Familyhood

  But otherwise, forget it. I could never put myself before my children. The depth of love and animalistic protectiveness that we develop as parents is staggering. It becomes the very currency of your life. The hypothetical measure of your limits as a human being.

  Example: I’m working out. I’m exhausted and want to be done. But I owe seven more sit-ups. My body tells me it’s impossible. Maybe I can squeeze out one more. Conceivably two. But seven? Humanly impossible. What do I do? I imagine someone threatening my children. I envision, for example, Vikings holding my kids over a cliff, dangling them by their ankles and threatening to let go unless I finish the sit-ups. Guess what? I sit up pretty fast. Seven times in a row. It can be done; you just need the motivation.

  And nothing motivates like the threat of misfortune befalling your child. It’s a sick game, but I daresay we’ve all played the occasional round of “What Would You Do If Your Child’s Life Depended On It?” Would you jump naked into the filthiest of rivers and swim to the other side? Splash! You betya. Would you eat whatever that dead thing on the side of the road is? Gimme a fork and pass the ketchup! Not even a question; you bet I’d do it. When it comes to your children, all is possible.

  Now. Would you do the same for your spouse? Hmmm . . . let me think for a second. Hmmm. Well, we certainly don’t love our spouses any less, but perhaps we love them a little differently. Neither of you would ever say you love your children more than you love each other. (You may think it—you’re just not allowed to ever say it out loud.)

  I don’t question for an instant my wife’s love for me. I also don’t underestimate the speed with which she’d throw me under a speeding bus to protect our children. As I would her, I imagine. (Though I’m already preparing my excuses should the bus happen to stop on its own before impact. “My bad. It’s just that the bus was moving so fast, and it was so yellow and everything . . . I thought you were someone else. But look—the kids are fine!”)

  Is there any force on earth as compelling as a parent’s vigilance? Our children turn us into the true animals we forget we are. And that ferocity kicks in at the very moment of their birth. They pop into the world, and at first glimpse, you’re hooked. “Hi, nice to meet you, I’ll be your father, and I will have your back from this moment on.”

  SHORTLY AFTER your kids are born, you realize your responsibility for them includes becoming more responsible about yourself. To whatever extent, for example, you ever considered bungee jumping, motorcycle racing, or shark-wrestling, you now reconsider. You weigh whatever thrill you imagine those activities will bring you against the thought of your kids discussing your demise. “Yeah, I’ll miss him, but he sure showed that shark a thing or two, huh?” (Ironically, the shark’s take on it is “Y’know, I wouldn’t have even bothered with the guy but he got a little too close to my kids.”)

  It’s hard, though, to be perfectly responsible and absolutely disciplined all the time. I think I’ve mentioned I enjoy the occasional cigar, knowing full well it’s not that good for me. Less healthful than, for example, tomato juice. But I’d always convinced myself that I was protected by my moderation, my pretty healthy lifestyle absent that one vice, and the belief that God will be kind to me because I’ve been, by and large, a nice guy.

  Not the best plan, I admit. But it was working for me. And I always imagined that once I had kids, I’d stop. (I wonder if that’s where they got the tradition of handing out cigars upon the birth of a child. Maybe it wasn’t so much a gesture of celebration as an act of house cleaning. “Here. I’m not allowed to have these anymore—you take ’em.”)

  Surprisingly, though, having children didn’t make me give up the cigars. I just ratcheted up the rationalizations and qualifiers.

  “Okay, I’ll never smoke near the kids, or in a room they’re going to be in later, I’ll cut way down, and when they’re old enough to call me on it, I’ll stop.” (Figured I’d put a little of the onus on them. Use my bad habits as a teachable moment, y’see. Let them discover the joy of empathy and concern for others.) And I was certain that I’d never be able to withstand the pressure.

  To my surprise, I’ve withstood it pretty good.

  “Daddy, aren’t cigars bad for you?”

  “Yes, but not like cigarettes. Or napalm. Those are really bad. These are less bad.”

  “But, still . . . they’re bad for you, right?”

  “Well, yes, but . . . I had salad earlier. So, all in all, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  It’s amazing what reasonably intelligent adults can justify. I have a friend who shared that he doesn’t always buckle his seat belt when driving. He finds it an inconvenience. “Short distances only,” he feels compelled to qualify. “To the store. And only on surface streets; on the freeway I always buckle up. Always.”

  This is the same friend, by the way, who fanatically never eats carbs. “I see,” I said to him. “So you’ll risk death on the way to dinner, but when you get there, you won’t eat the rolls.”

  TRY AS I MIGHT to ignore the reality of an ultimate death, I do periodically make vague, halfhearted attempts to account for the possibility.

  Like when we travel, my wife and I always fly separately, the logic being that while some terrible fate might befall one of our planes, there’s much less of a chance fate would stick it to both of us. On the same day. So this way, at least one of us will be there for the kids.

  When we travel with the kids, however, we all travel together. Somehow we decided—while never quite articulating it—that if God forbid we all go down together, “being together” would take the sting out of the part about “going down.” If tragedy should strike, at least we wouldn’t have to bear the blow of losing one another. Others may grieve and miss us, but we’d be spared all that because . . . well, we’d be dead.

  And these statistical considerations and precautions are made surprisingly devoid of emotion or lengthy deliberation. They’re just things to consider when you’re a parent. Like inheritance.

  That’s something I’ve yet to see anyone deal with comfortably or particularly successfully: the eternal question of “who gets what when you die.”

  There are many things you hope you impart to your children: a set of morals and values, for example. A healthy balance of self-confidence and openhearted humility would also be nice. You may or may not succeed in any of this, but either way, nobody’s going to fight over it.

  But your money and everything you have is another matter. This is the stuff of which family dramas are born. If not handled properly, this is exactly what causes loving families to deteriorate and gives surviving children all they need to resent one another and squabble well into old age.

  There are several schools of thought on how to handle these things. Some parents believe in giving their children everything immediately upon their passing. Divide everything equally, and just pass it along. A reasonable approach, but not without its pitfalls. Divvying up “stuff” equitably is not so easy. Some stuff carries more emotional attachment. One kid always loved that painting over Grandma’s couch, another kid may covet that watch Uncle Momo left us. One kid may want the living room rug, others may want to stay well clear of the rug because they know what happened on that rug when Mom and Dad were in Mexico that time.

  My own parents started twenty years ago asking my sisters and me to start “tagging” stuff—so we “wouldn’t fight” when they were gone. Ironically, nothing bonded my siblings and me as forcefully as the mutual disinterest we had in almost all of our parents’ stuff. “You want the painting of the clowns in the park? Yeah, me neither.”

  We were united in our conviction that when the time came, some nice Home for the Elderly would be getting more paintings of flowers and more chairs that wobble than they could shake a stick at—courtesy of us, the executors of our parents’ estate.

  On the other extreme, I know people who have lots of money and are convinced that the best thing they can do for their children is to not give it to them. I unders
tand the reasoning; give your children the joy of earning it themselves and, at the same time, spare them the burden of dealing with it. But I notice that surviving children, as a rule, seem to opt for the “please burden me” plan. It’s a pain they’re willing to endure.

  No matter what, there are problems.

  Some parents will leave their money to charity, and to the children go only the personal effects. The “heirlooms.” A lovely gesture, for sure. But this can lead to even uglier displays of discontent. “Really? American Cancer Society gets all the dough and we get the Broadway show-tunes records and a ceramic vase? How is that fair?”

  Then there’s the middle-ground “slow leak” approach: Leave everything to the children, but dole it out at such a glacial pace that the “children” are sixty-five before they get their hands on any real money, and by that point, they’re well into planning their own estate and seeing how they can tease their children.

  The more I consider it, though, the more I think this may be the way to go: delay the decision and make it the kids’ problem. In the case of my sweet but anxious son, it would at the very least give him something to talk about in that speech he’s so eager to deliver at my funeral.

  I’M NOT SURE exactly how I left it with him, by the way. I think I told him he needn’t worry about funerals anytime soon, but if there’s something he felt he wanted to say, why not say it now, so I could enjoy it? (Or defend myself, as the case may be.)

  And as far as his invitation for me to speak at his funeral, same deal; whatever flowery, glowing sentiments I might want to impart, I’m going to share them now while we can both enjoy them, together. Everything that’s great about him, I’m going to tell him today and tomorrow and every day as those things spring to mind. There’s no gain in saving them; they’re meant to be given away.

  And same goes for the material goods, I’ve decided. Give them all away now.

  Which is why every morning, I give each of my children a glowing compliment, a check for $45, and some knickknack from my parents’ house that I never knew what to do with. Let them figure it out.

  Castle Walls

  I came home one day to find some people in my house I never saw before. Two women and a kid. Eating and frolicking, laughing and casually putting some stuff into bags.

  It turned out the kid had been over at the house playing with my son, his mother was there now to pick him up (it was his stuff she had been packing up), and the other woman . . . I’m still not sure. Their cousin, maybe? I don’t know—but she was with them. My wife came in from the other room and explained the whole thing to me.

  So while I was relieved they weren’t, as I’d first feared, a marauding band of remarkably cocky prowlers, and had in fact been granted legal access to my home, I’ve got to be honest: I still wasn’t thrilled with the whole thing.

  IN DAYS OF OLD, kings built castles. They’d secure themselves and their families behind the strongest, thickest, highest, most impenetrable walls they could build, then put soldiers up on top to be extra safe.

  Even this wasn’t enough. They’d also build a moat around the perimeter of the castle, and inside the big wall they’d erect still more walls; a series of ever smaller concentric walled circles, surrounding the central, walled residential quarters—generally consisting of the royal bedrooms, the royal TV room/den area, and a small kitchenette.

  Should any undesirables from the outside world manage to elude the guards on the walls and then get past the crocodiles, eels, and dragons of the moat, the castle family would fall back and lock themselves behind the next set of walls. At this point, the hope (though rarely realized) was that upon arriving at the third or fourth set of walls, the intruders would screech to a halt, slap their foreheads, and then—embarrassed for having been so oblivious to the fact that they were unwelcome—turn and leave of their own volition and sense of propriety, leaving the king and queen and royal offspring safe and undisturbed.

  Hence the expression “A man’s home is his castle.”

  TODAY, NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE live in castles, but the theory remains the same. A condo or an apartment can be a castle too. So can a tent, or a yurt. Or even a nastily worded “Keep Away” sign taped to a big cardboard box. You just need some sort of marker; some delineation that says, “This side is me and mine, that side is you and yours.” Your castle is what protects and keeps the people you love inside, while keeping everything bad—rain, sleet, snow, invading armies, bears—outside.

  And here’s the best part: it’s your castle, so you get to decide who gets in and who doesn’t. It’s like the greatest clubhouse in the world.

  Personally, I don’t like too many people in my castle. You know how they say, “There’s safety in numbers”? Well, to me, it’s a very small number that provides that safety.

  It’s not always easy to know who it is we should be keeping out. So really, the safest thing you can do, I say, is expect the worst and refuse entry to everyone not closely tied to you biologically. My family has rejected this plan as “unworkable.”

  So we’ve broadened our admission policy.

  Grandparents? Always welcome. (But let’s say for no more than a week at a time, and never grandparents from opposing fiefdoms visiting at the same time.)

  Siblings of the king and queen? Absolutely. Children of these siblings? Of course. Our castle is your castle. But boundaries have to be established here too. Castle access, for the most part, should not be open-ended, or scheduled too closely to visitations from other outsiders—welcome though they all may be.

  Furthermore, it’s generally wise to deny or strongly discourage castle access during the heavy-homework days. Or flu season. Or if either the king or queen is “just not up to it” and feels so moved to use his or her highly charged veto powers. (Which, while entirely enforceable, are not to be used casually, as consequences can be ugly—both inside and outside the castle walls.)

  But castle visitations are, of course, never limited to just family members. There are countless friends of the court. And the friends’ children. How about your children’s friends? And, by extension, the families of your children’s friends? Let ’em all in, I say! What’s a castle for if not to bid welcome to friends, that they may partake in the bounty of your kingdom?

  But not all at the same time. Their visits too have to be scheduled intelligently. I mean, you can’t just let anybody into your castle. Because then it stops being a castle and becomes a Starbucks. (And even Starbucks will throw people out now and then—though always with a smile and often with a free cup of coffee.)

  Castles have walls and doors for a reason. You’ve got to use them now and then.

  THERE ARE ALL KINDS of social norms that make castle visits very tricky. Once they’ve been to your castle, people generally feel the need to reciprocate. And conversely, if other people have invited you into their castle, the pressure to have them over to your castle becomes profound.

  Truth be told, I’d gladly give up visitation rights to pretty much every other castle in the world if it meant I could withdraw invitations to have them over to mine. My wife points out that this makes me seem somewhat unwelcoming, perhaps even a borderline shut-in. I don’t see it that way. All curmudgeonly and antisocial behavior notwithstanding, there is darn good reason to maintain vigilance when it comes to who and what gets past your castle gates.

  Not that I believe marauding armies or bears are circling the castle. Or that visiting friends and loved ones intend us any harm. But that doesn’t mean harm can’t happen.

  Sometimes it’s emotional harm; grazing slings and arrows of criticism or insult, which can, in fact, be harder to defend against than flaming javelins and hurling cauldrons of hot oil, because these verbal attacks are staged from within the castle walls, by people you’ve already let in. You’re unprepared for assault.

  “So, uh, Buddy . . . What, did you—put on a little weight?”

  “Boy, your kids sure watch a lot of TV.”

  “You let him have
that much sugar so close to bedtime?”

  First of all, who asked you? And second of all, shut up. You have something you want to say? Say it in your castle. Don’t be bringing your opinions into my castle.

  I have an old friend I hadn’t seen in years visit from out of town. Naturally, he was invited up to the castle. As we sat at my kitchen table enjoying a few hefty mugs of ale, a side of mutton, and some hearty bonhomie, the conversation turned to a movie I had recently worked on and of which I was very proud. I noticed my manor guest grinning.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked him.

  “Oh . . . nothing,” he said. “It’s just . . . I have a friend at work. He said in his whole life, he never enjoyed a movie less than yours. Hated that movie.”

  Okay. I hadn’t seen that coming.

  “It’s funny,” he continued. “He doesn’t know you and I are friends.”

  Well, first of all, I thought to myself, it’s not that funny. And second of all, again: use some discretion, you jackass; don’t share that with me.

  Not that his idiot friend at work—or my idiot friend himself—isn’t entitled to his opinion; just don’t be bringing it inside my castle. Because when a person is inside his own castle, his armor is off; he’s vulnerable to attack. The heart is exposed. So if you’re a castle guest, embraced in the warmth of the castle keeper’s hospitality and open-armed trust, you cannot violate that trust, or you will be attacked in return. Perhaps not a full, armed assault, but a gentle smack in the head isn’t out of the question. At bare minimum, you are less likely to be welcomed back to that particular castle.

  I’m telling you: once you open those gates, you never know what nasty stuff will come blowing in. It doesn’t even have to come from actual visitors. Evil can wend its way in electronically. Ever go online and read one too many “readers’ comments”? It’s not good. You don’t want every nutty opinion, every horror story, every repulsive yet hard-to-forget-you-saw-it image getting into your head, your home, your soul. You’ve got to maintain those lines of demarcation. That’s why people remove their shoes before entering the home. It’s not about keeping the carpets clean; it’s about leaving the outside world outside, and honoring the sanctity of everything inside.