Archive for the ‘Parenting’ tag
Mr. Sentimental
It happened twice recently: I looked up from what I was doing and saw Carter crying quietly to himself. It’s not unusual for him to cry—it happens about once a day for one reason or another—but usually it’s preceded by getting in trouble or an argument with his little sister, and in most of those cases the tears are big, theatrical, stage tears that can be turned on and off like a tap. But the two times I’m talking about weren’t an act. He was legitimately upset, his mouth turned up in a sad little grimace while he tried to wipe away the tears and hide them from me.
The first time, he was looking at a laminated piece of orange construction paper Sadie brought home on the last day at her old day care before she started preschool this fall. Her handprint was pressed onto the page with purple paint, and one of her teachers had written something on it about how fast she was growing up and how much she learned at school. She brought home lots of “arts and crafts” like that where the kids smeared some paint around and the teachers dressed it up into a keepsake. Debbie asked him why he was crying and he said, “I just remember all the good times when we played together after we picked her up from school.”
Reading by Example
I.
My son Carter is reading Harry Potter at six years old. I’m not saying that to brag (okay, maybe a little), but it’s important to the story. He made his way through the first three books pretty well, but I know that each book in the series is progressively longer and more complex, especially for a six-year-old, and as I expected he started to slow down by The Goblet of Fire. He finished it with an assist from me, reading together each night before bed, and insisted on starting The Order of the Phoenix right away. After a few weeks though, he had stopped reading it on his own and started asking me to read other books with him at night. I asked him about it, and he admitted it was too hard. We still read it together at night but he spends most of his time now doing other six-year-old boy things like building Legos and driving his little sister crazy.
First Glove
My first baseball glove sits on a bookshelf in my home office. I left it at my parents’ house when I went to college (I had been through a couple more gloves by then), but I reclaimed it when I moved out for good and left for Chicago. It’s dry and brittle, and the fingers are curved around the old ball I keep stuffed in pocket with the name of my Little League team—Poseyville I—written on it in Sharpie. The glove is a MacGregor G19T, branded all around with slogans like “Flex Action,” “Adjusta-wrist,” “Lattice Weave,” and “The Athlete’s Choice.” The lining inside is shredded from years of sweat and dirt and wear, and it’s a little small for my hand now, but it’s still serviceable. Baseball gloves are like that. The basic design and build is no different from one you could buy today, and with a little glove oil and a tug on the strings, even a 30-year-old model could be ready for a game.
Birthdays Are Big
1.
Carter’s birthday is this week. I say it this way because his birthday has seemed to stretch from Christmas up until this actual day this week. My sister has a saying, “Birthdays are big!” to justify throwing big parties and buying lots of presents (mostly to convince people to do that for her, I think) and Carter has inherited that tradition with no prompting. From the minute he finished doing inventory on his Christmas loot, he started planning what he wanted for his birthday.
Debbie and I try our best to strike a balance between buying our kids things and not totally spoiling them. We’ve resisted repeated demands for a Wii, Nintendo DS, giant sprawling Harry Potter Lego sets that cost hundreds of dollars, and Carter’s own personal cell phone. Each time he asks for too much, we explain that we simply can’t afford to buy him everything he wants, and that he’s lucky to have all the toys and games and gadgets he has already, half of which have been discarded and ignored anyway. If he’s too persistent we go for the kill: “You know some kids don’t have any toys at all.” Somehow we managed to instill liberal guilt into him at six years of age, and the argument usually stops there.
The Home Team
1.
Carter has three baseball hats that he wears on a regular basis: a crimson Indiana University hat with the Hoosiers’ white pitchfork I crossed with a U logo; a navy blue St. Louis Cardinals road hat; and a Chicago White Sox hat that is so sweat-stained it’s turned from black to brown. Each of them is there for a reason. Debbie and I met when we were in school at Indiana, and I’ve followed the Hoosiers ever since I could sit in front of a TV to watch Bobby Knight menace referees on the basketball court. The Cardinals have been my favorite baseball team my whole life, and the White Sox are my adopted hometown team now that I live in Chicago, mainly because they aren’t the Cubs.
One morning last summer I was helping Carter get dressed for his day camp and I asked him which hat he wanted to wear. He picked the Sox hat again, as he had every day that summer.
Aging Slowly in the Big City
1.
On my birthday last month, I watched with narcissistic glee as the obligatory well wishes piled up on my Facebook wall. I’m not a big Facebook user–I prefer the news sense and black humor of the people I follow on Twitter–but my birthday is the one day of the year I check the Social Network first. It’s not the same as a surprise party or thoughtful gift, but at the very least it makes me feel like someone thought about me for a second, even if “Happy birthday man!” is the most they’ve said to me in 15 years.
Most of my birthday posts this year had the same drive by quality, but of the handful of friends who added a little extra (mostly wise-assery, but still appreciated), my friend Kevin added the comment that struck me the most. “I hope you write something poignant about aging slowly in the big city.” I didn’t ask him what exactly he meant by “aging slowly,” but until then I hadn’t thought much about getting older. I’m 34, and after I passed the milestones of 16 and 21, I stopped thinking much about how old I was at all. In fact, I’ve actually had to stop and calculate my age a couple times in the past few years when someone asked me.
Sunday Mornings
This piece originally appeared at The Millions
1.
My parents spent the weekend at my house recently, and besides the standard good feelings of spending time with the people who raised me, I’ve come to look forward to these visits because they are two able-bodied adults who can help watch my kids. Once the initial greetings are shared, bags unpacked, and meals cooked, their presence in the house offers the unusual chance to sneak away to check my email unmolested and go to the bathroom without being interrupted mid-stream by a door-pounding demand for apple juice.
Proof
My first day of school is crystallized in a now 30-year-old photograph taken by my father, of me and my friends Mark, Clint, and Chris on our first day of preschool. Ready to become Pooh Bears at the Kinderschule in Wadesville, Indiana, we stand holding hands in front of the entrance. Mark is wearing a powder blue polo shirt with matching shorts. Clint has on a striped tank top. Chris has his mouth open as if he was talking, and I’m about to insert my index finger into my mouth, my version of thumb-sucking. I remember nothing from this day, but the wary, apprehensive look on my face in that photo describes the moment perfectly.
What you remember from your first day of school is cobbled together from what your parents told you, from images in your mind of what the school looked like, which friends were there, and how much you liked your teachers. But most often it’s defined by the photos, which replace the memories themselves. When I was a kid, I assumed my dad took pictures like this expressly to torture me and my sister. No trip was complete without a family photo posed in front of a row of bushes at my grandparents’, standing against a railing over a scenic outlook in the Smoky Mountains, or backs to a sunset on a Florida beach. Now that I have my own kids I understand why he did this. He needed to take those pictures to remember being there, to make sure it really happened, because our real memory falls apart so quickly.
What’s Left Behind
I know I’ve driven on US-45 in southern Illinois on sunny spring and summer days, but I always picture it in the winter, with gray skies and two-week-old snow on the ground, the kind that’s been there long enough to start melting into ugly, misshapen ice and turn filthy black along the edges of the road. It’s one of the many routes I can take to get from Chicago to my parents’ house in Poseyville, Indiana. The towns along US-45 are drab and desolate, some slightly larger than others, delineated by whether they have a McDonald’s and a Marathon station or a Citgo with a quickie mart. Louisville, Geff, Hord, Cisne, Flora: they appear universally tired, towns you remember from childhood but left long ago, returning briefly to visit your grandparents once or twice a year, for only old people still live in towns like this. The houses themselves appear to be asleep, hunkered down on their lots, dirty clapboard sidings mirroring the mottled, sagging skin of their inhabitants. Some children must live there or at least visit regularly, according to the broken down Playskool cars and rusty swing sets scattered around the front yards of houses lining the road, but they’re never present when we drive through, as if they hibernate through the bleak winter days.
Purloined
“I’M NOT TOO GOOD AT THIS, SO TELL ME IF I’M BEING TOO ROUGH.” Such a comment, coming out of the mouth of a rookie shoe clerk fitting a pair of loafers or a novice tailor tugging on the lapels of a jacket, might pass unnoticed. Their imprecision, while momentarily annoying, would cause no lasting injury, for the things they are jostling with rough hands aren’t attached to you, after all. But put that statement on the lips of a woman holding your genitals and wielding an electric razor, and it takes on quite a bit more significance.
I heard it while I was laying on my back in a procedure room in Northwestern Hospital, naked from the waist down except for my socks, waiting to get a vasectomy. Desiree, the young, attractive, African-American medical assistant who would be helping the urologist that day, was already mowing away at my crotch with a beige set of clippers when she confessed her inexperience. The handout the urologist gave me during my initial appointment suggested that I shave myself the morning of the procedure to save time, but a new job and the two kids who led me to this state of affairs left little time for special grooming that day. So now Desiree was doing things to me that some men would pay good money for a woman like her to do.