Familyhood Read online

  “Did you actually tell him we’d be thrown out of the country if his homework didn’t improve?”

  “Huh?”

  “He said that you said—”

  “No, no. Well . . . not exactly in those words.”

  Apparently I had overcorrected.

  The next night, I went into his room and there was the same kid, hard at work, at his desk—whereas before, his customary work mode had him sprawled across his bed in a sea of scattered Lego pieces and corn chips. This time, it was well past his bedtime as he sat fretting over some long division problems and the fact that he hadn’t yet studied for a vocabulary test.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, as calmly and reassuringly as I could. “You can finish in the morning.”

  “No, I can’t! I need to finish it now, because—”

  “Listen to me. You did the best you could tonight and—”

  “But I didn’t finish my—”

  “Shh, shhh. C’mon. Let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow is a new day.”

  “But—”

  I cupped his beautiful, agitated little face in my hands and said, “It’s just homework.”

  A quiet descended. He was a bit relieved, but more than that, confused. As he looked at me through very puzzled, slightly squinted eyes, I could see him recalibrating everything he had come to understand thus far in life, specifically anything he’d ever heard from me.

  While he said nothing, it was clear to me he was thinking, “You . . . you really don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”

  In a word: not really.

  STEERING, IT TURNS OUT, is not so easy. Too much in either direction is no good. And if you steer too briskly, people can fall overboard.

  I put my son to bed, both of us banking on the hope that the light of day would make the world right.

  But that brief exchange caused me to realize just how much of what parents tell their children—if not all of what we tell our children—is based on remarkably inexact science. We may have a good sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s beneficial and what’s detrimental, but when pressed to act upon those instincts, we are so just making it up. And we make it up all day long; a steady bombardment of well-intentioned contradiction.

  “Come on, why don’t you go out and get some fresh air” is followed by “Come on in—you’re getting too much sun.”

  “Play with your brother” ends up with “Why don’t you give your brother a little time to himself?”

  “No more pretzels—have some fruit” leads to “Why would you eat seven bananas?”

  “When you meet people, look them in the eye and say ‘Hello’ ” is hard to do when you’ve already been instructed “Do not talk to strangers.”

  I’m actually amazed that my children aren’t perpetually dizzy.

  “Read a book” and “Put the book away and go to sleep.”

  “If you’re not sure, just ask” vs. “Come on—you can figure it out for yourself.”

  The suggestions are not only contradictory, but often arbitrary.

  “Why don’t you give that man on the corner this dollar—he’s hungry” is followed with an urgent “No, no, sweetie, not your whole piggy bank. Just . . . a little.”

  “Oh. How much do I give?”

  “Um, I don’t know, actually. Okay—that’s fine. We’ll go get you another piggy bank.”

  (When my older guy was about eight, he saw a guy standing on a corner and sweetly handed him five dollars. As we walked away, I gently explained that while I loved his spirit of generosity, this particular fellow wasn’t actually homeless—he was waiting for a bus.)

  THERE IS NO END to the pushing and pulling, trying to get the balance just right. And when you have more than one kid, you not only have that many more people to balance individually, but you have to maintain the balance between them too.

  At its simplest, there’s the exhausting attempt to keep things equal.

  “Why does he get fifteen minutes more of TV?”

  “Because you had more yesterday.”

  Or “How come he gets to pick where we’re going for supper?”

  “Because you picked last time, now this time he picks. Next time, neither of you picks.”

  But that’s a walk in the park compared to the much trickier judgment calls and interminable calculations we make to push (or pull) each of them in the particular areas we believe they need to be pushed. Or pulled.

  I have one kid who needs to take things more seriously; the other could afford to lighten up a tad. I have one who is innately anxious, one absurdly reckless. One child is a “hugger,” the other not so much. My younger son—though loving and affectionate—has to be practically paid off (cash only) to indulge a hug from his grandmothers. By contrast, my older son will hug anyone not currently behind bars. Neither is right, neither is wrong; both just need a little adjusting. But it’s the specifics where you get tripped up; it’s like cooking from a recipe that’s been destroyed at the margins—you know what goes into the cake, but they don’t tell you how much or when it’s supposed to be dropped in.

  Most frightening of all is that nobody has the answers for you. You’re the captain. And the crew is looking a little nauseous.

  I HAVE A FRIEND who flies airplanes. Not the little ones with the remote control box that you take to the park and try not to fly into people’s dogs. I’m talking about real planes. With landing wheels and wings and cup holders; the kind of plane that could take you from one state to another. And also crash upon takeoff.

  I had a hard time understanding why this otherwise responsible and conservative guy with a lovely wife and kids would elect to take on an activity that involves potentially falling from the sky and hurtling to a certain death.

  “It’s relaxing,” he told me.

  “Really,” I said, unconvinced. “The crashing part doesn’t bother you?”

  “You have to understand,” he said, patiently. (I was obviously not the first one in his life to question this particular choice.) “The plane doesn’t want to crash.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “The plane also probably doesn’t want to go to Bridgeport for the weekend, but it goes. The plane doesn’t always get a say in the matter.”

  “But it does. Because”—and here he paused again for dramatic purposes, practically willing me to embrace this—“the plane wants to fly.”

  He then launched into a complicated dissertation on the laws of physics and momentum. Once the plane gets up in the air, he explained, it wants to stay up in the air. In fact, what with energy and thrust and so forth, the plane almost always will stay up in the air, flying. So long as the engines don’t stop working and the wings stay on, crashing is almost impossible.

  “But it happens,” I pointed out, fairly unnecessarily.

  “Sure,” he said. “But usually because of things out of our control. So I just focus on what I can control: roll, pitch, and yaw.”

  I thought that was perhaps the name of the legal firm handling his estate. “Eddie Roll, Markus Pitch, and Simon Yaw—Making Things Right Since 1984.”

  Turns out, no. Roll, pitch, and yaw are, in fact, aviation terms. As best I could understand it, if you imagine a plane flying through the air, there are three imaginary axes: front-to-back, side-to-side, and up-and-down. These are the areas you want to concern yourself with when piloting.

  “Roll” is the way the wings dip up or down, “pitch” is the way the nose goes up or down, and “yaw” is the way the nose goes left and right. (This, by the way, is one reason I myself will never fly a plane; what I just explained to you there is the upper limit of what my brain can digest.)

  But basically, my pilot friend explained, if you manage the pitch and the roll and the yaw—countering sudden changes by rooting yourself as best you can back to center—you’re pretty much home free.

  “And raising kids,” he told me, “is a lot like flying.”

  I was a bit miffed upon hearing this last bit.

  “Are
you sure it’s not like being the captain of a boat?” I asked, irritated that my brilliant analogy had to now be chucked. “Because I had the whole ‘boat thing’ worked out pretty solidly.”

  “No, it’s more like flying,” he assured me. “Because flying has that extra third dimension. Raising kids is definitely more like flying a plane.”

  SO FORGET ABOUT the boat captain thing. I was wrong; kids are like a plane. And you’re like the pilot, but only a little. In truth, the kid takes off and flies less because of what you do and more because of how the kid is designed. Once they’re up, they’re going to be buffeted and pushed around plenty by bad weather and strong winds and angry turbulence. No way to avoid it. As the pilot, you make your adjustments. That’s your job. Do it as best you see fit.

  But take comfort knowing that in the end, they’ll fly. Because they want to fly.

  P.S. ANYONE INTERESTED in a perfectly good “boat captain” analogy? Only used once. Call if interested.

  Like a Half Hour

  My wife and I have established some ironclad rules and traditions that serve to keep our family strong, connected, and grounded:

  • We always have dinner together as a family. (Except for those nights when we don’t—which is most nights. One of us is working late, or the kids are a bit too wild, and we’re unable to pull it off . . . something usually gets in the way.)

  • We always go over the kids’ homework with them before they pack it away. (Except for the days we don’t—which is most days—because the kids were fooling around too much and didn’t finish the homework, or it was too hard and neither of us could explain it to them, or we decided that ultimately it’s not that important, they can do it tomorrow.)

  • We never raise our voices or speak to another member of the family out of anger. (Except for the times we do—which is often enough because . . . well, just because. We’re a family; who are we gonna yell at—strangers?)

  (It should be noted that we continue to keep all these seldom-met objectives on the books because it’s important to have goals. Like world peace; it may not happen, but how do you not try?)

  The one practice we do insist upon and stick to no matter what (except for those nights when we don’t—which is almost every night) is: we sit down together—the two of us—and just connect.

  This may seem a mighty meager aspiration—to simply talk to the person with whom you have committed to share your life—but I assure you it is not. It is, in fact, almost impossible. (If you think otherwise, you either have no children currently living at home or are so supremely organized that, frankly, we might not be able to be friends.)

  First of all, the goal itself is multi-pronged. There are actually two distinct categories of things upon which we aim to “connect.”

  There’s the simpler—though more exhausting—recounting and updating of all matters of business currently at hand.

  “The guy came to fix the dishwasher but he didn’t have the part—he’s rescheduling for next week.”

  “You have to pick up the kids at school tomorrow because my eleven o’clock meeting got pushed to two-thirty.”

  “You forgot to sign that thing for the insurance thing . . .”

  “Did we respond to your cousin Ellen’s daughter’s thing? Because they left a very hostile voice message, you have to listen—you can’t believe it.”

  You know—the fun stuff.

  Then of course there’s the more intimate kind of catching up. “How are you?”—and all the derivations thereof. More important matters, to be sure. But invariably, these get relegated to second position, as the more pressing mundane issues—“the dog threw up again”—take precedence.

  What happens—virtually every night—is that as the time approaches to execute this mutually agreed upon covenant to put the world aside and connect with each other, the two parties involved are too darn tired. And if not literally exhausted, certainly so up to our ears in minutiae and momentum after a full day’s marathon of work, kids, and the rest of the world, that the very last thing either of us wants to do at that moment is talk. To each other, or to anybody. And we certainly don’t need to talk about all the things that we failed to get done that day and need to start scheduling for the next day.

  So we grant ourselves a buffer zone. A little “transition time.” A bridge between “work world” and “home world.” Traditionally, this would have been accomplished with a stop off after work at the “corner tavern” for “a few cold ones.” Well, we don’t so much have a corner tavern, and if we do, I can tell you with confidence we’ve never stopped off, and even at home, we’re not generally big proponents of “a few cold ones.”

  What we do instead is take a moment and go our separate ways.

  And that, my friends, is how the wife and I water the garden of our love: we designate a chunk of time every night, first chance we get, and proceed to deliberately and thoroughly ignore each other’s each and every need.

  Again, this is done for the communal good; the orchestrated “push away” is only so that, later, we’ll be that much more ready to intimately connect. We will be refreshed and replenished, and ready to engage.

  Except it never works out.

  And not for lack of effort, or sincere intentions. We earnestly plot this out every night. First, we calculate what we each have to do and negotiate a “meet up” time.

  “I just have to check my emails,” I’ll say.

  “Perfect—I just need to return two phone calls and look over some papers,” my wife will counter.

  “So . . . what do you think? Like . . . a half hour?”

  “Perfect,” she says. “Meet you upstairs in half an hour.”

  And this always, always works.

  Unless one of us goes online. Then it all goes terribly wrong. If either of us sits at a computer, the enormous Black Hole of emails and online distraction swallows us up whole, and we never see each other again.

  THE IRONY IS that the whole point of email and the reach of the Web was to make our lives better, communicating easier. Sadly, it has made it so easy that there’s no real incentive to ever stop.

  Before emails were invented, “getting back to people” involved checking your answering machine to see who called and either calling them back or, more likely, making a note to call them tomorrow. That was it. You didn’t go looking for more people to get back to.

  But with emails, with the entirety of humanity an equal and simple click away, the pull is too great, and we all succumb.

  So what used to be “I’m going to just call Larry back” has now become “I’m going to just check and see if everyone I’ve ever met is trying to reach me, and if they are, I will respond, then wait for their response to my response, and while I’m waiting, I’m going to go see if any of the little video clips that kid in the office sent me are funny and, if they are—or even if they’re not—just pop a quick response saying why I thought it was funny—or not funny—and then maybe send it to some other friends who might find it funny, and while I wait to hear back from them if they thought it was funny too, I just need to see what’s happening around the world in terms of news and weather, and, while I’m at it, check out scores of sports I don’t even necessarily follow, and then possibly—I might not do this, but I might—take a quick look at the thing that pops up offering to show what the various cheerleaders for those teams look like, and—you know what?—maybe scroll through some images of cheerleaders from all the various professional sports franchises—just to compare and contrast, and then—hey, look at that—Larry already got back to me. I’m going to send him that video clip too—I bet he’ll think it’s funny—and while he’s looking that over, I’m—just for a second—going to see what items are currently available for purchase around the globe—both in stores and also in people’s personal attics—maybe even put a bid on a—hey, look at that—this guy is selling a Camaro for $15—something must not be right. I bet that kid Billy from eleventh grade would know about that—man, that
guy knew about Camaros. Wonder what ever happened to Billy . . . I’m going to search around . . . Wow—he lives in Ceylon? How did that happen? I’m going to email him and . . . I’m going to check out my whole graduating class, see what they’re up to . . . Wow . . . I can’t believe she died, she was so pretty. I wonder if Billy knows she died . . . I’m going to ask him . . . I’m going to see who else died and then write to everyone from school who would have known them and say, ‘Can you believe it?’ and thereby initiate a never-ending correspondence with those people. So . . . I’ll be up in like . . . I don’t know . . . a half hour?”

  IT JUST DOESN’T seem to happen.

  When I finally do push away from my desk, a good two or three hours later, I stumble upstairs, dazed and drained, to find my beloved either sound asleep with her iPad on her face, or sitting up, equally zombied—her hair sticking up like from a cartoon explosion—little, tiny birds circling and chirping around her head. A brilliant woman now incapable of speech—certainly unable to connect, share, or plan out the week for her family. If I strain, I can make out her pathetic mumblings. “I don’t know what happened.” Or maybe a pleading “Can we please talk tomorrow? Must, go, sleep.”

  And then she’s out like a light, followed instantly by me collapsing next to her, my very last conscious thought of the day being “Must throw out computer.”

  FORTUNATELY, we’re a family of discipline and rules, so tomorrow we get to do this again.

  Leave a Tender Moment Alone

  It’s remarkable, really, how many things I can do that irritate my children. Without even trying that hard.

  My forte seems to be those special moments. The kind that mean the most, that give your life meaning. You know—the ones you want to treasure forever.

  Birthdays, for example, or holidays, when everyone is gathered to celebrate happy times that you’re going to want to remember forever, with, say, the aid of a nice photograph. Or two photos, just in case. Because you’re going to hate yourself if you don’t get the shot right. It’s not like you’re ever going to get another chance; this is a special moment. And because it is special, there are likely to be other guests in your house. Maybe even relatives from out of town. Loved ones who don’t get here that often, who may not be with us that much longer, for example. All the more reason you’d be crazy not to take the extra nanosecond required to maybe get a third shot. From a different angle.