Table of Contents
Contents Introduction....................1
Part One: Conscripted Ten Conclusions from Four Years of Fatherhood, by Kevin Guilfoile....................5
Sam I Am, by Matthew Baldwin....................17
A Girl Named Spike (And Other Gambles of a Godless Fatherhood), by Matthew D. LaPlante....................29
Part Two: Early Battles The Force Is with Us. Always, by Alice Bradley....................43
Day Job, by Heather B. Armstrong....................51
The Last Summer, by Doug French....................57
Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness Yet, by James Griffioen....................71
Failure, by Greg Allen....................85
Peas and Domestic Tranquility, by Greg Knauss....................97
Part Three: After the War My Father Makes Sense, and Other Harsh Realities of Adulthood, by Heather B. Armstrong....................115
What I Remember, by Margaret Mason....................129
Hostage, by Jon Armstrong....................137
Finding My Father, by Leah Peterson....................151
The Best Man, by Sarah Brown....................167
Adam and Red, by Eden Marriott Kennedy....................179
Circular Plug, by Gail Armstrong....................195
Not My Problem, by Bill Farrell....................213
Read a Sample Chapter
things I learned about my dad (in therapy)
KENSINGTON BOOKS
Copyright © 2008
Blurbodoocery, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-1659-5
Chapter One Ten Conclusions from Four Years of Fatherhood
Kevin Guilfoile
The seventeen-year cicadas were coming in three days. The TV news was preparing us all for the onslaught. When the temperature of the soil reached a certain degree Fahrenheit, tens of millions of them would emerge at once from the ground, hundreds of thousands of them on every acre, and their giant bug bodies, big as thumbs, would fill the air like Beijing smog, madly mating in a public display of affection that would make Caligula want to reach for a towel. Their collective call would be louder than lawn mowers, so loud that for weeks you wouldn't be able to converse on the porch without shouting. Just stepping outside would be a harrowing affair, as cicadas, despite their enormous veined wings, fly much in the manner of William Katt on the old television show The Greatest American Hero-rudely off balance, hurtling through the air at high speed until they hit something, usually each other or the back of your head. Millions of moulted shells and rotting cicada corpses would litter the streets, crunching underfoot as you walked. And then there was the smell. Throughout the stifling wet heat of summer the neighborhood would smell like a massive un-air-conditioned insect morgue.
But that ordeal wouldn't begin for three more days. This particular afternoon was lovely and sunny and not too hot. It was still quiet. The sidewalks were clear. The air smelled like pollen and clean sheets. My three-year-old, Max-not a television news watcher-was oblivious to the impending swarm, and he and I were playing golf in the yard with oversized plastic clubs.
"I don't think I want to play outside anymore, Daddy," he said.
"Why not?" I asked.
Max's eyes followed a lone bee, some ten feet away, bouncing from red flower to yellow flower to purple one.
"Too many bugs," he said.
I thought, There's so much he doesn't know.
Max doesn't know that we're at war, or that countries even have wars. He doesn't know about Hail Mary passes or walk-off home runs. He doesn't know he's Irish. He doesn't know that Mom and Dad and the cat are going to die someday. He doesn't know why you put gas in the car or peas in your baby brother. He doesn't know about The Clash. He doesn't know we've been to the moon or why that was such a big deal. He doesn't know how soap works.
Although, now that I think about it, I'm not entirely clear how soap works either.
The things he does know are curiously arbitrary. He knows Chewbacca and R2-D2. He can spell Mississippi. He knows about Sufjan Stevens and John Hiatt and (perhaps inappropriately) Franz Ferdinand. He knows how to get dressed and undressed by himself, although he won't.
There has to be a correct order in which to learn all this stuff. A hierarchy of general knowledge. Maybe that's why so many people are homeschooling these days. Maybe they think they've figured out exactly how Jor-El used that talking crystal to explain the mysteries of the universe to Superman, and they're setting up their own Fortresses of Solitude at their dining room tables. Max, on the other hand, is learning everything the way I did-on a need-to-know basis. When he gets too close to the stove, I tell him that it's hot. When he gets too close to the cat, I tell him to be gentle. And it's probably better for the child, I rationalize, that he follows his curiosity and figures it all out on his own. As his dad, I am sort of his Wikipedia-a massive repository of sometimes deliberately falsified information that he can call upon, but only when needed.
In fact, my own, probably faulty, recollection of childhood was that my parents would truthfully discuss any and all uncomfortable topics with me, but only if I asked a specific question. And like a reluctant witness on the stand, they would only answer yes or no. Which led to conversations like this:
ME: Do girls have penises?
THEM: No.
And then I would spend the next several weeks formulating a new theory and carefully crafting my follow-up.
They say kids are sponges and that they'll learn at an astonishing pace, and I suppose that's true. But fatherhood has a pretty steep learning curve as well, and there are at least ten things I know now that I didn't know before I was a dad. Of course, the genre of writing known as "The things we learn from the kids we're supposed to be teaching" is too often the source of awful, sentimental prose. Sadly, we parents can't help ourselves, which is why ...
1. Before I had kids of my own, I found parents really annoying.
When you have a child, the whole point of it becomes pretty clear pretty rapidly. Babies come into the world as completely selfish organisms, incapable of thinking about anything but their own desires. Over the next twenty years or so it's the parents' job to make them a little more self-sufficient and just a little bit less selfish. That's it really. That's all parenting is.
But the crazy thing the universe does is that it frequently gives kids to us after anywhere between five and fifteen glorious adult years of being single and free. And after five or fifteen years of pursuing grown-up pleasures with the same gusto that infants pursue milk and pants-crapping and shoving into their mouths household detritus exactly the diameter of their esophagi, you realize you and the baby are pretty much exactly the same, except all the responsibility falls on you, and in giving up everything to make this baby a little less selfish, you find you've made yourself a little less selfish as well.
Except nobody wants to hear about that crap, so keep it to yourself.
2. Don't ask your doctor for the sex of your baby.
Before he's born, I mean. Afterward you should definitely ask or you risk really screwing the kid up. But when he's still womb-bound, you should keep it all mysterious, partly because it's fun to be surprised and partly because you'll want to have something interesting to announce besides the baby's length and weight. Length is a totally arbitrary statistic to be putting on a birth announcement, but other than penis/vagina, it's just about the only quantifiable thing we can say about a baby at that point. You could print the circumference of his or her skull and it would be exactly as meaningful. If God were funnier, all your baby's physical traits would be as random as the sex. Then sisters and parents of the new mom would be in charge of putting a giant wooden stork in your front yard announcing, IT'S AN ASIAN!
3. Don't sweat too much over your baby's name.
Pick something you like, of course. Pick something you won't get tired of saying fourteen times in a row. ("Kevin. Kevin. Kevin. Kevin. Kevin! Kevin, come here. Kevin! Kevin. Come. Here. Kevin! Right now! I said come here! KEVIN!! KEVIN!!!! KEVIN!!!!!!!!!!!) But know this: If you have a boy, no matter the name you give him, Tard is what he will eventually be called. Tard is every American boy's name at some point. It's just a question of how many degrees of separation from Tard you are. For me it went like this: "Kevin, Caveman, Neanderthal, Australopithecus, Astroturf, Astrotard, Tard." There's no getting around it, so you might as well not worry and name your kid Tad from the get-go. At least it will be quick.
Before I had a child, I thought parents were comically poop-obsessed, but now I totally get it.
4. You will become obsessed with feces.
Before I had a child, I thought parents were comically poop-obsessed, but now I totally get it. When you have an infant, a healthy poop is the equivalent of a hearty "All's well!" from the town crier. Poop is the closest thing a baby has to language. It tells you if they're feeling bad and exactly where it hurts. But it also gets everywhere and on everything, including you, and you learn to just shrug and wipe it all off with a wet napkin. You become completely inured to the sights and smells and texture of steaming hot crap. In fact, just take it for granted that for the next three years your house is going to smell like a Bolivian prison.
Of course, during this time your child overcomes his own God-given disgust of his own waste, as well, and eventually he won't mind sitting in it for hours on end when he should be learning to use the toilet. If you had told me three years ago that the hardest part of being a parent would be convincing my child that thousands of years of civil engineering have produced ever more sophisticated means of removing waste product from the home and he doesn't have to walk around with his pants full of ripe feces, I would have called you insane.
On the other hand, maybe I should find another way to explain it to him.
5. There is no miracle diaper disposal machine that can transcend the immutable laws of physics.
At some point during the baby-shower registration process, you and your partner, otherwise intelligent and rational people, will become convinced that there are magical products into which you deposit a stinky diaper and deliver it to another dimension. Diaper Champ. Diaper Genie. Diaper Wormhole. Whatever the evil sales copy says, understand these are nothing more than cheap plastic cans with snap-on lids. For several nights in a row, while rocking the boy to sleep, you will sniff a pungent odor, and when you go to change him, you will realize the odor is not coming from your child but rather from the gigantic bucket of three-day-old shit sitting four feet away from your face. Even zoo monkeys are smart enough to hurl their fresh feces to the other side of the cage, but somehow new parents think their child's poop will keep just fine until garbage day in a porous bucket next to his crib. Honestly, your college degree is worthless.
6. You will become a hypochondriac by proxy.
It will start when you become obsessed with every burp and gurgle (and poop) your baby makes and it will worsen exponentially when you begin to worry about developmental benchmarks. Reading parenting books will only make it worse. You will be more familiar with the symptoms of childhood disease and abnormality than a pediatric resident. CF? MS? CP? SB? Pyloric stenosis? Intestinal atresia? Hirschsprung's disease? Turner's syndrome? Sickle cell? Clubfoot? Dysplasia? Deformational plagiocephaly? Tetralogy of Fallot? Pulmonary stenosis? He could have any of that! All of it! Call the doctor now!
When you do call the doctor, you will usually get a nurse, who has been required to take and pass a special training course in which she learns not to laugh audibly over the phone at hysterical parents whose kid has just crawled over a LEGO.
When my son was four months old, he developed a bright red rash that started at the top of his head and began moving down his body like a flame on an oil-soaked rope. I rushed him to the doctor, who walked in the exam room and said, "What's the problem?" I said, "My son has a rash!" He put on his glasses and said, "Yep." Three hundred dollars.
7. Your home will be a total disaster for the foreseeable future.
When I was a kid, my mother raised four kids and kept an immaculate house. I'm a stay-at-home dad and try to pick up, but now that I'm home all day, my net contribution to household cleanliness is apparently negative. For the first time in our marriage we've had to hire a cleaning lady, not so much to clean up after the kids but to clean up after me. Actually, I'm happy to do my part, but apparently as a man, my understanding of "clean" is materially different from my wife's. And there's really nothing you can do about the smell (see Number 4).
8. If your first child is a good baby, quit having them.
No one ever says, "My first baby was an angel, and the second one was even better!" If the first one is easygoing and healthy, the universe will punish you for it. Your second child will almost certainly grow up to be a stripper/cannibal who invents airborne cancer and kills off his babysitters one at a time with a Big Wheel.
9. Try to talk about something else instead of your kids all the time.
Talking constantly about your kids completely undermines your primary mission of making them less self-absorbed. As I mentioned at the outset, nobody likes to hear you go on and on and on about them. So just assume that everyone knows your kids are great and that you love them to pieces and talk about something else every once in a while. Sports. Popular music. The hue and texture of your lawn.
Or politics. For instance, one of the things I've noticed is that being the parent of a toddler is a lot like being the most powerful nation in the world trying to control an occupied foreign land. On the face of it, it seems like we have all the power and should be able to tame this child and mold him in our image. To dictate his constitution, as it were. But there's the language problem. And even when both of us are home, there aren't enough boots on the ground. He gets most of his information from a kids' version of Al Jazeera known as the Disney Channel. Plus, the little insurgent has learned very quickly that there are certain lines we just won't cross and so he's pretty much not afraid of us. He knows that he can scream longer and louder than the folks back home will tolerate. And he takes an unreasonable all-or-nothing stance when it comes to negotiations: If the insurgent wants a banana, a perfectly logical explanation for why he cannot have one, like "Those bananas aren't ripe," is insufficient. He sees bananas and demands that the corrupt interim government distribute them at once.
10. They will be older than you were at that age.
It was ninety degrees and the heat made the cicadas even more amorous than usual, and their swarming and bumping and shrieking made playing outside almost impossible. Max's friend Bella, also three, was over to the house and they were on the couch watching television.
"Are you cold, Bella? I'm cold," Max said. "I'm going to get under this blanket. Would you like to get under this blanket with me?"
She did, and giggling to myself, I took a picture of them. They were so cute.
Three days later another three-year-old girl from the neighborhood, Norah, was over to play. She picked up the photograph of Max and Bella cuddling under a blanket. She studied it a moment and then flipped it over so I could see it and pointed an accusing finger my way.
"Um," she said, her voice spiked with jealousy, "where was I?"
Shoot, that didn't happen to me until I was twenty-three.
* * *
Kevin Guilfoile's debut novel, Cast of Shadows, was published in 2005 by Alfred A. Knopf and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. He is a regular contributor to themorningnews.org, coudal.com, and theoutfitcollective.com. He lives in La Grange, Illinois, with his wife and sons.
Chapter Two Sam I Am
Matthew Baldwin
When my wife was eight months pregnant, she and I went to see The Return of the King. We had no other children and no prior experience in child-rearing, but some instinct warned us that we ought to make one last trip to the cinema while able, before our entertainment options were abruptly reduced to scrubbing applesauce off the walls, reading 27-word books about anthropomorphic mice, and after putting the tyke to bed, slumping off to sleep 10 minutes into a DVD.
The Return of the King is, of course, the third and final film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a series I had read twice and was now enjoying immensely on the silver screen. And yet, until that viewing, I never grokked the central symbolism of the story. On this particular occasion, though, I was struck by an epiphany about halfway through the film.
"Hey, wait a minute," I muttered to myself, handful of popcorn arrested on its journey to my mouth. "I know what this is about. This whole saga is an allegory for pregnancy!"
It seems so obvious in retrospect. The story, you may recall, centers around Frodo, Sam, and their quest to deliver the One Ring to the Crack of Doom. Much of the third film documents their slow and laborious trudge to Mordor. That's the first tip-off, right there. Has there ever been a more appropriate euphemism for pregnancy than "trudging to Mordor"?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from things I learned about my dad (in therapy) Copyright © 2008 by Blurbodoocery, Inc.. Excerpted by permission.
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