Life can feel like these cycles of getting up, scrambling to get children out the door, scrambling to get 9-7 worth of work done in 9-4, then picking children up and coming home and they want dinner but also snacks that have to be prepared during dinner prep and also the older one has homework and I’m not quite sure if we’re doing the homework right nor where her little sister is meant to be during it that won’t distract her, and then I serve whichever disappointing home-cooked dinner and then it’s bedtime routine and then the rest of the workday happens and looking at practical and impractical stuff that can be ordered online but typically ordering none of it then I go to sleep.
1. I should begin by saying that this is a lot like my life, and I am similarly pretty happy with it, although baffled in many of the same ways. I had a staycation where my wife and kids went away for a weekend and it was... fine. I saw movies I would not have otherwise and ate slightly differently than I would if they were around, but otherwise it was sort of blah. But when it's the first week of a new school year in July, or I'm facing down the endless monotony of three weeks off around Christmas, it becomes very clear the extent to which days are carbon copies of each other, and it does wear on you.
2. In my last year of teaching I was at Chicago, and was advising one of my freshmen who didn't like Chicago and had been accepted to Duke the year before. She wanted to transfer. I wrote her a letter of recommendation and told her what I knew about the student experience. She was accepted, and then began a serious campaign to get me to tell her what to do. I declined that request*, but did try to point her in the direction of the idea that the decision mattered a lot less than she thought it would.
If she stayed at Chicago, she'd incorporate into her self-narrative the belief that she is a person who can tough it out when things are difficult; if she left she'd be the sort of person who doesn't allow herself to be miserable but takes active steps to make her life better. And at a certain point of remove, it would cease to matter what she had decided--she'd end up pretty much the same person either way. (She acquired a boyfriend while deliberating; she stayed. No better or worse than any other reason to make the same decision.)
3. The central thesis here would be the one from Javier Marias' A Heart So White: at a certain point, doing or not doing, deciding one way or another, all eventually bend back into the same stream because you can outrun neither yourself nor the global circumstances in which you take part. I knew my wife for many years before we started dating; we were in and out of relationships at different times and always friendly with each other. Our relationship happened when it happened, but there's a real element of "of course it was going to work out" looking backwards. And nothing that we fretted about has really ended up mattering that much. Even our frantic 2nd trimester decision to move worked out just fine (we have A Pretty Good House, But With Some Drawbacks; same as every other house), so long as you don't ask me to move again for another ten years.
4. I was perhaps prepared for this by listening to a lot of Yo La Tengo: a long, successful relationship is falling asleep with the Mets game on, doing the dishes, remembering an argument you once had but that everyone moved past. It's pretty boring. The feelings move slower, at a lower register. You don't get the fireworks of being 16 and crushing on someone, you don't get the misery of a relationship that needs to die but won't. You get, say, a child pulling the pencil out of your hand because they can do the rest of the math homework on their own, or an older child pulling the "Do you need a hug? No? Well, I need a hug" to help a younger one feel better when they're having a bad day. Or a spouse just glad to talk to you at the end of the day (a non-talker who loves to talk to you, specifically, is such a winning feeling).
5. I have remembered this bit of ee cummings for 25 years:
i have perhaps forgotten
how,always(from
these hurrying crudites
of blood and flesh)Love
coins His most gradual gesture,
and whittles life to eternity
6. And one other note: it is mildly beneficial to be a good-ish father in the eyes of society and the workplace. You really do have to only gesture to the minimum and people will eat that garbage up. But I have also found that actually being interested in parenting them is read by lots of others as weird: I partake in no hoary gender clichés, I try to know their interests, thoughts, and general emotional landscape. Even among the relatively evolved dads in my social set, this is a bit unusual, and quite often treated as such. It's not a complaint, exactly: my kids' school knows to call me first (only took three years), parents of their friends learn that I am the one who organizes the schedule, etc etc. But it is an annoyance.
* Here in the sanctity of the web where only God, four people, and AI scrapers will see: based on what I knew of her as a student and a person, she should've gone to Duke. But also it didn't really matter.
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