## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Lewis]] - Full Title: Home Game - Category: #books ## Highlights - How can putatively important and deeply considered decisions—how to parent, and what role the father should play—be so easily undermined by casual contact with a different approach? Why should even fictional representations of different parenting styles be an invitation to argue about who should do what? One answer: In these putatively private matters people constantly reference public standards. They can live with their own parenting mistakes so long as everyone else is making the same ones. They don’t care if they’re getting a raw deal so long as everyone is getting the same deal. But there are no standards and it’s possible there never again will be. We’re all just groping, then lying about it afterward. ([Location 75](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=75)) - I found pretty quickly that any thoughts or feelings or even dramatic episodes I didn’t get down on paper immediately I forgot entirely—which was the first reason I began to write stuff down. Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do it twice. ([Location 84](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=84)) - New parents are not rational; they worry about all sorts of things that it makes no sense to worry about. For instance, I am at this moment worrying about when Quinn will learn to walk. I’d like to assume that our child will walk when she walks and that she’ll do it well enough to get around. But my wife will not let me. She believes our child will walk only if we worry about it. ([Location 220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=220)) - All of them find the notion of a man free in the middle of the day amusingly lovable, which is what, of course, I strive to be. ([Location 266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=266)) - The American deal—or at any rate the American deal currently fashionable in my socioeconomic bracket—is that unless you can prove you are out making money, you had better at least pretend to be caring for your child. You might think that the French male, so conspicuous in his disdain for commerce, would be left holding the Gymboree bag more often. Alas, never, except on weekends, when he is unable to pretend that he is in his office. ([Location 268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=268)) - What I’m supposed to do next, apparently, is to lead her by the nose around the room and persuade her to take big whiffs of the various sacks. But Quinn, who has yet to read Proust, has no interest in olfactory associations. ([Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=288)) - AT SOME POINT in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and—let us be frank—got fleeced. The agreement he signed foisted all sorts of new paternal responsibilities on him and gave him nothing of what he might have expected in return. Not the greater love of his wife, who now was encouraged to view him as an unreliable employee. Not the special love from his child, who, no matter how many times he fed and changed and wiped and walked her, would always prefer her mother in a pinch. Not even the admiration of the body politic, who pushed him into signing the deal. Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight. Men just look away in shame. And so the American father now finds himself in roughly the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having shocked the world by doing the decent thing and ceding power without bloodshed for the sake of principle, he is viewed mainly with disdain. The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks: OH…YOU…POOR…BASTARD. ([Location 308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=308)) - The reason we all must be so appalled by parents who murder their infants is that it is so easy and even natural to do. Maternal love may be instinctive, but paternal love is learned behavior. ([Location 573](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=573)) - The only person who would be perfectly untroubled by my absence was the baby. Having worked up enough feeling for her that I could say honestly that I preferred having her around to not, I could now, in good conscience, neglect her. ([Location 613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=613)) - For the whole of Stage 1, a father performs no task more onerous than seeming busy when he isn’t. Nothing in Stage 1 prepares him for Stage 2, when he becomes, in a heartbeat, chauffeur, cook, nurse, gofer, personal shopper, Mr. Fixit, sole provider, and single parent. Stage 2 is life as a Mexican immigrant, with less free time. Entering Stage 2, I know from experience, I have between twenty-four and forty-eight hours before I’m overwhelmed by a tsunami of self-pity. I set out to make the most of them. ([Location 1012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=1012)) - This is the very same Shirley who, seven and a half years ago, prevented Quinn from being abducted at birth, and thus spared some poor kidnapper years of sleep deprivation. ([Location 1043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=1043)) - I’ve sometimes felt that we’re using the wrong manual to fix an appliance—that, say, we’re trying to repair a washing machine with the instructions for the lawn mower. But my wife presses on, determined to find room enough for three children’s happiness. The current wisdom holds that if you seem to be not all that interested in your new child the first time the older ones come to see him, you might lessen their suspicion that he’s come to pick their pockets. And so that’s what she’s doing in there: As her children wait at her hospital door, she’s moving Walker from her bed into a distant crib. “Okay, come in!” They push through the door and into the room. “Can I hold him, Mom?” asks Quinn. “No, I want to hold him!” shouts Dixie. And with that Walker’s identity is established: one of something that we need two of. In less time than it takes an Indy pit crew to change a tire, Quinn’s holding him and Dixie’s waiting her turn, swallowing an emotion she cannot articulate and wearing an expression barely distinguishable from motion sickness. ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=1057)) - her mind has a slight tendency to race to some tragic conclusion, but she usually stops it before it arrives. ([Location 1072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=1072)) - This is what fathers are for? To take children to the places they aren’t supposed to go, so that they can do the things children aren’t supposed to do? If Mama’s the law, I’m the blind eye. ([Location 1229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=1229)) - When asked to take the baby, even for just a few minutes, I instantly become a corporate executive sentenced to a long jail term. I race around the house cleaning up my affairs, wondering what needs to be done before I’m removed from society. ([Location 1270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=1270)) - The interesting thing about twenty minutes is how many more they can seem to be. ([Location 1354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=1354)) - Like dreams, these fatherhood moments are easily forgotten and no doubt also a lot more interesting to the teller than to anyone else. But when they’re forgotten, their lessons, such as they are, are lost. The vacuum winds up being filled by experts on child rearing, and books on fatherhood, and social counselors and psychiatrists—the outside world has a lot to tell you about how to be a father and how to raise your children, and its advice no doubt serves some purpose. It fails, however, to get across with sufficient clarity the final rule of fatherhood: If you’re not bothered by it, or disturbed by it, or messed up from it, you’re probably doing something wrong that will mess up your kids. You’re probably doing something wrong anyway, but that’s okay: You can only do so much to mess up your kids. They can always get back at you, in therapy or their memoirs. But if you don’t monitor these small creatures closely, they have the power to screw you up forever. So watch out for yourself—but don’t let anyone know that’s what you’re doing. ([Location 1544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00261OOWQ&location=1544))