## Metadata - Author: [[Ben George]] - Full Title: The Book of Dads - Category: #books ## Highlights - But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, matériel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, and so we’re always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we’re doing things we technically don’t know how to do. ([Location 253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=253)) - I suppose I’ve lived that truth, although I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is. Perhaps it lies in the dailiness of family life, in the unspectacular accretion of weeks and years of being a married man and father, and the fact that we’ll fail, the whole premise of “family” will fail, unless we’re consciously, diligently trying to give more than we take. And to the extent that we fail or succeed in this, that’s the world. ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=360)) - Instead of shooting hoops, on almost every Sunday afternoon, winter and summer, he and his mother and I, along with Tasha, the dog, if she is up for it, go out walking in one of the Michigan parks. These walks constitute one of our family rituals—walking on a path in the woods affords both togetherness and privacy: you can be pensive, and in solitude, but you’re being pensive and solitary in the company of your family, and you’re being active, too. Families sometimes give the appearance of three or four solitudes living under the same roof. Ours certainly does. ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=465)) - When children are small, time often crawls. Then they grow, and time speeds up; once you couldn’t get away from them, and then they’re never around. ([Location 519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=519)) - A great author wrote, “I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love,” ([Location 1433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=1433)) - There’s also something kind of gangsta about having a little kid when you’re young yourself, ([Location 1626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=1626)) - Fatherhood makes you seem a little more tough and rugged, like getting a tattoo on your face. And being a dad—or acting as a dad—makes you feel more like a man. ([Location 1631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=1631)) - Here’s a secret: all of us, if we live long enough, will lose our way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn’t happened to you yet consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else—an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood. Or it may be easier to blame the map you were given—folded too many times, out of date, tiny print. But if you are honest, you will be able to blame only yourself. ([Location 1842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=1842)) - In this morning’s Writer’s Almanac, Paul Bowles is quoted as saying: “Everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it?” ([Location 2575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=2575)) - I’ve come to see raising a child as hands-on training for death and dying. The lack of control you finally recognize and then succumb to, the grip (already an illusion) slackening from firm to grasping to loose. Your sense of the future altering under the demands of the ever-pressing moment. ([Location 2582](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=2582)) - So I’m not arguing that today’s parents should drop everything and head for the hills, in pursuit of some solar-powered utopia. My concern is that parenthood—as defined by our generation—is becoming the opposite experience: a sort of comfy bunker of apolitical consumerism. I see this among my own friends, in the endless discussions about our babies, and our babies’ products, and our babies’ anticipated needs for day care and schooling. It’s like some default setting we slip in to the moment we encounter another parent. ([Location 2893](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=2893)) - The essential appeal of conservatism* in this country—aside from its naked pandering to the primal negative emotions of fear and grievance—resides in the notion that Americans need not face any of our common crises of state, need not even cop to their existence. Their political house of cards is built on denial. Denial of global warming. Denial of the looming fossil-fuel shortage. Denial of our massive foreign debt. Denial of our shameful economic disparities. And on and on. ([Location 2927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=2927)) - Becoming a parent is essentially about expanding emotionally, feeling more than we did before. It should awaken our empathy—not in some fleeting, phony-ass Oprah way, but as rational moral actors. We owe our babies more than a safe, well-appointed bunker. ([Location 3002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=3002)) - We have to recognize that caring for our children, far from granting us a free pass, requires us to make the concrete sacrifices associated with a social conscience. In the face of leaders who like us best as indulgent children, we must strive to be adults who teach our sons and daughters how to be adults, each and every day. ([Location 3009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=3009)) - It was the very end of a beautiful summer afternoon, the light beginning to slant. But though I was vacationing, I was also trying very hard to get some writing done, to bring a book project around to completion. It was because I wanted to think, to stew in my own notions, that I begged off when Lynn and the kids started off down the road on another walk. I waved them off, I remember, and then sat myself down on a steep, grassy verge in front of the house and watched. They were moving slowly, one or both kids dawdling. I sat and stared at them, and as I did I felt come over me, gradually, the clearest and sweetest melancholy. It was as if I had suddenly moved out of myself, pulling away and rising like some insect that has left its transparent shell stuck to the branch of a tree. It was as if the needle on the balance had drawn up completely straight; the string I plucked was exactly in tune. I watched my wife and two kids walking away from me down the road and I got it. I was exactly in the middle—of the afternoon, of the summer, of an actuarial life, of the great generational cycle. Outlined against the horizon in front of me were those three shapes, and behind me, imagined on the opposite horizon, were my own two parents, both still alive and in health, just coming into their seventies. I was in the middle, at once a son, a father, and something else: a man with plans and projects in his head, no one’s person. It was the frailest and most temporary alignment, and the sensation just then of everything holding steady, hovering in place, exalted me, just as the knowledge that it had to change filled me with sorrow. I took a breath and swallowed my metaphysics. I headed in to use the bit of time I had to do my work. For if parenting held any practical lesson for me, it was that I had to learn to stake out time, to filch every little scrap I could. ([Location 3396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0028MVGYW&location=3396))