Reflections on Identity
When it’s hard for men to embrace fatherhood as a full-time role
If babysitting children, by definition, means watching children who don’t belong to you while their actual parents are out, then it is literally impossible for a parent to babysit his own child.
I take words very seriously. I attach their rightful meaning to them, and I try to use my own carefully. When my ex-husband recently suggested that I get a full-time job, I wondered aloud who would pick up our ten year-old daughter from school every afternoon.
“I will!” he said, enthusiastically. “I would love to babysit for her.”
“But you can’t, because you have to be the father,”…
Reflections on Identity
Leaving kids at college, leaving marriages, losing spouses
I have a friend who drives in silence; she lives in a rural area, so she spends a lot of time in her car going from one destination to another. This astounds me: no radio, no podcasts, no audio books? I cannot fathom it. The discord in my head is so deafening that it feels essential to tune it out with someone else’s words. When I am in my car alone, when I walk around the city doing errands, when I unload the dishwasher or fold laundry, even as I wash up for bed, I listen, pausing only when the…
Reflections on Identity
On how whittling my household from five to four to three to two really feels
This morning, I awaken to find every light in the house on at full blast: first the hallway, then the hall bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, the staircase to the kids bedrooms. It is early and no one else is stirring yet — my ten-year old daughter is curled up in the middle of my queen-sized bed, where I have requested she stay for a while as I get over the trauma of what I call the white curtain incident, when I awoke in the dead of night to find a mouse wending its way down the white linen…
Reflections on Identity
The threshold between the life you had and the life you could have
If marriage forms a union, then the ending of one constitutes a dissolution; we meld together to become one seemingly inseparable whole, then we are cleaved apart to become distinct entities again. Take two colors that are marbled together: it’s not so easy to simply extract one from the other — each is irrevocably altered, tinged with the other color, some swirls remaining intact while others blend together to create a third color, and then multiple gradients of that new color.
The marriage vows we take are morally and legally binding, but so are many contracts we sign and later…
The ritual is strangely comforting
Co-authored by Jessica Pell
I’m visiting my friend Jessica for a couple of days at an airy, modern house she’s rented for the summer in a small seaside town in Long Island. Jessica and I have been friends for almost forty years, since we met in middle school — she, seeming a bit fancy, always dressed in the Ton Sur Ton clothes I coveted, was not amongst my closest friends. …
Reflections on Identity
What it feels to lose a father to one, then a husband to another
My father died at the age of 35, one month shy of my fifth birthday. His kidneys had failed, having been irrevocably damaged during a childhood illness. He was awaiting a transplant but had surgery for a minor repair in the meantime, developed a blood clot, and perished as he was allegedly recuperating. He had been ill for years. I remember celebrating my sister’s birthday with a fluffy white strawberry shortcake while hearing ambulance sirens in the background. I understand now that it couldn’t have been an ambulance coming for him, as we certainly wouldn’t be sitting around blowing out…
Lived Through This
Rising and falling, over and over and over again
I’ve done quite a bit of musing while sitting on the beach this summer, and I thought I was done writing about it after my last piece. For anyone who thinks that I’ve been doing a tremendous amount of sitting on the beach, thus affording me copious time to ponder and ruminate, let me clarify: I’ve had a few lovely short bursts oceanside and since I don’t enjoy swimming (I know, I know), I instead do a lot of observing and contemplating. I get a lot of thinking bang for my buck.
Mid-afternoon today, while spooning kale salad into a…
Reflections on Identity
Looking out, to find out what is within
When I was married, I didn’t spend much time pondering the happenings around me. I diligently read two newspapers everyday, listened to podcasts and NPR, and voraciously read books, so I don’t mean that I didn’t worry about issues in my community or the world beyond it. It’s that I rarely sat still long enough to closely observe people around me, and if I did, chances were that I was silently judging them for something I was sure they were doing wrong. I wasn’t a petty, mean person, but I was a cautious and circumspect one who behaved according to…
Cuomo, cheating spouses, and why re-drawn lines are no match for basic morality and respect
Even Andrew Cuomo’s staunchest supporters must have acknowledged that his resignation this week was a fait accompli. I listened with great interest to the press conference in which he addressed the findings against him, and then again to his resignation, first with dismay, then embarrassed laughter, and finally, with disgust. I had, not so long ago, been an ardent supporter. I may have harbored a bit of a crush. I have a mortifying video on my Instagram account of my twenty-one-year-old daughter expressing her adoration of him and why she felt she would make a compelling, albeit young, partner for…
Reflections on Identity
My monetary worth on the open market
I hate to run, but today, I run. I am angry, the kind of anger that can make a person smash plates or scream with primal rage, and I have nowhere to release it save the ground beneath my feet. I haven’t run since the pandemic forced the closing of gyms and I took to running laps around Washington Square Park, dodging jumpy dogs on too-long leashes and panting into my cotton mask. Now, I lace up my sneakers and set off along a road lined with rambling shingled houses. …
