This is, first of all, a super-basic bolognese sauce. I don’t think there are any weird twists in there, although whether your Emilia-Romagnese nonna would agree with my choices is, well, I don’t care. Here ya go:

Ingredients

• 2 lbs. ground meat (I prefer a pork-and-beef mix, but you could go all beef, add in some veal, or switch up to lamb)
• 5 tsp. kosher salt
• 2 Tbsp. butter
• 2 medium yellow onions, diced
• 4–5 celery stalks, diced
• 2–3 large carrots, diced
• 6 large cloves garlic
• 2 bay leaves
• 4–6 thick twigs fresh thyme
• 1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes (I prefer Sclafani brand because its ingredients are just “tomatoes, salt”)
• 3/4 C. white wine
• 3/4 C. whole milk

1. In a dutch oven over high heat, brown the meat in two batches, seasoning it with 1 tsp. salt and breaking it up once it’s developed a crust, about 5 minutes. Remove the meat from the pot with a slotted spoon, so that the fat drains back in, and reserve.

2. Reduce the heat to medium-high and add the butter. When it’s done frothing, add the onions, celery, and carrots (this mix is called a mirepoix), plus 1 tsp. salt. Cook, stirring regularly, until the veggies have cooked down a bit and the onions are on the verge of caramelizing, about 8–10 minutes.

3. Stir in the garlic and cook 1 minute. Add the bay leaves and thyme and cook 1 minute more. Put the meat back in and stir to combine.

4. Stir in the crushed tomatoes and 1 tsp. salt. At first, this won’t seem like nearly enough tomatoes to make this a sauce, but after a minute or two, everything will be nice and crimson.

5. Stir in the white wine and milk. When the sauce starts bubbling furiously, cover with a heavy lid and turn heat to as low as possible (you may have to change burners for this). Cook at least 3 hours, preferably 4 or 5. However long you cook it, do it until the fats have started to separate out from the rest of the sauce—this is a good way to know when it’s generally ready.

6. When it’s finally done (or you can wait no longer), pluck out the thyme stems; the cooking should have removed the leaves from them already. I usually then let the pot cool and spoon it out into Ziploc baggies; about 8 of the “snack” sizes, each of which holds enough sauce for 2 kiddie portions, or 1 adult portion.

Variations: In summer, I like to add a diced zucchini to the mirepoix and skip the milk.

The last, but possibly most important, thing to know about this recipe is: Make sure you get to eat some yourself! It’s pretty damn tasty, but your kids can easily consume the whole batch without your ever getting a spoonful. And then you’ll have to make another pot. Which maybe isn’t so terrible, come to think of it.

Anyway, let me know it goes for you…

1. You can disappear for years at a stretch, and yet your kids will still adore you. No, I’m not referring to the Doctor’s penchant for bouncing into and out of his companions’ lives at odd moments. Actually, I’m talking about the way the series barely made it to the age of 50: Beginning in the mid-80s, its existence was threatened, and it went entirely off the air for years at a time, returning occasionally for a season or three with a new Doctor before once again failing to find a broad audience and going dark. And yet Dr. Who fans STILL clamored for it, their ardor only growing with the show’s prolonged absence. And when it returned: joy beyond all reasonable measure! So that’s the approach I take to my kids. I leave when I feel like it, knowing that when—if—I return, they’ll be as desperate as ever for my love and attention.

2. Kids will believe anything. If there’s one thing Dr. Who is known for, it’s execrable dialogue and even worse special effects. Easy example: For the show’s entire run, the most evil bad guys of all were the Daleks, who trundled around on roller balls, unable to climb stairs, and were usually limited to the singularly idiotic spoken line: “Ex-ter-min-ate!” And yet I fucking loved that show, and even now, despite my overt knowledge of its shoddiness, tune in to catch new episodes. And so, once again, I’m taking this approach to child-rearing: I tell my kids whatever flits through my brain, no matter how unbelievable, knowing that the little creatures are so credulous they’ll eat it all up. Remember, I’ve just returned from months or years away, and they want my attention, so their defenses are down—I might well have been piloting my spaceship through the galaxy in the company of unicorn princesses.

3. A silly outfit makes everything okay. Of course, for these tactics to work, you have to emulate the Doctor down to his wardrobe, which can be anything from Edwardian to cricket-ready to 21st-century hipster formal. This gives the Doctor a playful, almost harmless aspect, when in fact his arrival usually signals the imminent near-destruction of the planet Earth, and the upending of his companions’ lives. But hey, he’s got a long, silly scarf! And a robot dog! And expertly tousled hair! How much chaos can he—or I—really wreak? (Answer: As much as you’ll let me!)

So there you have it: a primer on parenting based on the adventures of a guy who’s lived 900-some years without ever settling down, acquiring health insurance (what’s the deductible on regeneration?), and time-traveling all the way back to 4:35 a.m. in order to be first on line to register a kid for Universal Pre-K. Trust me, this stuff totally works—at least until the network executives (a.k.a. your wife) cancel the season and the kids all yell, “Exterminate!” After that, you might as well go live at Comic-Con.

Crib, cradle, car: these are, apparently, the three main sleep-inducers for the modern family. This we know because of a recent study that showed that new UK parents drive an average of 1,300 miles a year just trying to get their children to sleep. And, as the Daily Mail pointed out, the fathers as a separate category are even rangier than that, driving an astonishing 1,827 miles in the first year of their child’s life. That’s the equivalent of three Le Mans endurance races, except there’s not always second driver to take over when you get fatigued.

At least there isn’t for the self-described “baby chauffer”  in Fiat’s dad-centered video followup to Fiat’s The Motherhood video. This installment, called The Fatherhood (Fiat 500L 12″ Remix), begins with an identifiable scene: mom packs the two mewling infants in the back car seats and then shuts the door so the father can drive off in the hopes the children will finally settle down. The car door shutting serves as the downbeat for a retro musical take on the road rules of being a first-time dad, as some satirical New Wave synth pop kicks off (think The Human League and their ilk). Whether or not that’s your jam, readers of this blog will be glad to see the lyrics laced with the kind of self-pity and regret we often indulge in here:

It’s fine because I love you / And I will never trade your mother
But in the future I’ll be abstinent / Or double up the rubber

There must be an element of sleep-deprived hallucination involved here—soon he’s seeing singing wood nymph and dancing unicorn, which is usually a firm sign of mental distortion—which could also explain the teleportation directly back to the sounds of early-80’s Sheffield. The good news here—for the driver, for Fiat, and for the babies—is that despite his solipsism, sleeplessness and hallucinations, the father manages to drive safely enough to arrive unscathed back in front of his home.

Except, just then, the infants wake up. And thus, perhaps, was a sequel to The Fatherhood (Fiat 500L 12″ Remix) born.

Until then, here’s the video, on YouTube:

And so, I present to you, on March 2 in the evening, a post about March 1.

There is a lot of scripture about the Sabbath and what it is and why God  commanded it and such. But one of the best has to be this:

Exodus 23:12 Six days you shall do your work, and on the seventh day thou shall rest: that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of your handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed.

I like it, of course for the unintentional way that it talks to me in the vernacular—thine ass may rest!—and because it presumes I have a handmaid, which is nice and flattering. But this, like other scripture on Sabbath, says it should be a day of rest. The problem for a digital sabbath is that these days we tend to be doing the exact same thing whether at rest or at work. That is, we are still at our computers whether it’s the weekend or the week, whether we are looking to work through a to-do list or looking for cat porn for fun (or whatever your search habits are). About when the Book of Exodus would have been written, it was pretty clear if someone was in the fields working or at home Sabbathing. Now you would have to be close enough to see the screen—angry birds or angry email to investors?—to figure out whether this was work or rest.

That’s why I like the solution from the National Day of Unplugging people. Just unplug it all. Refresh your handmaid’s son (if you’re into that kink). Rest thine ox. And, of course, rest thine ass. Offline.

Because what would I brag about? I’ve never made enough money to boast about; in fact, I’ve always been either underpaid (for glamorous work) or paid just adequately enough (for tedious work). Last year, in fact, I made so little money as a freelance writer (after the usual deductions) that I wasn’t even required to pay New York City’s Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility tax, which is maybe $100 every year, tops. If I were single, I would be homeless, or more likely living in a far cheaper place than New York. Like Lagos.

See how much easier this is for me, to put myself down rather than build myself up? It’s the legacy of Woody Allen, I think, that many of us born in the 1970s and reared in the Freaks and Geeks 1980s are only too happy to embrace (we don’t really have any choice): We are nebbishes, nerds, and nudniks, with bad hair, bad skin, and bad, bad dance moves. And yet instead of letting our unmanliness dominate us, we made peace with it and moved on, mocking ourselves more mercilessly than any jock, prep, or cheerleader ever did. In fact, I just wrote a whole book about my failures as a traveler—how, after decades of jetting around the world, I still get sick, spend nights alone, and make stupid, humiliating mistakes. (It’s coming out in May, by the way.)

Relentless self-deprecation has become my basic mode of being, and that’s antithetical to so much of American office and public life: the endless talk about sports, cars, and money. Whenever I overhear coworkers say things like, “Did you see the Nets beat OKC last night?” (which happened as I was writing this piece), I feel the gap between myself and that traditional form of masculinity yawn ever wider and deeper. At times, when I observe how passionate guys get arguing about the superiority of, say, BMW over Mercedes, or discussing serious money-making deals, I wish I could be the same, just to know how that feels, to care so much. But that’s also how I feel about jumping from a moving train or eating glass: curious, but not that curious.

Instead, I’ll content myself with my own little beta-male world of onedownsmanship, and leave the boasting to the boors. Which is, I have to admit, its own form of bragging. By abasing myself so thoroughly, I’m really setting myself on a different, purer plane of existence, where we’re all so gawky and hopeless that we simply needn’t bother competing with the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe. But you know what? That’s one bit of hubris I can live with.

My six-year-old daughter has an old friend—in as much as first graders can have old friends—who is a boy who used to live in Brooklyn but moved west. He visited again recently, and after a long absence, they fell to discussing something that has suddenly become important to them: money.

“I have $75,” said the boy, a statement that his mother later verified as true.

“Oh, that’s funny. I have $68,” said my daughter, a statement that was categorically false. Even after Santa delivered that bag of real gold she asked for (ten Sacagawea dollar coins in a little satchel, as it turned out), she still doesn’t have more than $25 to her name. But the old friends just turned to each other and laughed. “We have SO much money,” they said one after the other.

The last time they saw each other, they really didn’t feel this way about money. Yes, she’s had a half-full piggy bank on her nightstand for years, but this thing of talking a lot about money, and this magical thinking (read: lying) about how much money she has is new. Watching them made me think that salary bragging might be an actual developmental step. Kids are often braggarts, which seems—if I can indulge in some armchair psychiatry—like a useful shield for them as they start to look around and see just how little they are capable of in the adult world.

The leap from piggy-bank fibbing to salary-bragging is a natural one. At an older age, it is still the defense of the braggart, particularly of men who are ever-aware that they have less and earn less and are less than others on this earth. But I’ll say this about salary bragging and six-year-olds: as with so many social and cognitive milestones, young girls are simply a little more advanced than the boys.

Let me begin by copping to a gender-specific failing: The shopping duties in my household do not fall to me. I did not select our furniture, although I have, on occasion, been required to accompany my wife, Tomoko, on her forays to outlets big-box and small as she determines the future of our seating. I had no say whatsoever in the plates or flatware. When Tomoko first moved in with me, she banished the sheets and pillowcases (bought by my mother at the time of my separation from my first wife), replaced the drapes, and undertook the purchase of clothes needed for the children. I grocery shop, ferry our dependents to the sites of their education and entertainment; ensure the continuing good health of our cat, dog, and car; cut checks from bank accounts as directed; and am responsible for sundry other tasks, chores, and obligations too varied and boring to mention. What weight there is in our home, I pull my fair share of. But shopping I avoid.

All of which helps explain my lack of familiarity with CouponCodes4u, a consumer website that recently conducted a survey of the dynamics of female-male workplace behavior. To wit: 2,671 office-working Americans were (Fine print alert: the survey also included the mysterious labor population not toiling in-office but “an environment with other colleagues.”) asked if they ever discussed their salaries with co-workers. Fifty three percent of male survey respondents admitted to having done so, compared to only 15 percent of female respondents. Of those women unwilling to disclose the size of their, uh, salary, nearly a third said it was because they feared their colleagues earned more than they did. Oddly, another 22 percent said they showed discretion about their pay because they believed they earned more than others.

In those workplaces from which I’ve been fired (basically all of them, but for the current one), chitchat about paychecks hasn’t tracked along gender lines: Either everyone talked about it, or no one did, with the most significant correlation being the overall rates of pay. That is, the more everyone made, male or female, the less the subject was discussed. There’s much to be made of that, but for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll focus on one problematic observation, given what is known of female-male compensation balance in the U.S. Recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show women’s earnings still reach only 80 percent of their male counterparts. The disparity decreases in the relatively educated workplaces silly enough to pay me, but does not—as yet, one hopes—approach true equity. That suggests that if women earn less, one should expect them to talk about money more, in amounts proportionate to the total pay. For example, in the offices of my more parsimonious former employers, ones in which everyone complained of their pay, women should have done with greater frequency, as they were likely earning less than the men. That didn’t happen, though, not to me, and not on the survey.

Pseudo-scientific studies, and myopic opinions based only on personal experience, rarely account for the complexities of actual human interaction. Here’s one factor I believe accounted for by neither the survey nor my sexist judgments: Most women are more polite in the workplace than men. That doesn’t make for superior employees, necessarily; nor does such propriety equate with elevated character. Women just tend to be on better behavior. Dirty jokes; sexual harassment both overt and implied; acts of violence—these are all typically (although not always) the purview of the working male rather than his under-compensated female workmate. If that is true—and who knows if it is—it seems logical, then, that men would be more likely to discuss their pay, a practice that while, if not wrong, is undoubtedly rude.

Male competitive norms may play a part. The survey, for example, found that 55 percent of men who discussed their salary acknowledged being motivated by the “bragging rights.” Bully for any dudes clearing enough to strut about it—as demonstrated earlier on this site, the brain trust of DadWagon has never been so favored. At one former job, however, I happened to work with several fellows lucky enough to have book deals, myself included. The size, heft, and dollar value of those publishing contracts was no secret, and short of whipping out our peckers and measuring, I can’t think of a clearer attempt at securing bragging rights. If women engage in comparable displays of peacockery, I’ve yet to witness it.

In truth, though, the survey indicates more about the sexism extant in our work culture than anything having to do with displaced male locker room bravado. Generally, men enjoy a greater sense of empowerment in the workplace than women. We will, I imagine, continue to feel so, until pay equity has been achieved, if ever it is. Men talk about their salaries because, like most forms of boorishness, they can. Come the day that women achieve fiscal equality with men at work, I’d wager the gender kinetics of this very slim issue will change, although in which direction—more talk or less—I’m uncertain. Until then, when it comes to workplace piggery, men will, as ever, dominate.

I have no idea why we would be motivated to do this, but we tried to get our kids to make it to midnight. Sure, they aren’t all that different from other partygoers: like any hard-swilling hipster worth his salt, a kid might cry or wet himself during a particularly long party. But stretching a first-grader to midnight is a dubious plan, not least because of this fact:

They have very little sense of time.

I’m not just talking about 7pm versus 10pm versus midnight. Clearly the child-mind gets hazy about what clocks mean around bedtime anyhow.

But the bigger issue, New Year’s Eve as a holiday is entirely predicated on having made the developmental leap into understanding time in general, and specifically the passage of time. This makes it a challenging milestone for small kids. Christmas is easy: it’s just another birthday party. Channukah is understandable (if weird—kids who are growing up around smartphones probably can’t relate to the miracles of lamp-oil). Even death-centric Easter makes sense, at least to kids who have lost a grandparent or a pet, though one could ask rightfully what the hell a rabbit has to do with the death and also, while we’re at it, why grandma isn’t able to rise from the dead like Christ if that is really the Easter story.

But New Year’s Eve has got to be a strange thing indeed to someone who really doesn’t understand was 2012 was. So while I puzzled over how Carson Daly ever got a job working in television, my daughter chewed over the concepts of time and remembrance in her head, and ended up not really caring that much. Not yet, anyhow.

Which was for the best, in the end. Because her and her preschool son weren’t fated to make it to midnight anyway. They crashed around 10:30pm, and then slept through the fireworks and faint whoohooing from the street and the NYPD sirens and all the other things that make New York on New Year’s an assault on the senses. It was still a party—with two friends their age staying and their mother staying over with us from out of town, it was actually a monumental chocolate-eating pillow-fighting, milk-guzzling blowout. But they just didn’t trouble themselves with why they were partying, or why we didn’t care if they slept or not, or what 2013 will even be about.

I’m not often jealous of my kids, but I was last night. It’s a beautiful thing, to not be able to size up 2012 in any way or to form any anxieties about 2013. We should all be so lucky.

I just got back a couple days ago from a reporting trip to the Western Cape of South Africa, which included some time with farmworkers mourning the death of Michael Daniels, a young father shot dead by police during a wage protest. There was a visitation of the body, a politically charged funeral, a graveside sermon and afterwards, a traditional meal—the after tears, it’s called—back at the deceased’s house. For the adults, it was grilled chicken and rice, and for the children, it was an African version of Irish stew, which means a runny plate of boiled potatoes, carrots and peas.

“Only the adults get meat,” one of Daniels’s friends told me. “Children won’t get chicken until they’re 11 or 12.”

In the poor farmlands of the Western Cape, then, this is at least one definition of adulthood: you get chicken.Back in the States, there are few such bright lines. Children eat chicken, adults eat popsicles and drink fizzy drinks, and as Christopher Noxon pointed out in his highly entertaining book Rejuvenile, Disney World is the world’s top vacation spot for adults (that means, without kids in tow).

All this self-infantilizing, of course, has everything to do with the main difference between us Rejuveniles and, say, African farmworkers: We are wealthy and idle enough to delay adulthood, or even, god forbid, write posts on the Internet about the onset of adulthood.

Further contributors to the confusion: We have this wealth but lack any unifying customs. We don’t have something like a toga virilis, the chalk-white robe Romans wore to mark manhood after it was time to offer their childhood amulets up to household gods. A suit and tie is a close approximation, I suppose, whether you’re the managing director of Bain Capital or a shift manager at Applebee’s. But still, for those of us who eschew Jewish or Wiccan or Catholic rites of passage, and who don’t have to get dressed to work, it’s up to us to define what manhood is and when it happens.

And on that score, I have no answers. I wake, I eat, I try not to lose my temper at my lovely children, and then I travel for work to places where I’m absolutely sandblasted by the miseries and occasional joys of others. Life is full and enervating and confusing enough without trying to wedge a definition of manhood into it. Case in point: on the nearly 16-hour flight back to New York from South Africa, I spent some time going through my notes, and even more time playing a boxing game on my iPhone. Does that make me a child? A man-child? A rejuvenile? I don’t know. But when the dinner cart finally made it to the back of the plane where I sat, I ordered the chicken, whether or not I deserved it.

–Nathan

One recent Monday morning, I was telling a co-worker about my weekend: There had been a playdate with my daughter, Sasha, and one of her friends, and I’d been having some trouble with my apartment’s hot-water heater, and I’d gone shopping at the farmers’ market for vegetables for the week. All in all, nothing special. Just a typical Brooklyn weekend.

But for my co-worker, this was amazing. “You’re a real grown-up!” she said.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say. I’m still relatively new to the working world. After freelancing for the last eight years, I’ve only just taken a full-time job—and it’s one where I’m at least a decade older than almost everyone on my team. At the age of 38, married, with kids, a mortgage, a beard, and a receding hairline, I suppose I must really seem like an adult to them.

If only I seemed like that to myself! Though I never wanted to be one of those much-derided man-children loafing around Brooklyn coffee shops—“grups,” New York magazine dubbed them—I was never all that eager to embrace the traditional outward markers of adulthood: suit and tie, office job, lightless dead eyes. And in truth, I’d always felt like a child. The sense of smallness and powerlessness that are a child’s everyday experience had never fully left me. When I’d look at my own father, a tenured history professor, I could never imagine becoming like him. And when I looked at kids, I felt nothing but sympathy—I know what you’re going through—and imagined they were looking at me and thinking, Dude, you look older, but I see through you; you’re just like me.

Still, degree by degree, things shifted. Six years ago, I grew a beard, mostly because, clean-shaven, I looked like I was still 17 years old. I invested in some good shirts and stylish blazers—not office-drone garb, but clothes I felt comfortable in. And, of course, I got married and had kids and bought an apartment. Inside, I felt no different from before—small, nervous, new to everything—but apparently I was. Or, quite possibly, the world was different, not in its essence but in how it viewed me. My own children, for example, will never see me as anything but a grown-up, and as they age, the kids of her generation will see me that way, too. One day, my daughters may look at me as I looked at my own father, and think: How am I ever going to become that?

The secret (which is only a secret to those still too young to have experienced it) is that adulthood is not something we consciously embrace, a set of rules we one day agree to follow. It’s a set of perceptions and assumptions that everyone has about us, though we may still feel like children inside. How the hell did I become an adult? It’s because the young people at my office decided I was. And one day, 10 or 15 years from now, it’ll happen to them, too. We all grow up, whether we want to or not.

–Matt

Life with my second wife began not with a cinematic meet-cute but a brisk phone call, during which I explained that ours would be a part-time dalliance. I was divorced, or nearly so, at any rate, and had a child who lived with me half of every week. (Joint physical and legal custody—a phrase only a divorced father could love! My son was young enough to fall under the so-called Tender Years Doctrine, which presumes that fit mothers are entitled to full custody of children under five, a judicial bias that supposedly no longer exists, but that my attorney assured me most certainly does, and which my ex, to her credit, never attempted to exploit.) Because I didn’t introduce casual dates to my son, Tomoko would have to be comfortable with an amorous schedule governed by the my night/her night dichotomy under which I lived.

These terms, I added, were non-negotiable, and it was up to her to accept them or not. Question her sanity, if you must, but she consented, and so we strolled in the park when I had time, explored the city when I was free, caught movies on the nights I wasn’t needed as a father.

Eventually, Tomoko invited me to meet her friends, a group of childless, 30-something singletons with whom she shared a summer home on Fire Island. They came each Sunday for an early dinner, and Tomoko warmly and maternally fed them, sat for their tales of dating woe, and provided a focal point for their lives.

It was a tricky occasion. I would be offering myself up for inspection by a clique of protective and well-meaning independents, all of whom, I imagined, would expect copies of a recent resume and credit report, a list of references, my genetic particulars, plus a non-refundable application fee, before deeming me a suitable match. I decided that I wouldn’t have it. A grown man, with a child, ex-wife, mortgage, dog, car, and an attorney vacationing lavishly on his $50,000 in legal fees, need ask for no one’s approval.

The night went well. The friends proved fine people, funny and harried and acerbic in the way of New Yorkers, and not nearly as scrutinizing as I had feared. And it was true: I didn’t need their approval—they needed mine. Tomoko and I shared that sense of mutual possession that comes with falling in love. She was with me, we were alone together among people, and I was entitled to resolve their value rather than the other way round.

What does any of this have to be with being an adult? Well, that night after dinner I entered into a lengthy discussion with one of Tomoko’s friends about his efforts to purchase a couch. He was a finance guy of some sort, successful enough, with money to waste on a couple of sports cars and an apartment in Manhattan. It turned out that he’d been at this for months. He just couldn’t decide—what style, what fabric, which size, never mind color—the whole thing, he said, was bedeviling him no end. This commitment, this furniture, represented a stark and binary choice (sectional or no?) that would irrevocably alter the course of his life. He could not, in good conscience, take it lightly.

The conversation spun me from the room. I nodded with sympathy, but my mind was with my son who was spending yet another night without me. As Tomoko’s friend wrestled with the vexatious dilemma of a two-pillow or three-pillow existence, I obsessed over babysitters and pediatricians and the punitive costs of daycare. I wanted to grab him by throat and shout, Grow up! It’s just a couch!

Which it was, and I didn’t. Wouldn’t be the adult thing to do. Instead, I sipped my wine, slipped an arm around Tomoko, and with self-congratulatory condescension, surveyed him from the remove of what I will allow myself to call the real world.

It wasn’t long after that I introduced Tomoko to my son. Soon, we moved in together, commingling our lives in ways that made irrelevant whether it was “my night.”

–Theodore

Over the last few years, I’ve become a fairly devoted fan of the TV show Fringe, now in its fifth and final season on Fox. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched it—I get the sense its ratings aren’t too hot, which is why it’s ending—but it’s surprisingly good, particularly considering it comes from the J.J. Abrams wonder factory, better known for creating mysteries than solving them.

Anyway, Fringe revolves around the lives of three people: Olivia Dunham, a tough FBI agent with a photographic memory; Peter Bishop, a rebellious young scientist; and Walter Bishop, Peter’s father, an aging scientist who’s spent the last couple of decades in an insane asylum. Together they investigate “Fringe events,” bizarre crimes with a far-out scientific angle—people who suddenly transform into monster hedgehogs, killers who can liquefy your brain, shape-shifters, and so on. Of course, there’s an overarching mythology-conspiracy tying everything together, slowly revealed over the course of many episodes (spoiler: it involves multiple universes and an ominous post-human race called the Observers).

Quite satisfyingly, the mythology pretty much holds together: This ain’t lost. But what makes the show fun to watch are those main characters—particularly Walter Bishop, an acid-dropping, milkshake-concocting, bathrobe-wearing genius (played by the wonderfully crinkly-faced John Noble)—and the consistency of the themes that emerge from their interactions. The first seasons are about Olivia coming to terms with her childhood traumas, and about Walter’s attempts to rebuild his relationship with his distrustful son Peter, who didn’t really appreciate Dad’s going crazy when he was a teen. The tension builds across the seasons as we learn that Walter, the genius scientist, had done terrible things in his earlier years—experiments that, while seemingly high-minded, were truly unethical, destroyed the relationships everyone is now trying to mend, and may have led to many of the bizarre fringe events the team is now trying to solve.

Again and again through the show, parents like Walter (and, later, Olivia and Peter) use all their formidable powers to try to create a better world for the future—for their children—and yet hubris reigns: The world they create turns out to be more dangerous, threatening not only their own children’s lives but everyone’s. They are geniuses, highly professional law-enforcement agents, and devoted whiskey drinkers, and yet, no matter how many battles they win, against other rogue scientists, against hedgehog men, against the disintegrating fabric of the universe, THERE IS NOTHING THEY CAN DO. All will lose the people they love—their children, their parents, everything they love.

As I watched the show last night, this theme was perhaps more in my mind than usual. The massacre at Sandy Hook, which only slowly filtered into my attention through the course of the day, had left me horrified, uncomfortable, but also weirdly numb. I can’t imagine being one of those parents, learning their children had been killed in an utterly senseless slaughter—or rather, I can all too easily imagine it. These things happen, more and more often it seems—just that morning, some guy killed 22 kids at a school in China with a knife—and it feels like it’s only a matter of time before it happens to us. What were once “fringe events” are now daily reality.

And so I ask myself (as many other parents are probably asking): What can I do about it? And I answer myself: not much. Unless I want to quit my job, home-school my daughters, and never leave them alone for a single second, they are going to be out there in the world—at day care, in kindergarten, hanging out with their friends at libraries, malls, movie theaters, boarding airplanes for far-off lands, or just walking down the wrong street on the wrong day. I can teach Sasha and Sandy (not the most popular name now, I guess) to be ready for calamity—and indeed, Sasha’s school did so yesterday, having the kids practice hiding under a shelf and telling them, according to Sasha, that they did a “fabulous” job.

But readiness only goes so far, and hiding under a shelf is no guarantee that some 20-year-old with Asperger’s won’t slaughter my child for reasons no one will ever really understand. There are matters beyond my control—beyond all our control.

Or are they? Clamping down on guns would help. Improving access to mental-heath care would help. I guess. Insert whatever practical-sounding, reasonable approaches you like here—I’d vote for them, maybe even fight for them. Those things would help.

Or not. Maybe those things would just help preserve our illusion of control. Maybe, as with Walter Bishop, our best intentions will bring unintended consequences. Maybe we’ve fucked this world up so deeply in the past 50 years that there’s nothing we can do but cross our fingers we’ll somehow make it out the other end, live good, long lives, and watch our children grow into adults and start their own families. That’s what I hope for at least, but then I’m seized with a final fear: that the day after my own death, some unspeakable calamity will befall the loved ones I’ve left behind, that despite all I’ve done to keep them safe, their universe will be torn asunder, and that it will never be fully repaired, not even five seasons later.

I don’t mean this to be as utterly depressing as it sounds. In fact, it’s somewhat liberating. Knowing you can’t control the universe, knowing that you will die, that your children will die, that these are the most certain of certainties in our world means that we shouldn’t worry about them, that we should care instead about the moments we have together, however short and uncertain they may be. My daughters could be killed at school next week—or they might not. As likely as the calamities may seem, the lack of calamity is probably just as likely, maybe even more likely. We could all just go on and on, living happy, boring lives, and dying slightly less happy, but equally boring deaths, for generation after generation. So go, eat, drink, be merry, listen to the Flaming Lips, and as President Obama said yesterday, “Hug your children tighter tonight.” And every night.