Post #148: The Waiting is the…(say it with me!)

New Writing, Parenting, publishing, Shaking My Head, Writing Advice

First off, have you pre-ordered Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze yet? Click HERE to pre-order your copy now–thank you! Also remember to add it on Goodreads HERE!

Now, to business.

After years (and years) of trying, my debut novel finally comes out next month, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of time, and how time gets soft and stretchy around moments of great expectation. Why is that? I hate to fly and in the days, hours, and minutes before I board an airplane, time seems to puff up, to press in on me. Minutes fall into quicksand and drag interminably. Similarly, as I await my book coming out, time has gotten labored and unreliable. I’m simultaneously wishing I could wind the clock forward to July 22nd and my moment of jubilation, but also trying with every shred of my being to savor the experience, to soak it up. To look around. Remember how I feel. But time has me in a strange grip as of late, and it won’t seem to let go.

Be in the moment, I tell myself. Be here now, I say. You’ll only publish your first book once, don’t try to race through it. But how exactly do you do that?

I have two sons, and when you’re a parent, you come to realize that parenting is a journey that makes one hyper aware of time. I remember when my first son, Felix, was perched in my lap, only a few days old, barely able to hold up his own head or make conscious facial expressions, totally unable to control his own bladder, and even then I was already thinking: won’t it be wonderful when he can walk? I was thinking: I can’t wait until he’s older and I can teach him to play tennis and take him to hear live music and share with him all of life’s wisdom. And then he’d smile quite by accident, the way babies do, and I’d be hurled back into the moment, feel his warm soft skin against mine and I’d kick myself for drifting, for not being as present as I would like to be. For not being right here, right now.

Does this happen to you? (Please say yes)

The strange thing is that it feels almost impossible to stop this from happening. Even if you gain momentary control over your sense of space and time, if you find yourself in a moment that you’re so deeply in that time ceases to exist, it’s fleeting. At least for me. Before long, I’m thrust back into the weigh station of anticipation. Thrown into a box with high walls and just enough air. Forced back into asking that perpetual question I will forever associate with The West Wing: What’s Next?

But still I try.

My book is currently in the hands of early readers and reviewers, some of whom I know but most of whom I do not. As a professional writer (my day job is as a copywriter), and soon to be published novelist, I dine out on feedback. Everything I write gets picked apart in one way or another. I’m used to it. I like it. My writing being critiqued is literally my life. And yet, awaiting the judgment of strangers on the relative quality of my novel is a uniquely out of body experience, the likes of which I’ve never known before. I’m genuinely proud of my book, and I know I did the best I could. My conscience is clear. I know even bad reviews won’t change that. Nor will good reviews. And yet…the goddamn waiting.

I hope you’re not over there rolling your eyes at me. I hope, at least in part, that you’re nodding your head just a little bit in understanding.

Time makes fools of us all.

Post #127: Me Vs. Batman

Parenting, parenting advice

Hello! If you’re still out there, thanks for hanging in and many apologies for the radio silence. I’d make excuses, but you don’t care.

The leaves are changing here in Vermont and our yards are dusted with crispy little piles of orange and purple leaves. It’s six-thirty right now and the sun is already starting to set. I went to a bar tonight and there were wooden crates of complimentary apples on the tables, local varietals, crispy and juicy and delicious. I ate one while I drank my beer.

I also have an essay in the new Kids Vermont, a publication I love and have written for before, including an award winning essay I wrote last year about my father. This time around they asked me to write about technology and I gave it a go. Have a peek. It’s not even that long.

Cheers.

Post #86: Kindling Quarterly

Parenting, Things You Should Be Reading

As a father of two young boys (4 1/2 year old Felix and 2 1/2 year old Leo) I pay a lot more attention than I used to to how fathers are portrayed in our culture. And, for the most part, at least from where I’m sitting, the portrayals suck and are a pantheon of one note men who don’t know how to behave and who are basically grown up children masquerading as men who think that farting is high humor and scoff at vacuums and toilet brushes. These are your Tim from Home Improvement kind of guys. These are the guys in Old School and The 50 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up and on the sitcom Guys with Kids. Guys whose naiveté and reliance on masculine puffery/buffoonery and female intuition is supposed to be cute. On occasion, you see far more nuanced and life like fathers, but most that I bump into fit the mold described above. Men who need women to remind them about really complex and hard to figure out stuff like, you know, cleaning windows and making a roast chicken, morality and table manners. Not that all stereotypes are unfounded and unfunny. Some ring true some of the time. There’s pervasive truths about gender that do truly seem to trump interpretation. But I work hard to deliberately smear and ignore gender lines in my own home. And I like cleaning and cooking. I pay actual attention to my children and care a great deal about how they see me. I want to define manhood and fatherhood on my own terms. I don’t want my sons to feel burdened by gender-centric expectations and images the culture feeds them about what boys and men are supposed to be like, especially when the bulk of those portrayals are so embarrassing and limited. And straight. And white.

Enter Kindling Quarterly, a new magazine published by a pair of fathers, David Michael Perez and August Heffner, who seem fed up with the same thing that I am. The newly launched magazine is an exploration of fatherhood and features articles, photos, fashion, recipes, and a host of other content. Full disclosure here that I haven’t read the magazine yet and am not purporting here to review its content. But I heard about it and was intrigued enough to do a little digging. Have a look at the website and read a little about it. It sure sounds cool and looks nice, even if the photo spreads and design are a little hipster looking for my taste. In fact, the whole thing looks like it might be taking itself a little too seriously. But maybe that’s what’s needed. In the “About” section of Kindling Quarterly’s website, they state, “men who are active caregivers are not a novelty and we do not depict them as such” and that’s a sentiment that rings awfully true in these ears. I’m going to pick up the first issue soon and let you know if it justifies it’s hefty $12 price tag.

Until then, The New York Times City Room Blog wrote a pretty decent feature on the magazine. Read it here.

Post #43: A Fine Line

Parenting

Sometimes in parenting, the line between fury and hilarity is paper thin. You feel incredibly powerful emotions, emotions like rage and hate and amped-up types of frustration that make earlier, pre-parenting forms of frustration seem almost quaint by comparison. And yet, these emotions, and the strong and often regrettable language that accompanies them that is directed at your misbehaving spawn, have dual lives, for they are also a kind of comedic performance you enact to be a good parent and to teach your kids life’s most hard earned and valuable lessons. You become the emotion so they can learn. Sometimes you literally want to wring their necks, and yet, you know that if you actually started to, wring their necks I mean, you might just bust out laughing because it’s so damn ridiculous how mad you’ve gotten over the fact that they won’t just eat their fucking dinner in the time frame that you’ve previously decided is the reasonable amount of time in which to consume a plate of food and now you’ve spent twenty minutes arguing about eleven peas and half a pork chop. You also can’t help but face the fact that most of time you’re hating in them what you most hate in yourself (or other people hate in you) and there’s also a strange and sickening kind of karma at play that no one ever warned you about in the pre-parenting world, or could even have prepared you for if they had.

To wit.

The other night, Felix is in the bath and refuses to get out. I’m standing in the bathroom doorway, lion towel in hand, spine aligned with doorjamb, palm against forehead. It’s late. I’m tired. I want him out of the bath so as to be one step closer to the end of the day and my first beer and my book and my tv show or whatever the hell it is I’m needing. He’s sassing me in the most passive way. Kind of hearing me and then responding with gibberish and disappearing beneath the rim of the bathtub as if he didn’t hear me. Lately Felix has been experimenting with two unfavorable traits: sullen faces and pointed fingers. When confronted with a task he doesn’t want to do or a directive that’s not to his liking, he’ll play with these traits, setting my blood to boil as he crosses his arms aggressively and makes his angry face at me. So I’m asking him to get out of the bath and he’s saying no in his own special way. I’m getting kind of pissed, but trying to keep it together, urging him like I would my dog, “C’mon Felix. Really buddy, it’s time to get out. C’mon pal. Felix. Felix?” My wife is sitting on the toilet seat, combing the hair of our younger son, who’s recently been removed from the bath and is already in his pajamas. He’s also put up a fight, but luckily he can’t talk yet and isn’t that strong. She’s watching me get pissed. I’m in control though. I am. Until Felix barks “No!” and points his finger at me and then simmer becomes boil and I get really mad. There’s just something about a pointed finger.

“You know?” I say, “I’ve had about enough of that tone from you. You’ve been very curt with me and mommy lately and I don’t like it when you use that tone of voice. And I don’t like it when you point your finger at me. It’s rude and I want you to stop it!”

But even as I’m saying the words “It’s rude and I want you to stop it!” I’m also noticing my own totally heated and unreasonable tone, not to mention my own aggressively pointed finger and it’s at this point I realize that I’m basically looking in a horrible mirror. I’m yelling at him to stop doing the exact thing I’m doing right that second and the whole thing is just so ridiculous that before I know it I’ve burst into fits of laughter and tears of hilariousness go cascading down my face. I’m laughing so hard I can barely catch my breath and feel like I’ve just broken character because my cast mate was making funny faces at me. Like I was just pretending to be mad, but really, I wasn’t. I was really mad, but in a puff, all my rage went up in smoke. It was one of those surreal moments. Add it to the catalog.

There’s a great line in The Big Chill where the Glenn Close character is on the phone with her daughter and saying things like “I don’t care,” and “no, I didn’t say that, young lady,” and “well, when you’re a mommy, you can be mean” and things like that. When the conversation’s over, she hangs up the phone, turns to her friend, played by Mary Kay Place, and says “sometimes I can’t believe the things I hear myself saying.”