Familyhood (3 page)

“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

M
y 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

I
t'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.

“DAD!!!!” MY BOYS WHINE
in that special way they have. (Who exactly invented that, by the way—the Petulant Child Eye Roll? Any idea? Because I'd like to talk to them and, at the very least, make sure they're not working on anything new. Like an Abrasively Dismissive Ear Tug. Or a Huffy Irritable Mouth Pucker with Optional Sucking Noise. The kids seem to be doing fine with just the Eye Roll.)

I can, admittedly, be a little overreaching in orchestrating these photo ops.

“Hey,” I cheerily suggest. “Why don't we all just get up and go into the living room where the light is better?”

“No! Forget it,” come the cries of resistance.

“Okay,” I counter. “Why don't we just open up the curtains and maybe stand near the—”

“Daaaaad!”

At this point my wife will generally suggest—as gently as she can—that the moment has perhaps sailed away, and it might be best to cut our losses and move on. I try to salvage at least one shot—albeit not in the optimum setting.

“Okay, just stand right there—this will only take a second. And I promise you guys: one day you'll be glad you have this.”

“No we won't!” the boys say in unison. (It's nice to see how they can work together when they want to.) I take the picture.

“Finally!” the boys say. They're relieved. Now they can get back to having fun. Almost.

“Wait, wait,” I call after them. “I want to get it on video too.”

“Aww, Dad! Why? You just took pictures.”

“I know, but—”

“Can't you just scroll through the pictures really fast so it looks like a movie?”

“First of all,” I feel obliged to mention, “that's very funny. And second of all, no. They didn't come out that great. You were moving. Now, go stand next to Grandma and do . . . something video-worthy. Hug her. Smile. Wave.”

“Do we have to?”

“Yes.”

So with literally no joy or love in their heart, they drag their feet over to the couch and sit next to Grandma, and proceed to be entirely still.

“Do something,” I tell them.

“Like what?” they ask.

“I don't care. Just say something.”

“What should we say?”

“Whatever you want. Maybe you could talk about what you think your life will be like living on your own starting tomorrow.”

The subtlety lands. They grudgingly mug and goof around and say funny things for the camera.

“There you go,” I say, happy to have this production finally up and running. I check the camera viewer.

“Oh, nuts,” I blurt out.

“What?”

“The memory card is full. Let me just—”

“Daaaad!!!”

“Hold on. Hold on—I just have to clear some of this old stuff from the chip. Just keeping doing what you're doing—having fun, enjoying the moment.”

“We're not enjoying anything!” they clarify.

“It's okay, let them go,” Grandma graciously suggests. “We'll do it another time.”

“No, no—I'm almost ready, here—oops—that's the wrong button.”

“Daaddd!”

Truth be told, I am not particularly skilled or competent with technological things in the first place. Add to that the pressure of single-handedly trying to orchestrate a moment that everyone else present is actively resisting, and my performance suffers. I consistently do every wrong thing that can be done. I shoot with batteries that are near empty, memory cards that are near full, I leave the lens cap on, I'm recording when I think I'm not, or I'm
not
recording when I think I
am.
Way more often than you'd think possible, I unwittingly have some button pressed that makes everything look like I'm either shooting from the center of a fire or, conversely, like I'm looking through night vision goggles in a bleak desert storm and the only image discernible is a dimly lit three-inch circle in the middle of the screen—usually of some indeterminate stomach.

And while it's possible I'm imagining this, it seems to me that the moments most frequently lost to human error are exactly the ones you'd most want to have. The ones least likely to ever repeat. Those are the ones I've almost never gotten. On the other hand, looking out a plane window and shooting into the sun—
that
I've never missed. If that's something you enjoy seeing, by the way, you've got to come over. I have hours on end of nothing but airport runways barely visible behind blinding sun flares.

There may be a perfectly valid explanation for this, though. Some larger law of the universe may in fact be at play. I believe it's entirely possible that the Higher Powers don't actually want you to record for posterity the most magical of moments. By not having the image tangibly in hand, they've decided, you're forced instead to remember more clearly, investing yourself more deeply in that golden moment. This way the memory can only grow in recollected detail and mythological import, whereas the actual earthly footage would have likely only disappointed. (Even if this is not the case—which might be the case—I'm going to choose to believe it anyway. It sure beats accepting that I am as untalented in this arena as I appear, and that I'm doomed to a life of pained apologies and disappointed loved ones.)

I just want to have a nice keepsake that we can treasure later on. Is that too much to ask?

The irony is that my boys love looking at old photos and always wish we had taken more. What they don't like is the intrusion necessary to get them.

Surely they are not the first to feel this way; they are part of a long-standing tradition of annoyed and put-upon artistic subjects. I'm guessing that had Da Vinci actually been alive to paint
The Last Supper
at the time that it really was the last supper, the Apostles would've been very irritated with him.

“Uh . . . Peter? Could you hold the goblet up a bit and maybe stand closer to—”

“I'm Matthew!”

“Sorry, sorry.
Matthew
. Could you lift your head just a bit? I'm having trouble seeing your face and—”

“
Da Vinci!!!!”

“Sorry, sorry . . . but you guys are going to want to see everybody's face.”

“Just paint it already, for crissake!”

“Hey!”

“Oh. Sorry, Jesus.”

It just can't be helped. The second a tender moment occurs, a bell goes off in my head, alerting me that not only is this a wonderful moment, it would also make a great photo.

I don't know if this is a uniquely male characteristic, or something that I just inherited from my particular father, but I see that I now regularly do exactly what he used to do, which he did much to the irritation of myself, my siblings, and every relative within camera range.

My father did have a genuine fascination with emerging technology that I did not inherit. I remember the first indoor flashbulbs he used with his old 8mm movie cameras. (It could have been 16mm. Or 144—this was quite some time ago.) My recollection is that the flash consisted of about a dozen bulbs—each the size of a small melon—mounted on a cumbersome wooden stick, and taken together, they gave off enough light to land an incoming Spitfire in the depth of night. I have an image of my father standing on a chair over the Thanksgiving dinner, holding up this substantial stanchion of lights with one hand, aiming the prehistoric 8mm camera with the other, and shouting at us to “Just be natural and eat the turkey.” I don't recall it being a particularly relaxing evening.

Then there were the early Polaroid cameras that involved chemically treating each photo as it came out. We had to take this little pink scraper about the size of a small cigar and run it over the image with a sticky, foul smelling gel, so the intrusions to the family's great moments were not only chaotic, but also came with a nauseating toxic fume.

There were virtually no occasions too sacred for my dad's inescapable camera.

Late in his life, we were at the funeral of one of my uncles (the husband of my dad's sister), and my dad very casually pulled out his newest toy—a sweet little German spy–type of camera—and clicked off some shots of the proceedings. I remember taking his defense when he got a bunch of nasty looks and snippy comments for this breach of decorum. On the way out, he even took a “lighthearted” snapshot of one of my other uncles—the unpredictable and more free-spirited of the family patriarchs—clowning around and doing a funny wave as he left the grave site and headed to his car.

As fate would have it, Uncle Funny passed away ten days later. This photo—the last one of him ever taken, waving good-bye in front of a sea of gravestones—was suddenly
the
collectible item in the circle of family and friends, and my father was suddenly the sought-after
artiste
of the family, his persistence and diligence no longer an annoyance or a point of mockery but now a virtue to be celebrated. (Though not for long. At the funeral of the waving uncle, not fully two weeks after the funeral of the
first
uncle, my father again took out his camera, only to be assaulted with an immediate and virulent chorus of “Enough already!”)

But I was forever informed by that photo and the tacit lesson involved: they may give you a hard time when you take the shot, but they're going to be happy they have it later.

WHEN YOU CONSIDER
how technology has made it so easy to record our special moments—disposable cameras, phones, and music devices that capture anything at the push of a button—
not
ruining the moment by taking a photo feels downright irresponsible and lazy.

So, yes, we can now capture every fleeting tender moment. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's that much more to capture. People don't get married more, or have more birthdays, or have more kids. Babies haven't gotten cuter, kittens aren't playing in hammocks with balls of yarn more frequently than they used to.

But we've made adjustments; we've expanded our notion of what constitutes a tender moment. College graduations and high school graduations don't allow enough opportunity for recording special moments, so we've started making a bigger deal out of elementary and kindergarten graduations. We film Open School nights. We film the opening of every gift and greeting card. We record not only “Baby's first solid food” but also every dinner partner's first bite of “You won't believe how good this is!”/“You won't believe how spicy this is!”/“You won't believe how disgusting this is!” We film sunsets. We film people
looking
at sunsets. We film people learning how to use their new memory-capturing device while standing
in front of
a sunset. We record anything that seems important or that could, upon reflection, later seem important or, at a bare minimum, anything that might someday make a nice screen saver.

This kind of Emotional Event inflation can only go so far. Modern fishermen have used all kinds of complicated machinery to catch so many fish that now we're running out of certain species entirely. So too we may have depleted our stock of tender moments to such a degree that fewer and fewer things feel truly spontaneous, meaningful, and real. The expectation and practice that everything special will be recorded has led us to treat
everything
as special, the result being that now
nothing
feels so special. Instead, it all feels like movies we've seen before, reruns from our own lives.

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP,
my father always described our family vacations as “making memories.” We didn't have to enjoy the trips; we just had to go, and take pictures.

I am blessed to have so many nice memories. And thanks to the technology we have now, these memories flash across my computer screen all day.

Next to my computer on my desk is a black-and-white photograph of my mother and father on their wedding day. They look impossibly young: he, in his army uniform, looking like a cross between John Garfield and Glenn Miller; she, beautiful and sparkling, a Jewish Donna Reed. Stare at it long enough and you can just make out the sounds of their thoughts, the excitement for the future. Knowing what will and what will not be for these two young people, my parents, makes it almost unbearably beautiful and sad. The photo captures a tender moment that I wasn't alive to experience. It's photos like that which compel me to risk my boys' irritation. One day, I imagine, long after I'm gone, maybe they'll look at a photo of their mother and me and wonder what
we
were thinking and feeling. (I can give them a hint: My wife was wondering why I had asked this stranger or waiter or bus driver to take yet another photo. And I was thinking: “Why couldn't this guy count before he took it? Who doesn't count to three before taking a photo?”)

THE TRUTH IS
my boys probably won't be able to even
find
a photo. Our generation takes more pictures than any before it, but if I actually want to find a particular picture, I have no idea where it is. Never been cheaper and easier to take photos and videos, yet somehow none of them seem to last. They disappear into files or onto flash drives or into thin air. Photos are becoming like pensions: something we relied on and assumed would be around forever, but then turn out, to our great surprise, to have all pretty much evaporated.