Stay-at-Home Work-at-Home Full-Time Married Dad

After a dinner break on a family road trip, I fished out the sidewalk chalk and invited the kids to draw pictures on the sidewalk bordering the parking lot. An older couple passed us and saw what the kids were doing. The man paused to speak to me. “Fifteen years ago,” he said, “I lay the concrete for this sidewalk.” His tone was amusingly critical, as if he felt that what we were doing to “his sidewalk” was wrong but not that wrong, but I didn’t think he was joking.

I replied, “I can’t believe it’s taken 15 years for someone to deeply appreciate your work.”

The bronze ears on the hare in Copley Square are shiny from the many grips of children’s hands as they climb upon the bunny’s back for a pretend ride. The bills of the bronze ducklings in Boston’s Public Garden are similarly bright from touch, polished over many years by thousands of bare palms. The artist of both sculptures, Nancy Schön, writes “I wanted my sculpture to be interactive and touched.”

Then there’s architect I. M. Pei, who said in an interview that he felt validated and even proud of the oil stains at the edge of one his buildings. The East Building of the National Gallery comes to a very sharp vertical edge, an edge so enthralling to visitors that they can’t help but touch and even squeeze the line where the building’s sides comes together, discoloring it over time. Pei sees this discoloration as proof that his idea is meritorious.

Unlike art that makes you think, art that you can touch — even if you’re not really supposed to — can be so affecting that, like children, we ourselves must touch it. This man’s sidewalk came that much closer to transcendence with the simple addition of my children’s chalk. This intentionality of touch, of reaching out and feeling the paint, the edges, the colors, is for me an important part of art. It’s so important, in fact, that if I can’t touch an object, I will mime the creation of it with my fingers, as if I were brushing my hands through a Zen sandbox. Children understand. They touch, mar, smear, push, brush, pet, poke, and scratch everything. Their worlds are — and literally must be — at their fingertips.

I remember how my children, like all very young children, used to put everything in their mouths, and suddenly I’m a little bit jealous.

“Needle in a Haystack” was conceived as a joke, but my kids love it. I do too, but only because it keeps them engaged long enough for me to work or talk on the phone. To play “Needle,” you uniquely mark up a thumb-size wood chip, throw it away, and then fetch it. The catch is this: the playground — the entire playground, all 400 square feet of it — is carpeted with an inch-thick covering of nearly identical thumb-size chips.

When my brother was seven years old, he couldn’t contain his joy when he traveled backwards in time for nine minutes. He didn’t experience anything; he just noticed the numbers of his bedside clock repeat themselves, once and for no good reason. For days he spoke of it, as though he had been divinely chosen to stay in bed a little longer.

But once we’re adults, for miracles to be miracles, they have to mean something. We get a choice about what it means, but we absolutely must choose. We can find a penny on the street and think, “This coin was left here meaningfully for me to find, perhaps by God,” or we can contemptuously sneer at it because, after all, it’s a stupid, worthless penny not worth our effort to pick up. Never both. A college friend once dreamed a bowling game in which he got his average score, so we teased him about his wasting a perfectly good dream on an average event. Even today, when I discovered my car with the keys locked in and the windows down, I felt no supernatural breath on my neck. It was dumb luck, that’s all. I have too much on my plate already for me to waste time on a silly miracle.

Children live in a world with no clear boundaries. Everything is possible, especially for grown-ups, who can perform superhuman feats of strength, sensation, dexterity, and intelligence. My children don’t yet understand why cars and paper didn’t always exist, why some things can’t be fixed, or why there aren’t a billion different spoken languages or nearby planets. My children view the world in the black and white of perfection and futility. In that forgettable middle space of grays are the most mundane of miracles, where finding a thrown wood chip is just as ordinary and expected as my having to wreck my pen creating two dozen replacements.

We admire our children for seeing beauty in the world. But to them, I think, beauty is plain ordinary.

My whole family was in the car when one of my kids announced, “Eva has a lunchbox with a princess on it. Sophie has a fairy on hers, but Eva doesn’t think fairies are real.” Is it just me or does this sound like gossip?

Since I first really noticed a comment like this, I’ve been listening more carefully. Now I’m fascinated at how children talk unabashedly about their friends and their friends’ problems.

“Ryan wanted to go down the slide yesterday, but he wasn’t allowed because his pants were wet. He wets his pants a lot.”

“Daddy? We listened to that song at school once, but Terri said she didn’t like it. She says she only likes movie music.”

“Brian ate steak for lunch. He ate the whole thing.”

“When we had a fireman come to the school to talk about being a fireman, Isabel wanted to sit in the front but couldn’t because her parents brought her to school late and made her miss the beginning part.”

The inflection when these comments are spoken is devoid of any meanness or envy. They are spoken with such an earnest this-is-so-awesome vulnerability that you’d think they were thanking someone for a favorite birthday present. My replies are forcibly noncommittal, along the lines of “I see” and “Oh yeah?,” but that’s good enough. They’re don’t need validation from me. This is their news, the headlines of the social drama that is preschool, the very first building blocks of the he-said-that-she-said-that-she-thought urgency you hear from the mouths of middle-schoolers.

Years ago I believed that a person’s intelligence was reflected in his dialogue. People who spoke about ideas outrank those who spoke about events, who outrank people who gossip. For preschoolers there still isn’t a whole of lot of “ideas” to talk out. My son is learning karate; my daughter is learning the planets. I teach them about cooking with the aid of Ratatouille, and I bring every bug I can catch in a box to their day care. But conversation with my kids is dominated by conversation first about themselves, and then about others. They know the names of every creature that has ever crossed their path, from television characters to neighborhood pets, from friends to distant relatives. They are still beginning to construct the foundation of their life-view, and people and their relationships are the hardest and most important parts to learn right now. So when my daughter says, “Me and Donatello both drew flowers in our drawings, but his stems were smaller than mine,” I see the future shadow of all life’s challenges laid out ahead of her: competition, creativity, sexism, science, apology, self-image, compromise, and emotional health. The gossip of preschoolers is not fluff. It is a casual but critical oversimplification of an unknown world. In response to this, the adult is reduced to nearly nothing.

“Really?” I say. Yes, very really.

This morning my daughter crayoned a quick picture for me, an abstraction of a rainbow that looks like a staircase, and then she wrote her name on it. Beneath the rainbow were the letters

SIE

and on the back of the sheet,

NA.

Later, I’m going to have to explain this to my wife, to her mom. See, I’ll say, she wrote her name, which starts here … and ends here. And if they’re anything like me, they’ll necessarily pause for a moment, needing a second or two to process this idea alighting upon the a-hah of understanding. It’s true; when you read the big letters above, didn’t you briefly pause to put the ideas together? Front-and-back integration is actually hard for us. What doesn’t even register on the brain of a four-year-old requires a focused effort from her parents.

Professionally, I want to be more like Siena. Working with words and web pages, I am always shoehorning my ideas into a hierarchical structure, the columnar layout of HTML pages, the little rectangles of a PowerPoint slide. I like being a stay-at-home dad, juxtaposing parenting with professionalism, because this breaks the mold. I learn from both, and then apply to both. Exceptions are cracks in the mold. The reason it takes time to process these exceptions is because we’re re-learning, growing, becoming smarter, finding wisdom. There’s insight aplenty jammed into those cracks.

Handwriting analysis experts will explain how the edges of our penmanship matter a great deal when interpreting personality. Writing up to the very edge of the physical page implies desperation and compensation (you just can’t afford the delay of starting a new line), whereas leaving lots of extra whitespace implies carelessness and distraction (you just can’t wait to start a new line). And if you get to the bottom of a page or card and start bending the text and writing upwards along the margin, you probably don’t know to relax and let go. But Siena and other kids her age don’t even see the edges; they don’t think twice about turning it over and using the backside. And Oren, who draws on toys, tables, and every exposed part of his body (especially the fascinating bottoms of his bare feet), doesn’t acknowledge the specialness of the paper itself. In adults, these behaviors tend toward mental instability.

The box is how we function. Ignore it, and excel.