Navigating Fatherhood Together
On the day this piece will be published, I’ll turn 40. I have a 5-year-old, 3-year-old, and, wait for it, a post-vasectomy 4-month-old.
Yeah, it’s been that kind of year.
Or maybe it’s just been that kind of life?
I have no career. I have published zero novels, and despite having spent tens of thousands of dollars on college, I have zero college degrees. As far as banks are concerned, I own nothing. As far history is concerned, I’ve accomplished nothing.
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The words of recently deceased, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison had a huge impact on my life —first as a student, then as a parent. In graduate school, much of my research focused on her powerful novels — especially Beloved — that explored slavery and its aftermath. Later, as a stay-at-home dad, I saw her appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and once again her words hit me hard. During that appearance, Morrison captured the nature of a parent's unconditional love: “It’s interesting to see when a kid walks in a room, your child or anybody else’s child, does your face light up? That’s … [Read more...]
Like most Americans, I experienced the trauma of September 11, 2001, through my television. My wife, 1-year-old daughter Lauren, and I had just moved to the Cleveland, Ohio area, and I was a stay-at-home dad. That morning I was in my living room while Lauren watched a children’s show. Our landline phone rang, and my brother-in-law said: “Turn on the news.” I changed the channel over Lauren’s protest. Smoke billowed out of the first tower. Watching a national tragedy unfold in the presence of a 1-year-old made an already surreal experience even more bizarre. I was unsure what to do … [Read more...]
My wife approves of my keeping one mistress. She happily walks in on me as I’m cozying up with an Abraham Lincoln biography, a Wall Street Journal op-ed page or the latest edition of Time magazine. If she’s out of town, I’m never alone long. I'll quickly get intimate with Charles Krauthammer, Neil deGrasse Tyson or an elegantly stated case against the anti-fossil fuel argument. But only one at a time: I don’t have the stamina I used to. These late-night visits to the native English language are my after-hours escape and salvation. You see, I’m an English-language copywriter living in … [Read more...]
I’ve heard parenting described as a vocation where the goal is to work yourself out of a job. Seems pretty accurate to me. As a longtime stay-at-home parent, I see myself doing it all the time. In fact, as I write, the washing machine is spinning noisily and the dryer is droning away, and I didn’t start either of them. My 14-year-old twin sons are doing their laundry today, a job I did for them for years. I showed them the ropes a few months ago and now, begrudgingly and with a bit of prompting from me, they’ve been doing it on their own. Late last week, I found one of them riding the … [Read more...]
