all of her dolls and stuffed animals [...]
I suppose I always expected, without thinking very carefully about it, that at some point in the swerving course of our marriage, as Nicole and I packed our expanding brood of children into the car with greater and greater frequency, and as they grew older and someday thought of driving themselves, I would inevitably utter [...]
Sometimes, to forestall the end of our bedtime ritual, Maddie will start asking what one might categorize as “deep” questions. Last month, for example, she asked how the human race came to exist—“I mean, how did they get to be on this planet?”—and I offered two common explanations: one, that genetic mutations processed by [...]
Today I found myself frozen to a spot on the living room floor while Maddie pulled on my shirt and Mason screamed and leaked mucus all over my leg. The room, so clean mere days ago, is again a rubble of books and stuffed animals and blocks. The small tables we keep near [...]
Maddie and I are reading The Magician’s Nephew now. It finally occurred to me, after having assumed the role of every character in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe more times than I care to remember, that I could escape the indignities of playing Mr. Tumnus by introducing a new book in the [...]
At first the control room was too warm, so I tuned on the air conditioning. Then the room was too cold, so I turned the air conditioning off. Now my fingers feel stiff and cold and I can’t stop shivering, but at least I’m earning twice the normal rate at this godforsaken second [...]
Nicole and I are sitting across from each other at the dining room table, peeling the skins off a few dozen potatoes. She’s telling me about a dream she had in which the baby is born hours before the midwives arrive. Years ago this would have alarmed me, but we’ve been through birth [...]
Today Maddie and I raked leaves—or I raked, in any case, while she ran through the huge pile I made in the backyard and pretended to be a bear cub hiding from hunters. While raking, I uncovered lost toys and tools and a rubber ball that has been missing since summer. The rubber [...]
Every now and then I have a few weeks of insomnia, and so, at one o’clock in the morning, you’ll find me red-eyed but wakeful on the couch, watching old episodes of Oz or some other horrible show on cable, hating myself for wasting the time this way, but unable to rouse myself from paralysis. [...]
Today was a day of deadlines—proofs were due at the printing plant, and students stayed after school to cram as much content into the files as they could, and I bought pizza for everyone and diet soda for the one student who wanted it—and the upshot is, everything went well, and the last two weeks [...]
It’s been several weeks since Mason demonstrated that he could walk, but a few early falls seemed to inhibit him. He still wants to walk—on Halloween he would fuss unless Nicole and I held his hand so he could shuffle along on the sidewalk—but he’ll usually only do it if someone holds his hand. [...]
I’ve always liked the academic calendar—the way the sloth of summer gives way to brisk chill in autumn, like a slap in the face; the way December and April grant the reprieve of vacation; the way civic holidays and semester deadlines puncture the year. When I was attending public elementary schools, each September seemed [...]
Nicole and I made the holiday card for 2006 yesterday morning and early afternoon, while Mason took an uncharacteristically long nap and Maddie played in another room. Our two hours with Photoshop, munching on stale asiago bread and sipping cranberry-apple juice while retouching and cropping photos, amounted to the best quality time my wife and [...]
It’s eight o’clock. Maddie is sitting upright in bed, in plaid pajamas, legs crossed, bouncing like a coiled spring. “Tell me a story,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. Her mattress isn’t very firm, so when I settle in next to her it sags a bit. She lies down, props herself up on [...]
Mason, go to sleep. Please sleep, Mason. No, not on my body. Perhaps in your crib, or in my bed, or on the couch, but not on my body. I require the use of my body. I need it to go get my dinner, and I need to balance the [...]
When our cat began spending the nights outside, Nicole was quick to observe that we should treat her for fleas before she brought them into the house. “Yes, we should,” I said. And then we did nothing. Sadly, this kind of procrastination is typical for us—we’ll discuss a plan of action, draw [...]
It’s a sticky summer evening, and Maddie and I are on the front steps, sucking on ice pops and watching the neighborhood kids coast by on skateboards and bicycles. She’s wearing pink shorts and a dirty blue tee-shirt; her legs are tanned and skinny and spotted with bruises. Some have blossomed into a [...]
It’s that time of winter when everything in New England turns gritty and dull. The snow banks are gray with exhaust fumes and mud, and the sidewalks are thick with sand and salt. Every afternoon I track clumps of dirt into the house, which is strewn with clutter—fliers and envelopes and cardboard boxes, unassembled baby [...]
Today my daughter and I started reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. We have all the Narnia books in a terrific boxed set of hardcover volumes with colorful glossy dust jackets that my friend Kelly sent to us four years ago, just before Maddie was born, but until this afternoon they’ve simply [...]
It’s autumn in New England, and I didn’t even notice it until this Sunday, when Nicole called Maddie and me into the living room for a plate of cheddar and apple slices. My wife and daughter sat on the couch and I sat cross-legged on the floor and the three of us munched [...]
Nicole and I took Maddie to the playground today and sat in the shade while she raced around, climbing up slides, dashing through the window of a playhouse, tossing debris out of the sandbox. A few other parents dotted the landscape, strolling aimlessly over woodchips. It seemed that we might have started [...]
Last night our new kitten, a slinky black scarf with eerie yellow eyes, ran into the living room, where Nicole and I were watching television, and spit a frantic June bug onto the floor. The kitten—my daughter had named her Ophelia—waited a moment, watching the bug scuttle toward the fireplace, before she pounced [...]
When our local park cancelled its Teddy Bear Picnic this morning on account of a massive storm rolling in, my wife must have thought something very much like, “Fuck that, I’m getting out of this house if I need to hijack an ark to do it,” because she promptly packed the car for her [...]
Yesterday my wife and I went to the midwifery practice for our monthly appointment. It’s a very tranquil place, painted in earth tones and adorned with drawings of big-bellied woman squatting heroically in labor, and there are plenty of toys for Maddie to play with as we sit around with the midwives and [...]
A weekday mid-afternoon. I’m trying to assemble a desk that Nicole and I have been lugging with us for three years, from bedroom to attic to basement to here, what passes for the study on the second floor of our new house. Outside it’s a balmy spring day, but I can’t get [...]
Maddie was playing in front of the fireplace while I snapped photos with our digital camera. She swept the hardwood floor with the iron tampico brush, waved the poker like a rapier in the air, ran her fingers along the russet brick, and, after a moment’s contemplation, stepped into the soot of the [...]
Several months ago my wife and I joined our town’s newly constructed and family-oriented Y. We had become exasperated with our sedentary lifestyle, and the new facility lured us in with an impressive array of amenities—heated pools, spacious gymnasium, yoga classes, saunas, and most importantly, free childcare for our daughter. We marveled at [...]
Maddie was born with a ventricular septal defect, which only means that there was a miniscule hole between the lower chambers of her heart. She was less than one day old when the cardiologist put a stethoscope to her mottled chest, listened, and then described to us the high-pitched whooshing that he heard. [...]
This morning, as the pile of torn wrapping paper threatened to flood the living room, Maddie quickly became exhausted. At first, of course, she was enraptured with the holiday, and even managed to put together a pretty inspired fairy ensemble that she says will be her uniform someday, when she is all grown up [...]
Usually the bleating of my alarm clock wakes me up, or my daughter, or my wife, but today it was Franco who interrupted my slumber. Not that Franco and I are especially close. I see him in the corridors sometimes, and we nod in our manly, reticent way, but that’s about it. [...]
So. Today I watched my daughter while my wife convalesced at home. After a stint at her preschool, Maddie and I went Christmas shopping, first at a horrible mall, then in Northampton, and even there, in that liberal bastion of New England, where corporations are met with sneers of contempt and the commercial [...]
Lately, it seems that life is like a railroad train in one of those cartoons where the mad conductor has shoveled too much coal into the furnace and the bridge ahead is out and some blurry damsel is tied to the tracks and burly highwaymen with bandanas drawn over their faces have mounted the caboose [...]
To my wife: your masquerade of “balanced, well-adjusted parent” is over. I know, for example, that you took our daughter yesterday to “Starbacks,” where you bought her a cup of caffeinated “hot coffee,” and that you tried to visit “that store with the fun house inside to play in,” even though you knew that it [...]
Yesterday, after a doctor’s visit at which we learned that Nicole’s spinal cord may require surgical attention, I drove home with Maddie while Nicole left to meet friends for her Monday discussion group. Perhaps, as my wife and I said goodbye in the parking lot, my daughter detected some somber tone in our voices, [...]
My wife and daughter and I were seated at a small table in a quiet corner of the Restaurant Bonaparte, having just arrived after a seven hour drive from Massachusetts to Montreal. In the background we could hear a soothing ballad, the lyrics gently cooed in French, and the ambient, polyglot conversations of other [...]
Two weeks ago I was trying to have a conversation with my summer school students about the secret lives people lead when they believe they’re unobserved: picking their noses while driving the interstate, eating cereal in the nude, cackling at the witticisms of imaginary people. We were about to read “The Enormous Radio,” [...]
We had stopped just north of Baltimore—the car needed gasoline, the baby needed milk—when two teenagers, eighteen or nineteen, shuffled anxiously toward the gas pump, where I’d just swiped my debit card. “Hey mister,” one said, and I glanced through the passenger window, where my tired daughter’s mouth pulsed over her mother’s nipple, nursing. [...]
Last night I found myself laying next to my wife, my daughter asleep between us, trying to understand the vague anxiety I felt—this persistent notion that something, somewhere, was askew. It had been a strange weekend. Friends of ours, beckoned by more lucrative career opportunities, flew away on Saturday. Their parting gifts [...]
I try to behave decently and deferentially when I’m in public, avoiding when possible the typical bluster associated with all too many of my gender. I refrain from drag racing on the interstate, jostling pedestrians at the crosswalk, haranguing waitresses with sarcasm, yapping into my cell phone at the bookstore, and pontificating loudly on [...]
To the person who invented “time outs”: you’re either an idiot, or you’ve never had children, or the children you do have are sluggishly docile from all the Ritalin you’ve been dissolving in their sippy cups.
But let’s rewind a bit.
It’s a pleasant Saturday evening, and my wife has been cooking at the stove. [...]
It’s a classic domestic scene: the man, bullied by his nagging wife, or exhausted by his implacable children—or both—leaves the house. Sometimes he slams the door against a hailstorm of invectives, and sometimes he just slinks away. There he goes, down the street, around the corner, to mourn at the local drinking dive [...]
So there I was—a pyramid of wet wipes to my right, my daughter’s legs to my left—ready to perform with great dexterity the task of removing gobs of goopy poo from her bum. (Ah, the euphemisms parents use to distract themselves from their offspring’s malodorous excretions! Tinkle instead of piss, upchuck instead of [...]
The transit of Venus happened this morning. I was driving to work at the time, winding up and down the hills of narrow backroads, bouncing on broken asphalt. Ten minutes earlier my daughter had wrapped her arms around my neck, pressed her cheek against mine, and moaned, “Don’t go. Stay here and [...]
It’s been a long sort of weekend, sapped with the humidity of an incipient storm that finally broke while Nicole and her mom’s club and a few straggling dads, myself among them, pushed a phalanx of jogging strollers through the park for three miles, to raise money for people with multiple sclerosis.
I should add that [...]
Yesterday, while Nicole wrote her international law paper on campus, I took Maddie to the local library for Toddler Time, a half hour of reading and songs for area kids and their parents. And by parents, I mean mothers.
It isn’t the first time Nicole has misrepresented the demography of these outings. Music classes, [...]
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