I never wake up alone unless I’m on the couch.
“Mama!” whispers the three-year-old at 1am. He is carrying his full-sized pillow and blanket through the doorway to our bedroom. This is not a visit. He is a moving van, and he has arrived.
“Thank you, Dada! Thank you!” he says at 5:30am when I give him my pillow as well. He wraps himself around it, a koala discovering its first tree branch.
“I am speaking this way,” I say in the afternoon, trying to moderate my severity, “because I asked the first three times and was completely ignored.”
“Stop!” I say very loudly — not, I must insist, actually yelling — “screaming!”
I do not fully understand Gentle Parenting, which is not to say I fully condemn it.
“I won’t cry,” says the three-year-old when we tell him to stop climbing or running or throwing scissors.
“You might get hurt,” we say.
He unleashes his dimple. “No,” he says. “I won’t cry.”
The kids do not belong to us. We aren’t even borrowing them.
“Okay, I think we’ll call it there.”
All three children have been watching me play “Old School Mario.” This is what they call Super Mario Bros. World. They call Super Mario Bros. 3, “Old, Old School Mario.”
“Dad!” says my daughter. This is a protest against ending Mario. She reads a book a day when she’s not in school. There is never enough book time or screen time or pool time or park time. She cannot be exhausted. More is the beatdrum of our arguments. All my limits feel artificial.
The key to being counter-cultural, I’ve found, usually involves doing nothing, which is much simpler than doing something.
Our children don’t play with iPads on road trips. Or ever. We already didn’t have iPads when they were born. Join the revolution, baby. Do less.
“I think your son is having sleep problems,” a specialist visiting my wife’s pediatric clinic tells one of her patients, “because he has access to a computer in his bedroom. And he’s twelve.”
I am kind of a zealot about tech and children.
I recently bought myself a Steam Deck.
A few years ago, on my older son’s first day of pre-school, I had a mini-breakdown. He and I fight the most. We can see through each other’s skulls. We feel the other one’s feelings too easily. He tried to smile as we left him, but it was terror that hovered beneath the bone. “See you in a little bit,” we told him. Three hours later, he was fine. I, on the other hand, found another inventive way to gain weight.
This year, my younger son keeps braying about going to school, the same pre-school my older son has now left. “In Sepmember I get to go to a classroom!” he says. “This is my lunchbox!”
If we don’t kick him out the door, he’ll kick himself through it. Go with our good wishes, unbreakable boy.
At some point, with unrecoverable intensity, he’ll make me cry alone at a Popeye’s, too. The mercy of God doles this out in doses. Even the Lord doesn’t think you should be at Popeye’s more than once a week.
“Knight’s Castle is the second book, Daddy,” says my daughter.
“I think it’s Magic by the Lake, kiddo.”
“No, no,” she is saying. “Because in the back, where they list the books, they don’t list the book’s own name.”
“I know, sweetheart. I’m a librarian. I’m pretty sure it’s Knight’s Castle. I can even look it up to be safe.”
“Let me show you!”
As she finds the book that will prove me wrong, I prove myself wrong with the internet.
“'Ope!” I say as she returns. “I was wrong. You were right.”
The smile that posesses her face is indescribable. I already too often grab the wrong keys, forget we’re going to school and not to my work, misremember her schedule. I’ll never be able to tell her anything again.
“Son,” I say very softly to my older boy. “You can’t throw rocks off the cliff while people are jumping into the water. It can be dangerous.” If it were another child, like my younger son, I might have yelled. Safety brings out the horns, sometimes. Not with my older son. If I want him to hear, he needs it soft but urgent. He needs to be treated as an equal, almost.
“Okay,” he says. He doesn’t jump into the lake from twenty feet. His sister does.
Another summer absorbed and released. We’re in the transition days of September, an eternal return of something finite.
Onward, I suppose. Let the schedule regain its iron.
I love you all.