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During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
Fatherhood
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This is a very difficult column to write. It is a very difficult column to write because my son is sitting on my shoulders. Seriously. He is. Worse yet, he is sitting on my shoulders and drumming on my head. This should not be happening. This would not be happening if his mother were here. But she is at work, and I am taking care of my 3-year-old son, and he thinks he can get away with this sort of thing with me because, well, he can. Wait. I need a break. That's better. She came home. My son is not on my shoulders anymore. I sort of miss him up there, but, honestly, it's easier to type this way. In February, after 3 years and 4 months of staying with our son, my wife went back to work for a less demanding boss. I could make several arguments as to the noble abstract reasons she did this - work as personal fulfillment, work as service to the world, work as a good example of gender equality for our son - but the fact is that she went to work for a less abstract reason. She went to work because I do not make enough money. My wife works on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays while my teaching schedule this semester has me on campus Tuesdays and Thursdays. So we take turns with our boy. On my days, he goes to school for 3 hours in the morning. When I pick him up, he asks me for things he never asked his mother for. First: "Let's go to the bagel place." Next: "Shall we go to Acacia Park?" (He really talks like that.) I say yes, and yes again. At the bagel place, he eats precisely nothing while enumerating for me in an immoderately loud voice every element of the building's infrastructure: "That's an air vent, that's a filter, that's a speaker, that's a drain...." Then somewhere between the bagel place and Acacia Park he turns back into a normal boy. We hold hands and run across the field. We kick a soccer ball until it hits the fence. We look through the links and watch the belching yellow trucks build a new freeway interchange. At home, it's time for a nap. On my wife's first day of work, my son didn't think it was appropriate that daddy should put him down for a nap. So I said something stupid. "Today," I said, "daddy is mommy." When my wife came home, he ran up to her, grinning. "Mommy," he said, "are you a daddy?" Later that night, he got on her nerves and she let him know about it. "Do you have to work?" he asked her. "Sometimes," she said. "Then go work." I called him a little snot and we all had a good laugh. Greg Blake Miller is a writer and college instructor in Las Vegas. The UC Irvine graduate is a longtime contributor to Churm Publishing, Inc. |
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