Under the Table, Inside the Tree

Parenting and Other Transitions

When I turned thirty, I started having uncomfortable conversations with dads at parties. I don’t mean with the kind of people I think of as dads, that is, my dad and his friends. I mean, with dads about my age, peer dads, because suddenly there were peer dads. (Cue Grandpa Simpson: It will happen to yoooooooou! If it hasn’t already.) Thirtysomething, a couple of kids at home with the babysitter, night off, on their third beer. Not close friends of mine—someone’s coworker, or a friend’s casual acquaintance invited to board game night. The uncomfortable part was the way some of them talked about having kids, how raising them hurt, how it’s the end of your life. Often it was a joke, but not always, or else it was the kind of joke with a razor in it, the kind of joke where the teller laughs a little louder than they should. 

I’d take a drink and smile and change the subject. I wasn’t a parent then, and I got the sense this wasn’t a conversation where a civilian had much to add. I got the sense it wasn’t a conversation at all, any more than it’s conversation when someone sits next to you on the subway and starts to tell you about the angels that talk to them at night. It’s more of a release of pressure. 

But I’d go home thinking about these dads.

As you may have noticed, there’s been this pandemic. My wife and I are working from home, and our toddler has been out of day care since early March of 2020, so, as the parent whose industry seems to feel that “within a week or two” is a prompt and professional email response time, I’ve been doing a lot of caretaking.

And… look, this is the part of the essay where structure says it’s time to deploy a phrase like “I understand those dads now.” The thing is: I don’t. My life has changed, but then, so has everyone else’s. For the last fourteen months I haven’t had to figure out how to do the things I used to, cons, friendships, commutes, travel, only as a parent now. I have faced all sorts of exhaustion in the last year, but I have not faced the exhaustion of identity, of trying to be who I am and who I used to be. I rarely even feel the parallax, how much has changed, because I lack fixed stars for comparison. The closest I get is when I talk with friends who don’t have children—who face their own daunting challenges in the pandemic drift, among them the lack of a tiny meaning-making engine in their daily lives—and ponder what it would be like to “run out of Netflix” or “reach the end of my Steam library.” (I’ve been halfway through one quest on Shadowrun: Dragonfall since October.)

But I can’t deny that parenting, and especially these last fourteen months of it, has hammered me. I have been cracked open, peeled, driven. I have been fucked up. But not in the ways I expected.

There are the lacks, of course, the things you don’t have any more, everyone talks about those, the lack of sleep and the lack of time and the lack of solitude and the lack of adult friends and clean floors and the lack of space for contiguous thought. But you can chart around those lacks. You can find paths through them. And there’s always coffee of course. The lacks never become easy—they have not become easy to me—yet—but then, lifting a heavy weight never becomes easy, either, if by easy we mean something that can be done carelessly and without attention to form. Still, one learns to manage. 

What has really bodied me, though, is not what I lack but what I am given. Here I am, every day, face to face with a small being becoming themselves, putting together their life with parts lying around. We forget what that’s like, or to put it more precisely we never remembered it, because when it happened to us we hadn’t yet learned how to remember—to engrave our lives with narrative and anecdote, to tell what we think are important stories over and over. 

But those memories live inside us—the intimations, the sensations, which we formed before narrative memory, they remain, like gems beneath the stone, raw, unpolished and uncut. Timeless impressions, because back then we had not yet learned time. And when you’re face to face with someone who’s right there, in the thick of it, all of a sudden like Proust with the madeleine, you realize that while time isn’t yet real for them, it’s not real for you either—that we grow not like a flower blooming, so what’s innermost becomes what’s outermost, but like trees, our earliest structures and twists shaping what comes after, hidden beneath the bark. 

Sometimes I think we build time in order to escape that raw forever. Sometimes I think we spend our whole lives trying to get back there: chasing castles on hills and green lights at the end of piers and various visions of God. When you are caring for a child—and I think this is especially and particularly true when caring for your own child, in that daily, inescapable way I never managed when I was, for example, visiting with my sister’s children when they were young—you find yourself, every day, in their full and awake presence. And in the presence of what you were, when you were the seed crystal of yourself.

That sensation is… not always comfortable! Back then we were scared and back then we were hungry and back then we wanted as if there was nothing else in the universe and we couldn’t do anything about any of it, not because we were not strong or stable enough, or did not have enough fine motor control, or language, but because we did not quite yet know that these overwhelming feelings could pass, can pass, do pass. We did not know there was such a world as after. But also back then we could stare in awe, forever, at the underside of an iron table outside Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, at the leaves and the sky through the diamond spaces between the metal. We could stare forever, even if we only stared for five minutes, or two—because the distinction between two minutes and five and forever was not so firmly wrought.

You start to see the children in other people, and in yourself. Humans on the whole seem less fundamentally good or evil and more tired, hungry, thirsty, asserting their independence from mommy / daddy / nurse, needing care, navigating this or that difficult transition, being unexpectedly, breathtakingly kind. It’s not like seeing The Matrix, this weird new vision doesn’t suddenly explain everything, and it certainly doesn’t excuse everything—one reason we try to help one another grow up is that a toddler with the tools of a grown being is a dangerous creature, to themselves and to others. But still, reading parenting books and connecting them with my experience, I gasp—the way you do when a physical therapist finds just the right place to push, or when the couch-and-chair kind of therapist asks just this one innocent question. Oh. Oh, that’s how it is.

Take transitions, for example. (This particular bit is from Tovah Klein’s How Toddlers Thrive.) Toddlers tend to have trouble with state transitions—from playing to eating, from eating to storytime, and of course the big transition to sleep. The problem is (Klein says, and I buy it) one of control, and time. We understand the now, we understand what is in front of us and around us. We understand that we are right here with a book or a toy sheep, and we are comfortable. Even when we don’t like the now, we know it. We can navigate. 

The next, though, that’s a problem. That’s an issue. Who knows what happens next? Anything could be out there! In fact, the very prospect of next, the fact that there is such a creature, suggests that we don’t actually have as much control of now as we like to think. Next undermines us. So we cling to now. In those moments, it falls to the parents to help the child through the arc: begin with sympathy for the emotion—of course you want to keep reading, you were happy there, of course you don’t want to get up and sit down for a meal, of course, you have some measure of control and comfort in this moment in this uncertain world and you don’t want to go to bed, because who knows what happens tomorrow—and then, once sympathy and empathy have been established, offer structure. This is what we have to do now. And: continuity. 

I’m still here for you. I love you. 

So there I am, at my dining room table, reading this Tovah Klein book on a Sunday night, up too late, in the pandemic, still, not wanting to go to bed, because tomorrow I have to get up at six thirty if I want to write before parenting, and then there’s parenting, and then the same thing tomorrow, and the day after, and if I just stay here, reading about toddlers and their transition difficulties, I will know what’s going on, and be happy. And my chest is suddenly tight. Because I still don’t want to get up. Because who knows what comes next.

Parenting is itself a transition—from being whatever you were before to being what you are now. Transitions are hard. They are fraught with endings and uncertainties and fear and the unknown. We work through them with patience, and with love. That doesn’t mean they’re not difficult. It just means that love gets us through.

This makes me think, too, about these little magic mirrors we carry in our pockets or pocketbooks or leave on the table in arm’s reach, about our phones, that is, about all the many ways they talk to us and remind us that they exist. I think about email and slack and SMS and the tweets and the facebooks and instagrams, how they’re always there, how unless we’re careful and clear in our boundaries, they never stop talking to us. I’ve read no end of “distraction crit,” those essays and eleven-chapter books about how what we really need is focus, freedom from the device’s interruptions. I eat that stuff like I eat Thin Mints—too many of them, too fast, because they feel too much like exactly what I want. I want to spend more time in maker time, I want to spend more time in Deep Work, in Flow. I don’t want to get Hijacked by Evolutionary Plains Ape Survival Strategies that don’t match with what I Need to Do as a Knowledge Worker in the Modern Economy.

But: maybe it’s not just the distraction. Maybe it’s not just the evolutionary plains ape whatever. Maybe the phone’s buzzes and dings and pop-up notifications offer not so much interruption as the promise of a life without transitions—a life without time. If we’re in some sense always on email, we never have to get off email and go do something else. If we’re always on Twitter, we never have to put Twitter away. No matter how awful we feel, we are always in that place, which means we always are. There we are seen, and remembered, and loved. However much we are, at the same time and in the same place and sometimes even by the same people and devices, hated.

Of course, your phone does not love you. But it can kick out a little picture of a heart every once in a while, which makes you feel good, because in second grade you cut one just like that out of a piece of rough red construction paper. We are not complicated creatures.

Often, a toddler doesn’t need more than a kiss. A word, a calming touch. To be lifted. To be hugged in a way that doesn’t make them feel they’re falling. “I know how you feel. I get it. I feel that way too sometimes. And we’re in this together.” “I love you.” “I’m right here.” 

It’s shattering to realize how little we need, and how much.