Familyhood Read online

  PAUL REISER

  FAMILYHOOD

  To Paula, Ezra, and Leon

  With all the love there could possibly be

  Contents

  Preface

  FAMILY

  ROLL, PITCH, AND YAW

  LIKE A HALF HOUR

  LEAVE A TENDER MOMENT ALONE

  THE CAR DOOR DING

  CONGRATULATIONS

  WHAT LITTLE I KNOW

  IT’S NOT JUST YOU

  BAD WORDS

  ENOUGH

  FAITH

  SITTING

  THE OTHER WOMAN

  THE GRMILE

  LIFE AND DEATH

  CASTLE WALLS

  MY DOG’S FATHER

  TAKE MY KID. PLEASE.

  EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE VS. LUGGAGE

  LOYALTY

  CURRENCY

  THE EMPTY NEST

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Paul Reiser

  Copyright

  PREFACE

  When they were well into their sixties, my parents renewed friendships with some of their old friends. These were close friends from their school days, friends from old neighborhoods—good friends that I had no recollection of ever having met growing up. Where had these people been? I wondered. If they were such good friends, how come I never heard of them?

  My parents’ simple explanation was that they had all drifted apart when they were busy raising their families, but now that the kids were older, they had picked up the friendships again.

  This was fascinating to me. First of all, the drifting apart. It’s not like any of them moved to the North Pole; they were all pretty close by, but they somehow managed to never see each other.

  Secondly—I didn’t know you could do that with friendships; put them on hold for fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years, and then just start right up again.

  And I had no idea that having kids and doing simple day-to-day stuff was so all-encompassing that it could necessitate putting entire friendships—good friendships—on hold.

  WELL, THAT’S KIND OF HOW I FEEL about this book. I wrote two books before this; the first one about meeting and marrying my beautiful wife, the second one about the journey before, during, and after having a baby.

  That was fifteen years ago. In that time, our infant firstborn became fifteen, his brother—now ten—joined the team, and a gazillion day-to-day things had to be dealt with: there were the countless hectic meals where nobody sits down at the same time, frantic rushes to start school reports that should have been finished weeks earlier, knees that needed bandaging and glasses that needed finding—even though they were “right there” five minutes ago—and more arguments than you can imagine about why long pants were in order even though, yes, shorts are more comfortable. My point is—things got busy around here.

  Along the way, there were certainly plenty of things that occurred to me, observations I might have written down for, say, a book about having kids, but I couldn’t because I was too busy (and exhausted by) having those very same kids.

  I’d like to say that somehow the clouds have lifted a bit and there seems to be a moment of relative quiet. In truth, things are only going faster. Life is, if anything, crazier than before.

  But I realize that my boys are probably closer in time to when they’ll leave our house than the time we first brought them home. Whatever I may feel about time, it’s going ahead. And I don’t want to wait twenty-five years to reconnect with my friends. And with you. (By the way—when I say “you,” it’s not like I’m being flip, using the figurative, cumulative “you.” I actually mean specifically you.)

  SO WHAT FOLLOWS are some thoughts I’ve had, some observations I’ve made, some hopes I humbly put out there, because I’ve discovered that while yes, my family is my family, unique and quirky, everyone’s family is unique and quirky, and everyone’s family is the same. More or less.

  I would also add that seeing as how, at this rate, I likely won’t write another book till deep into my nineties, I would suggest: if there are any questions, ask them now, because by that point I may not be making any sense at all.

  P.R.

  LOS ANGELES, 2011

  Family

  It’s a funny word—family. It can mean a lot of different things, depending how you use it in a sentence.

  There’s the smile-drenched “Yeah—going to have a nice relaxing weekend, just me and the family.” Versus the clench-jawed “Uch—I got the whole family coming in for a week! It’s going to be brutal!” Same word—and in this case—same family. But very different meaning.

  We all hold on to some image of the family we want, based one way or another on the family we had. Lots of people are thrilled about the families they came from, others couldn’t get away fast enough. Most people fall into that vast middle ground: great affection mixed with a few ideas for improvement. A couple of things they wish could have perhaps been done differently.

  That’s where starting your own new family comes in handy. You get to start from scratch and get it right.

  I don’t know about you, but growing up, I kept an actual list, a lengthy running tally called “Things I’m Not So Crazy About in My Family.” I kept it in my pocket (and in the forefront of my brain) at all times, for the express purpose of being better prepared when the time came to raise a family of my own.

  Years later, that time came—and I was ready. This, I said to myself with unwavering confidence, will be the ideal family! How could it not? I mean, I know exactly how I want a family to be now, I’ve married a woman with a perfectly compatible blueprint in mind, we’re equally determined to get everything right . . . Yesiree, this is going to be it!

  Ah . . . there’s such promise at the beginning, isn’t there?

  Well, as with any attempt to start society over from scratch, it doesn’t always work out as planned. You pick the perfect deserted island, you bring in fresh, pristine people, you set it up just so, and before you know it the constituents of the New World are squabbling and shoving their way through their overcrowded, polluted, crime-ridden paradise exactly like last time. It’s just the way it goes.

  WITH BUILDING A FAMILY, what remains unknown is specifically how you’ll fall short of your goals. In exactly what new ways you’ll get it wrong. That’s the mystery. That’s the sport to the whole thing.

  Sometimes it’s simply that the paradigms have shifted. My children and I grew up in different millennia, in different parts of the country, at different points in history. So many variables have changed.

  As a kid, I grew up with a mom and dad, three sisters, no dog (though that’s all I really wanted), and periodically, some fish. As a grownup, I have a wife, two boys, a dog, and no fish. The rules are necessarily different. Boys, for example, play differently. They fight differently. They certainly smell different.

  So, what I’ve brought with me from my original family does not necessarily apply to this new family.

  I grew up on the East Coast, my children are growing up in Southern California. They don’t have to take a jacket every day; it’s seventy-five degrees out. But I’m still thinking of the wrong childhood; on this day in October in my childhood, it would have been cold out. Here it’s not, but I haven’t adjusted properly. I continue to run after them in the streets with sweatshirts yelling, “Do you not see what month it is?” (The psychological damage to my children has not yet been fully assessed.)

  Sometimes it’s something new that takes you down; something you couldn’t have known about. It turns out, for example, I’ve underestimated the significance of video game-playing skills. I’ve never had any particular dexterity with my opposing thumbs, or hand-eye coordination or, for that matter, any real interest. We didn’t have these games when I was a kid, so
I couldn’t have anticipated that this particular shortcoming would lead to my own kids growing up nursing the pain of their father’s glaring absence from this sphere of their lives. Who knew?

  But even the areas of concern I did see coming, the very things I sought to adjust from my own childhood, may end up “corrected” but not necessarily any better.

  Example: Growing up, if I wished for anything it was perhaps that my dad—who worked nobly and tirelessly around the clock—would perhaps work a little less and hang around the house a little more. So I grew up determined to do it differently with my own family.

  As best as I’ve been able, I’ve endeavored to always put work second and make it my priority to be home and “just be there” for my kids. Result? My kids wouldn’t mind if I were actually “there” a little less. I’ve heard the prayers: “Oh, Lord, could you maybe get my dad out of the house once in a while, and if possible, could he go away for a couple of days sometime? We’re talking two, three days tops. Really, we’ll be fine. Leave Mom here, though.”

  I made notes not just about kid-raising; I also jotted down a few things about marriage—or at least my parents’ marriage, which was, after all, my only real point of reference. I had some very concrete ideas about what I wanted to change, and what I wanted to keep; what I thought worked and didn’t work—as I understood it from my kid’s-height view.

  Definitely saw a lot of love and a lot of commitment. Keep. Selfless devotion and sacrifice for their children. Keep.

  But I also remember wishing my father would have noticed my mother a bit more. Been perhaps a tad more demonstrative. Or tangibly appreciative. Which is not to say he wasn’t appreciative; I’m sure he was. Just not so’s you’d notice.

  And, shrewdly working the other side of the aisle, I simultaneously and actively wished my mother would notice a little bit less that my father didn’t seem to notice her so much.

  What I took away from the experience, though, was a commitment to be different when I had a family. I was determined to be unbelievably and demonstratively appreciative of my wife. Which has paid off handsomely—with the exception of the countless thousands of times my wife has nonetheless felt forlornly underappreciated.

  I clocked the rules of engagement in my house growing up; the way we communicated with each other as a family. In a word, I think it’s safe to say that clarity was not our strong suit. Nothing said was exactly what you wanted to say, and what you were aching to say was, regretfully, almost always left unsaid. Almost encouraged to remain unsaid. My remedy? Go the other way. In my “new and improved” family, I leave no sentiment unexpressed, no feeling unshared, no fleeting thought unspoken. Good, right? Not really.

  “Dad, dial it down, wouldya? That’s just too much information.”

  “Really? But I thought you’d want to—”

  “No. We’re kids. We don’t need to hear everything.”

  Do you see the problem here? There’s virtually no way to win.

  Striving to make your new family different from your first family is no easy task. And, I’ve come to realize, making it your life’s work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it’s a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We’d be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because your parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it’s hard to do, very limiting, and . . . makes it impossible for foreigners to understand you over the phone. (Which, while not germane to my point about parenting, I felt was worth mentioning.)

  I KNOW MY WIFE AND I will raise our kids to the best of our ability. Undoubtedly, our kids will have their own counterbalances in place, and swing back the other way with their own families, messing up their kids in the exact opposite direction. Their kids will hear nothing direct or emotional from their fathers, resent them for never being home, and wonder why, when they were home, they never told the kids to take a jacket when it’s cold out.

  And so the cycles will repeat, on and on through time, until the earth is pulled so close to the sun that I’m guessing nobody’s going to need a jacket anyway.

  Roll, Pitch, and Yaw

  Before I was a father, I sort of imagined the job as being the captain of a ship; you carefully steer your kids through life’s icebergs and storms so that they can sail forth through life’s many exciting adventures.

  Not sure why my brain took me to the nautical. Never captained a ship in my life. I once tried to take the boys kayaking and pulled something in my shoulder that has never been quite the same since. I think I just liked the image of being a ship captain: strong and stoic, meeting every emergency with calm, maintaining order among the crew, who would come to love my quiet, controlled leadership. (And from what I understand from pirate movies, you get better food and a niftier hat.)

  All in all, fathering—like captaining—seemed to be an exciting journey. Challenging, but certainly doable. Just keep a steady hand on the wheel, and make sure nobody goes off course.

  Turns out, children are not so easy to steer.

  My younger son was having a problem with his homework. No subject in particular; he just doesn’t like doing homework. He’s incredibly bright and, if he so elected, could finish any given night’s work in a matter of minutes. But he is so vehemently against the very idea of homework that he waits till the very possible last minute, then does it so grudgingly and recklessly that it’s really something to behold.

  As a father, I felt it was my job to steer him toward approaching homework with a bit more care and concern. Also, I didn’t want to have a mutiny—which, as I understand it, is the main thing you want to avoid when you’re a sea captain. (Particularly when the mutineer is only forty-eight inches tall.)

  My son, however, was not particularly interested in being steered. It wasn’t exactly a mutiny, but my little crewmember was not embracing my steering. The homework did not get any better.

  Fortunately, I have a co-captain: my wife. Unfortunately, she had no idea what to do either. No amount of helpful, gentle encouragement from either of us seemed to do the trick. Homework continued to come in late, ketchup-stained, or illegible. I pointed out that his “5” could easily be read as a “3,” and the odd squiggle he intended to be a “7” is also, ironically, the Chinese character symbol for “impale” or “to have impaled.” My son contended that everyone but me would know what these figures were just fine.

  He also had a tendency to illustrate the borders of his homework with a very impressive series of sketches—generally of some military confrontation between giant robots and stick figure gladiators. All very creative—just not necessarily relevant to the work. Or appropriate. To anything.

  Somehow my precious offspring wasn’t quite grasping the concept of what was at stake here.

  “This is homework,” I declared, as if the paper we were holding were some unearthed, holy document. Some sacred text.

  His rebuttal: “So?”

  “So, homework is a very big thing,” I said.

  “No, it’s not,” he countered. “It’s the same stuff we do in school, and I already did it in school, and I know the answers, so why do we have to go through it again at home?”

  Clearly a mutiny was a-brewing. I had to go deeper; push the envelope of my inspirational skills. I explained why homework was so important to his future as a student. And as a man. It wasn’t just about getting the answers right, I clarified for him. It was about developing disciplines, setting and achieving goals, meeting expectations—and maybe once in a while even trying to exceed expectations. (Though that didn’t seem likely. The idea of this guy ever voluntarily doing one ounce more than the barest minimum required was a laughable dream I had all but surrendered years earlier.)

  I tried to impress upon him that more than anything, doing his best—at homework or at anything—w
as a matter of self-respect, and respect for others.

  No takers. I dug deeper still. I explained how failing to do homework properly inevitably leads to a downward school career spiral, diminished earning capacity as an adult, the likelihood of homelessness, and quite possibly a life in crime, which, if pursued without basic math and grammatical skills, could only end in imprisonment or death. I let him know that by failing to do his homework, he wasn’t just letting down his mom and dad (and grandmothers, who were kept apprised of the continuing drama), but also his big brother, and—I hated to say it—the nation as a whole; American kids are struggling so badly in school now that it’s very likely that elementary school homework may soon be sent to kids in India—who will do it faster, neater, more accurately, and—I’m willing to bet—cheaper. Finally, as the great-grandson of immigrants, he was—as an American—failing to hold up his end of the Social Contract.

  Something in there got to him. He apparently hadn’t thought of it like that.

  Overnight, the homework improved dramatically. He started taking it seriously. He wanted to do well, and was firmly committed to never letting his standards drop again.

  I was so happy, I didn’t notice that in the process, he had also acquired a slight nervous tic and wasn’t sleeping very well.

  “Why is he so anxious all of a sudden?” my co-captain wife asked.

  I shrugged. “No idea. But did you see his math homework? He actually did the extra credit part!” I couldn’t help but gloat a little bit. “I think the talk he and I had really helped.”