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

“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.