In 2004 when I was in grad school, I took a course called “Marginal Literature in Latin America” that studied representations of marginalized people—indigenous tribes, slaves, women, the poor, children—in Latin American literature. One of the books we read was The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, set in Haiti during the slave rebellion and the years following as its people struggled to establish a new nation.

I wrote my final paper for the class about the book, on the heels of more terrible news out of Haiti. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had just been forced out of office under threat of an armed rebellion, and President Bush was sending American Marines to Haiti as peacekeepers. My paper was about Carpentier’s portrayal of history and revolution in The Kingdom, and how he used the techniques of magical realism to teach the importance of constant struggle in the face of the nation’s cycle of tragedy.

Going back and reading it nearly six years later, it’s actually rather apt given the terrible things happening there right now. In my money quote from the novel to wrap up the paper, Carpentier wrote about how man can never escape his worldly troubles:

… a man never knows for whom he suffers and hopes. He suffers and hopes and toils for people he will never know, and who, in turn, will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either, for man always seeks happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him. But man’s greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is. In laying duties upon himself.

Of course for Haitians now, wanting to be better simply means finding food, water, and shelter. They don’t need any more lessons about struggle. But that can be a valuable lesson for those of us who want to help them, by giving what you can from that which has been meted out to you.

If you’re looking to learn more about Haiti, I highly recommend The Kingdom of This World, along with The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James, another book about the rebellion I referenced in the paper. And for what it’s worth, here’s my six-year-old paper about the whole thing:

Revolution and The Representation of History in The Kingdom of This World (PDF)

I kept up with the Pacers after I moved to Chicago, even though I still had a soft spot for the Bulls like every other kid who grew up in the Michael Jordan era. You can’t just abandon your team because you move to a new city, close proximity to the United Center or not. But after Ron Artest charged into the crowd in Detroit during a Pacers-Pistons game in 2004 and started the brawl of all sports brawls, I gave up on the NBA. It wasn’t just a scared white man protest of “thugs” taking over the grand old game of John Wooden and Larry Bird. Reggie was gone, the brawl had ruined what had been a promising season for the Pacers, and Artest made me embarrassed to be a fan of my favorite team. Just like it’s hard to start dating again after a bad breakup, it’s hard to keep loving a game when you don’t recognize your favorite team anymore.

In the past few years, I’ve slowly returned to the NBA. I covered the Bulls for Chicago Sports Weekly and even attended their media day in 2007. After standing next to a larger-than-life character like Joakim Noah you can’t help but follow along a little more closely, and Hoosier boy that am, I’m required to enjoy all types of basketball as a birthright. So I’ve been paying more attention to the NBA, not necessarily pulling for the Pacers or Bulls or any other team, but just being a general fan of the game. It’s better that my enjoyment of the league isn’t tied to the fortunes of one team like it is with baseball and football. Once the Cardinals and Colts lose, I’m ruined for the rest of the playoffs. But with the NBA, I just enjoy watching guys like Noah play ball.

We took Carter to his first Bulls game last week. The played the Sacramento Kings, ironically, both former teams of Ron Artest. Carter was as excited as, well, a little boy at his first basketball game. We bought him a T-shirt, ate ice cream, and oohed and aahed at the Bulls’ Jordan-era, theatrical player introductions. The Bulls put on a show in the first half, going up 67-43 at the break and eventually stretching that to a 35-point lead in the third quarter.

The team runs a promotion where every fan gets a free Big Mac at an area McDonald’s if they score 100 points in a game, and I explained to Carter at halftime how it was a sure thing. “They only have to score half as many points as they already have,” I told him. “We’re winning a free Big Mac for sure.”

The Kings had better ideas, and eventually overcame that enormous deficit to stun the Bulls, the second biggest comeback in league history. Carter was as upset as the rest of the crowd as they booed every Bulls turnover, every bad shot by Derrick Rose, and every Sacramento bucket. I suspected he was just imitating their exasperation, groaning and shouting, “Oh no,” but as the game drew to a close he burst into tears.

Debbie and I reassured him that it was okay, you can’t win every game. “I know that,” he said, wiping his nose, “But I really wanted to win a big hamburger.” The Bulls finished with just 98 points, one basket short of our free Big Mac.

I think he understood the part about not always winning, but I suppose the game lets you down in many ways. A Big Mac would have tasted really good after a game like that. We promised to take him back sometime when the Bulls could score 100, but at this point in their 11-17 season and a coaching change looming, I don’t know when that will happen again.

Winter finally released its grip from Chicago this week, giving me the occassion to peel the fleece lining out of my heavy coat to convert it into a spring jacket. This uncovered a hidden pocket inside the lapel of the outer shell, inside which I found the remains of the ticket stub from a Chicago Cubs game against the Milwaukee Brewers at Wrigley Field on April 29, 2006. It was torn in four places: one, along the perforated line that the ushers rip when you enter the ballpark, and three less exact gashes through the top half that looked like they were caused by absent-minded handling or the trauma of several spin cycles.

It was a Saturday afternoon game, and a real circus apparently. The Brewers won 16-2 on the strength of six home runs, including two from their stout first baseman, Prince Fielder. A memorable game, to judge by the box score, except I don’t remember a thing about it. As a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, the Cubs’ biggest rival, I certainly would have enjoyed the spectacle of the Brewers running up the score. In my mind, I can recreate the crowd’s reaction after each home run, the boos and the catcalls after the Cubs’ starting pitcher Glendon Rusch was pulled in the third inning. But it’s all conjecture, pieced together from other experiences at Wrigley Field that I do recall.

There was a time in my life where such a lapse in memory could have been easily explained, when a Saturday afternoon at the ballpark would have meant drinking so much beer that I blacked out and couldn’t remember the train ride home, let alone specifics of the game. But I know for a fact that I wasn’t drinking that day, because in April of 2006 I was trying to mend my ways and hadn’t taken a drink in over a month. The irresponsibility of hanging on to youth for too long couldn’t explain this omission.

Since I found the ticket stub in that secret pocket, it suggests that I also wore my jacket that day in its current configuration for a typical Chicago April: not too cold, but none too warm either. Maybe that’s it. The weather was unremarkable. I didn’t freeze, as so often happens during the early season at Wrigley when the cold winds blow in from Lake Michigan, nor did I bask in the sunshine and gawk at the young women who flock to Cubs games to flirt with the young (and like the erstwhile author, drunk) men.

But bland weather can’t explain forgetting such an impressive offensive show either, one that surely would have appealed to my sense of schadenfreude toward the Cubs. I’ve been to hundreds of games, and I accept that some of them may have blended together. But I’m a baseball fan, obesessive and statistically-minded by definition. I remember that Andy Van Slyke hit a home run and Bruce Sutter got the save against the Dodgers in the first Cardinals game I ever attended in 1984. I remember seeing Bo Jackson hit a ball 420 feet to centerfield against the Yankees in Kansas City in 1990. I should remember 16 runs on 16 hits and six home runs from three years ago. This is troubling.

When my son was about three years old, I found a forgotten disposable camera in the bottom of his diaper bag. The roll of film was spent, and not knowing what images it held, I developed it for fun. The resulting pictures were bad–grainy, fingertips in the frame, out of focus. Some of them looked like my son had taken them himself. But upon seeing them, I remembered the scenes they showed instantly: a night at my in-laws’ cabin in Michigan, a weekday lunch at the Goose Island Brewery. These memories weren’t at the forefront of my mind, but the appearance of a token that had also been there, those grainy snapshots from goofing around with a cheap camera, made them fresh again.

I once found an SD memory card, one of those postage stamp-sized chips used in digital cameras, on the sidewalk near my house. I picked it up out of sheer curiosity, figuring that if it was in good shape I could reformat it and use it myself. I put it in my computer to browse the contents, and found it filled with someone else’s photos–vacation photos, judging by the scenery, from somewhere in Europe. A young couple smiled at me over glasses of wine at dinner. The woman posed by an entrance to a ruined, brown castle. The man put his arm around her in front of a long shot of a narrow, medieval street. Based on my own travels, I could reconstruct the scenes in the photos and hear the castle tour guide’s stilted, received pronunication. I could feel the heavy Euro coins in my pocket as I fished for a tip for the waiter. But those memories weren’t mine, they were those of the mystery people in the photos. I took the memory card out of my comptuer, feeling guilty that I had snooped on their vacation.

The next day, I taped a couple flyers with my cell phone number to the light poles along the sidewalk where I found the card, promising its safe return. Whoever those people were in the photos, touring castles and enjoying their wine, surely would want it back, not for the value of the cheap memory card, but for the actual memories it held. Maybe they’d been visiting friends in my neighborhood and realized they’d dropped it on that very sidewalk. They’d be so thankful I thought to rescue it for them.

But I never got a call, and took the flyers down after a week. Maybe they didn’t realize the card was lost until too late, when they’d been too many places in between to narrow it down to one particular spot in all of Chicago. Or maybe they had already copied the photos to a hard drive, and my good deed was all for naught. But what if they did lose those pictures for good, stuck on the memory card where I tossed it into a box of other comptuer detritus? I didn’t have the heart to delete the photos and reuse the card. They weren’t mine to delete. Do the memories of their trip fade without those visual reminders, the same way my memories of that rowdy day at Wrigley Field disappeared too?

I should hope not. I prefer to think that baseball game has decayed into the hieroglyphics of a box score because of the banality of one more baseball game among the hundreds of others I’ve witnessed, no matter how many runs were scored. Surely, those travelers could relive that trip in their mind’s eye, with or without pictures. But for those everyday images–the grin on my son’s face as he contemplated a plate of french fries, or the way my dog’s tongue hung out as he stared into the camera at the cabin–I’m glad for that disposable camera and the pleasure of discovering memories once lost.

“I’m not too good at this, so tell me if I’m being too rough.” Such a comment, coming out of the mouth of a rookie shoe clerk fitting a pair of loafers or a novice tailor tugging on the lapels of a jacket, might pass unnoticed. Their imprecision, while momentarily annoying, would cause no lasting injury, for the things they are jostling with rough hands aren’t attached to you, after all. But put that statement on the lips of a woman holding your genitals and wielding an electric razor, and it takes on quite a bit more significance.

I heard it while I was laying on my back in a procedure room in Northwestern Hospital, naked from the waist down except for my socks, waiting to get a vasectomy. Desiree, the young, attractive, African-American medical assistant who would be helping the urologist that day, was already mowing away at my crotch with a beige set of clippers when she confessed her inexperience. The handout the urologist gave me during my initial appointment suggested that I shave myself the morning of the procedure to save time, but a new job and the two kids who led me to this state of affairs left little time for special grooming that day. So now Desiree was doing things to me that some men would pay good money for a woman like her to do.

Considering what was about to happen after she was finished, it was an odd way to think about it. But up to the point where she admitted that she may well make a few starter incisions for the doctor, the whole experience had the feeling of something kinky: a pretty woman greets you, escorts you back to a private room, then tells you to lay down, relax, and take your pants off. The very fact that such an image even crossed my mind at that moment probably explains why I needed to be there in the first place.

I actually knew long ago that I’d get a vasectomy someday, before my wife and I started trying to have children in the first place. She and I had agreed from the beginning of our marriage that we only wanted two children, a decision affirmed by the chaos following the arrival of our second last fall. But she actually had the first opportunity to opt out of childbearing status permanently, moments after our daughter was born via C-section. The obstetrician, as an afterthought, hollered up over the privacy screen, “Hey, do you want us to tie your tubes while we’re in here?” My wife, exhausted after labor and the trauma of undergoing major surgery while fully conscious, gamely answered, “I don’t think I can answer that right now, thanks.”

Perhaps a little advance planning might have done us some good in that case, but the very fact that her option for permanent birth control required being flayed open like a gutted fish underscored the practicality of me taking one for the team. A vasectomy is a minor procedure compared to a woman getting her tubes tied: just a few snips, a jockstrap stuffed with ice packs, and you’re on your way. And despite the fear and instinctual cupping it might induce among men, it’s also a far less expensive alternative than hassling with condoms or birth control pills in perpetuity, or worse yet, having another child.

Apparently, I’m not alone in factoring in that last argument. Amidst the glut of news articles about what people are doing to save money during the recession, I came across pieces from CNN and the New York Times about how the number of vasectomies has risen since this fall. More men are worried about money and their jobs, more men are deciding that they can’t afford another kid, and more men are deciding to do something about it before they lose their health coverage.

I wasn’t alone in spirit, lying exposed on that table, but the impression I got from those articles was that those other men were forced into the decision by the bad economy. It wasn’t a choice they would have made in better times, whereas I decided to do it as if it were a natural milestone in a man’s life. Get married, procreate, get neutered. I’m not much better off than my dog, though at least I got to keep my testicles to remind me of the good old days.

I felt like I should be more nostalgic about my balls, like I shouldn’t give up the ability to have children so willingly. The pre-op literature emphasized that while vascectomies technically can be reversed it’s not a sure thing, so men should consider this a permanent decision, and when I Googled “vasectomy,” the first related search it suggested was “vasectomy reversal.” Enough men either regret their decision, or worry that they will regret their decision, to make even Google nudge you and say, “You really want to do this, man?”

Perhaps I would have been more torn about it all if it had been my wife’s idea, but I can’t remember ever having a conversation about what we would do once we had our matching set of kids. I just offered up the possibility because it seemed like the obvious thing to do, economically and out of simple fairness to her for bearing two children and suffering two C-sections. Her reaction: “Really? Wow, okay.” If she had been behind it, maybe I would have resisted out of pure male defensiveness about my loins. “Leave my boys alone, woman!” I would have cried. But despite being a sports-watching, former beer-guzzling frat boy, I’ve never been much of a red-meat macho man. My balls had served their purpose well, and now it was time for them to retire.

But maybe on a deeper level I wasn’t attached to them because I’d been able to experience fatherhood more than just providing the right chromosomes at the right time. Of course all good fathers are attached to their children beyond just supplying the DNA, but spending four years at home with my son and the first five months with my daughter made the ability to have more children someday, whether it would be wielded or not, less important. My manhood wasn’t tied to me solely through the instrument of creation. It was tied to my ability to shape those that I’d already created.

The procedure itself, after the awkward prep work, was “unpleasant,” as I later described it to my wife. I didn’t feel any outright pain, but lots of prodding and tugging and pulling accompanied by the stomach-churning, rolling ache that comes with a nice, sharp ground ball to the crotch. On the whole though, I’ve had far worse experiences at the dentist, including a harrowing gum-graft procedure that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.

As he worked, the doctor kept up a constant patter of icebreaker lines:

“How about that warm weather? Spring in Chicago though, it’ll probably snow next week.”

“Did you see the price of cars lately? Looks like you can get some pretty good deals out there.”

“Is this music okay? We can change it if you like.” (It was classic rock, not my favorite, but I demurred. I’ll never hear “Stairway to Heaven the same way again though).

He didn’t seem to even process my terse, clenched-teeth replies. He was robotic and methodical, the questions coming out unconsciously, surely having practiced them hundreds of times. He assured me nothing was wrong each of the three times his pager went off, or when he cauterized the vas deferens and a burning smell filled the air. “Just a little pinch here,” was his standard warning. Clearly he had decided the best way to get through these things was to be as businesslike as possible. Given the scare Desiree had given me while she and I got acquainted, I was thankful for this nothing-personal approach.

When he was finished, he helped me put on a jockstrap and stuff it full of gauze to support my wounded boys. He asked if anyone was waiting for me outside. I said, yes, my wife was, then I offered a weak joke. “The things I do for her, huh?” For a second, he broke character and said, “Well, you’re being a good husband.”

After that, I waddled out to meet my wife, where she and the doctor had a discussion about my scrotum within earshot of half the waiting room. We went home, I took four Tylenol and stuffed two icepacks down my pants. By sheer coincidence, I had scheduled my vasectomy during the opening round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. I sat on the couch the rest of the weekend, eating junk food and watching sports like a manly man, thinking about what a good husband I was.

This essay was also featured at CellStories on December 7, 2009

In a former life, before I went back to my old job, before I was a stay-at-home dad, before my old job was just my job, I was a consultant. This involved a lot of travel, the kind of fly out Sunday, fly home Friday travel eagerly tolerated by recent college grads who see it as a sign of prestige, but the kind of travel that slowly grinds you down until all the airports feel the same, no one concourse or food court or rental car counter in Chicago different from another in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

My longest project as a consultant was in Melbourne, Florida, on the unloved Atlantic coast of the state, distinguished only by its proximity to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral and its easy access to half a dozen full-nudity strip joints in Cocoa Beach. Getting to Melbourne meant flying to Orlando then renting a car and driving an hour to the coast through the bland marshland of central Florida. After one particularly grueling Sunday evening of flight delays and lost luggage, my team gathered in a group bitch session the next day at work. As a way of bucking up the team, my manager (who also happens to be my manager at my new/old job, long story) told a tale about a hunter who was hurt and lost in the hinterlands of Canada, and was forced to cut open the carcass of the elk he had just killed and sleep inside, amidst its still warm entrails, to avoid freezing to death (possibly apocryphal, since this is exactly like when Han Solo cut open a ton-ton and stuffed Luke Skywalker inside for the same reason in The Empire Strikes Back). “As bad as that trip was last night,” he explained, “At least you’re not sleeping in an elk.”

He was right. Not much could compare to sleeping inside an elk carcass, and it made our travel headaches seem trivial. The story became an instant mantra for our team, repeated after every delayed flight or missed deadline. Later that summer, we embellished that story after reading a news article about the hoof and mouth disease that was currently ravaging the livestock herds of Great Britain. Some poor slaughterhouse worker contracted the disease when a bloated, rotting sheep carcass exploded nearby and he accidentally ingested some of the remains. “At least we’re not sucking on sheep entrails,” went the saying, which we repeated with more glee than the elk version, even as the project dragged on and either of those alternatives started to seem less and less gruesome by comparison.

The weather was atrocious this Thursday in Chicago–rainy, foggy, temperatures in the 40s, like the beginnings of spring deciding to lay back down after the hangover from a long winter made things spin a little too much. I took the picture above outside my office building that morning. The men in question were window washers, and as I peered up the side of the green glass building to follow the ropes dangling from the 12th floor, I thought, “Man, I hope those guys don’t have to wash windows today.”

I’ve done a lot of complaining about the circumstances that find me working inside that building again, but no matter the compromises that resulted in my being there, I’d still rather be inside. I’m sure a certain kind of person could find a certain kind of peace hanging from a rope, 12 stories in the air, methodically washing pane after pane of glass with the swish and squeak of a sponge and a squeegee, but not me. When I start longing for my former life at home, getting heartsick about what could have been, I always have a watchword for (re)gaining perspective. At least I’m not sleeping in an elk. At least I’m not washing windows in the rain.

When I decided to quit my IT job four years ago to stay home with my son Carter, and then later my daughter Sadie, I knew I’d go back to work someday, just not when. My wife, Debbie, was building a successful business as a realtor, enough so that she could support the family on her own, and I was bored and frustrated with my job in corporate America. The choice was obvious. Instead of hiring a nanny, I would take care of the kids, and when I didn’t need to be at home anymore, I would go back to work.

I assumed this would happen when both kids were off to school full-time. The summer after I first started staying home, I went to a stay-at-home-dad’s convention at a local community college. The group organized itself on the internet, of course. Dads from all over the country convened at the suburban campus of low-slung, institutional modernist brick buildings to share war stories of diaper explosions and temper tantrums. We listened to seminars by childcare experts on what a wonderful thing we were doing for our children. Mostly it seemed like an excuse for many of them to get away from their families and drink beer for a weekend, and while I skipped the social events, it was nice to meet other guys in my situation and hear some reaffirming words about my new choice of vocation.

During one breakout session, the discussion leader, a founder of the group and veteran of 18 years of at-home parenting (a full tour of duty through high school graduation), claimed that once kids start school, they need you at home even more. “You can’t go back to work then,” he said. “What if one of them gets sick? Who’s going to pick them up from school and help them with their homework?”

I left that day thinking that guy was full of shit. He probably stayed at home less out of concern for his kids than from of an allergy to work. Of course you can go back to work when your kids go to school. What are you going to do for eight hours a day when they’re gone?

By that time though, just a few months into it, I’d found plenty of things to do during the day, especially when Carter was napping. I read and I wrote. I blogged and fooled around online. I worked out and ran errands, and I certainly wouldn’t have minded more time for any of those. Maybe that grizzled old dad wasn’t lazy. He’d just stumbled onto something: staying at home is a hell of a deal if you can get past those first few, maddening, pre-kindergarten years.

What my wife Debbie and I have realized though, is that those past four years were probably too good to be true. We took advantage of an economy that helped Debbie’s business grow beyond anything we imagined when we set up this arrangement. For a while we assumed we would be able to pull it off through both kids, but the catastrophic changes to the economy over the last half of the year made us nervous about having our eggs in one basket, especially that particular basket. One evening this December, after Debbie lost a deal because a buyer couldn’t get a loan, she and I looked at each other and knew. I had to go back to work sooner than planned.

*****

I say that I assumed I would go back to work one day, but I’m not sure I ever knew what kind of job I wanted when I did. I left my career in IT out of protest against that line of work altogether, not just because I wanted to raise my children. I worked for just six years after college as a software designer, but already grew disillusioned with what I saw as the monotony and emptiness of corporate life. I promised never to work there again, and left thinking that I could turn our family decision into a career change as well. I thought I deserved something to “fulfill” me, whatever that means, and started on a new path of writing and graduate school that led to what you see on this website today.

Of course, my new diaper-clad bosses had something to say about how quickly that new career progressed, and by the time we realized I needed to go back to work this winter, I faced a bleak job market with a four year gap on my resume. I applied to writing and editing jobs, trying to massage my peripatetic background to look like that of a seasoned journalist’s, but I was met with deafening indifference. Those jobs are hard to come by in the best of times, and no one was going to take a chance on a career-switcher like me now.

The first person I called when I started looking for work was my manager from my old job. I had taken care to stay in touch with him, kept the bridge intact for this very reason. He promised that after the new year, his team would have an opening, and I carried this in my back pocket while I flailed around for more appealing work. But as my imagined options dwindled, I finally resolved that I’d be returning to my old career. The job did open up, and four years after I had walked out of my job for what I thought was for good, I walked back into the same company, the same building, and the same team to work with many of the same people. Four years of thinking I had left that life behind to make a new one were over. I was back where I started.

*****

We visited my parents over the holidays. They still live in the same house where I grew up. They have renovated the place a little, changed the furniture in my old bedroom to turn it into a guest room for instance, but certain things can’t change. I had spent the week puttering around the house, obsessing about my job search, repeatedly checking my email to see if anyone had responded to my resume. As we packed up to leave at the end of our visit, I walked back through the house to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind, a stray toy or a forgotten scarf in a closet. Everyone else was outside, loading up the car. The house was quiet, and as I moved from room to room, I was overcome by the melancholy that had been hovering over my shoulder ever since I realized I’d have to go back to work. The sound of my shoes scuffing on the carpet, the floorboard creaking underneath as I stepped into my old bedroom, the way the sun cast its grey winter light on my view of the street through the window all reminded me of living there as a kid. Things were simple then, and at that moment as an adult, my life felt more complicated than ever. I wanted it to be simple again. I hurried back outside before I started to cry.

Adjusting to the new/old routine of work hasn’t been the hard part. When I think about my job four years ago, the routine parts—like walking to work, stopping for coffee, taking long lunches to read or study for grad school—feel like they happened yesterday. But the specifics about work—the meetings, the project milestones, the day I told my manager I was leaving—all feel very distant. I’d long since stopped caring about those things or thinking of myself as someone who does, even before I left.

The hardest part has been learning to think of myself as a different kind of person, because this time bailing out isn’t an option. I need to become the best worker I can, put my energy into being the best at what I do, because I’m in this indefinitely. I don’t have the energy to switch careers again. At one point in my life, with just one child and money to spare, it was feasible to try starting a new life, but now with a bigger family, bigger bills, and more responsibility, I need to accept that certain doors have closed. There was a time when I could have become that journalist or that editor, but that time has passed. It’s time to live with the choices I have made.

*****

After I agreed to take back my old job, I had two last weeks at home before I could start. A couple of those days, Carter stayed home from school with a fever. This would have been frustrating before, but sentimental mess that I am right now, it was fine by me. I tried to fill every moment with Carter and Sadie with significance, thinking about how it was going to be my last as a stay-at-home parent.

One afternoon I poked my head in the room to check on him while he was napping. He likes to listen to music as he goes to sleep, and a song called “Riding with No Hands” by a kids’ musician named Ralph Covert was playing. Most of Covert’s music is silly stuff about dinosaurs and puppy dogs, but this song was clearly geared toward parents, a sappy acoustic guitar ballad about growing up and learning to do big kid things. This time I did start crying.

Through all this sadness and stress and worry, I’ve been troubled about why I’m so upset about going back to work in the first place. How incredibly selfish of me to complain that I have to work, that I have to get a job to support my family when so many people are losing jobs they desperately want to keep. How incredibly shortsighted of me to claim sadness when I got to stay home to raise my son and enjoy the first few months of my daughter’s life. How spectacularly ungrateful of me to feel like I settled for a high-paying job at a good company within walking distance of my house.

Some friends who have been kind enough to listen say there’s nothing wrong with searching for a calling, but I take heart that I’m mature enough now to ask myself that question. When I was applying for jobs, I thought the hardest thing to explain to some interviewer would be how stay-at-home parenting taught me more about myself. I’m more mature now. After four years of trying to redefine myself through my work, I understand that the work is just a means to an end.

Four years is the longest I’ve done anything since I was in college. That’s troubling from a career perspective, but my sadness isn’t coming from changing jobs or careers again. This time it’s about the end of being a certain kind of person. Much of what I felt watching Carter sleep and listening to that song comes from simply watching him grow older, regardless of what I do for a living. Letting him go to preschool full-time was a tough transition too, one that I haven’t fully appreciated until now because it happened at the same time Sadie was born. That time of my life with him is over, no matter how I spend my days, and now I’m sad that I won’t get to do the same thing with Sadie.

I want to be okay with this. I need to be okay with this, because I have no other choice. But I also need to find a way to retain some of that person I’ve been for the past four years with the new person that I have to be now. I understand this choice and accept it on a practical level, but I can’t process it emotionally. I’m ending one of the happiest experiences of my life to go back to the scene of what had been one of the most frustrating.

I know this time will be better. I have a better attitude about work and responsibility in general. Having children will do that to you. I have every reason to believe going back to work is the right thing to do, but after being burned and burned out once before, I’m still apprehensive. I don’t have to be happy about this right away, and for now I’m okay with that.

*****

During my first week back, I was overwhelmed by the memories of place again. I ate my lunch in a cafeteria on the 8th floor of the office building, next to a bank of windows overlooking the south branch of the Chicago River. As the tables filled up, I listened to the sounds of other employees fixing their meals in the cantina—the beeping of a microwave timer, the slam of the refrigerator door—and I was reminded of when I worked there before. I remembered how I used to take long lunch breaks in that same spot, hiding from work, plotting my escape. I felt like I was going to cry again, and I needed to get out of there. But this time, I finished my lunch, went back to my desk, and went back to work.

On the corner of Jefferson and Polk, South Loop, Chicago

I’m guessing that I attended the only party for Barack Obama’s inauguration where someone came out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles. I watched the ceremony at my son Carter’s preschool yesterday. The group of three- and four-year-olds were amazingly patient and sat dutifully through most of the proceedings, but as the ceremony wore on, they started to get restless. During the new President’s acceptance speech, one little boy got up to use the restroom, and then hobbled back into the room to ask for help when he was finished, unconcerned that he was naked from the waist down.

I’m not sure how much the kids understood about what was happening on the TV, made obvious by the presence of that shameless little boy. One girl shouted, “That’s Jesus!” as the network showed a picture of the Statue of Liberty, and the resounding response to Joe Biden hugging his sons after he was sworn in was, “Ew, they’re hugging and kissing.” But they all knew the new President. “The girl is Michelle Obama and the boy is Barack Obama,” one boy explained to a friend. Carter was excited about the inauguration mainly because it meant his mom and I would be coming to his school for a party. I think by now he understands the concept of President as something like the country’s daddy.

The best part of this election is that someday I’ll have to explain to Carter and his sister Sadie why it was historic retroactively, because hey won’t grow up in a world where the idea of a black President seems absurd. Living in a cosmopolitan city, they’re already light years ahead of their parents anyway. I grew up in an all-white small town in Indiana, and my wife came from a fairly homogenous North Shore suburb of Chicago. The preschool where we watched Barack Obama take the oath of office is the prime example of how different their perspective will be. Carter is one of the few white faces in a class filled with African American, Latino, and Asian kids, and in his eyes, nothing was particularly special about the face on TV other than that he was the guy Mommy and Daddy wanted to win.

I don’t claim any personal knowledge of racism. I grew up around a passive aggressive form of bigotry, kids in school or co-workers at summer jobs who casually tossed around the N-word but didn’t have the guts to actually utter it in front of a black person. The most overt racism I ever witnessed personally was when someone shouted it from a moving car at the one black kid on my American Legion baseball team. I never doubted that the stereotypes were there in my small-town world, but it just wasn’t part of my daily experience, mostly because I didn’t grow up around many African-Americans on which it could be inflicted.

I want to say that my kids will grow up in a world where race won’t matter, but I’m not that naive. Around the time of the election, Carter started talking about how he and one of his white friends from school were “peach-colored,” while others were brown. My heart sank until I realized the teachers merely had been doling out crayons so the kids could color self-portraits with the right skin tone. Barack Obama’s election doesn’t end racism or even come close to settling the score for centuries of discrimination, and Carter and Sadie won’t grow up in a world devoid of race. Despite the diversity of Carter’s classroom, Chicago is still one of the country’s most segregated cities, and will continue to be for the foreseeble future. Race will always be an issue in their world, but maybe now it can start to become mostly a matter of what crayon you use to draw a picture of yourself.

The kids in Carter’s class broke into spontaneous applause yesterday whenever the crowd in Washington cheered, oblivious to one of the teachers, a middle-aged African American woman, handing out Kleenex to the rest of the adults in the room. I’m starting a new full-time job next week after staying home with him for nearly four years, and yesterday was my last chance to spend much time at school with him during the day. If I wasn’t going to be in Washington for the inauguration, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be.

Later at home, I watched the news with Carter. He looked at a video of Obama’s speech, and said, “You need a tie and microphone to be President.” He decided he wanted to dress like the President, so I got one of my ties and put it around his neck. He ran around holding a Lightning McQueen flashlight as a microphone, making pronouncements about his first day in office, then, in his haste to get into the bathroom, pulled down his pants and accidentally peed all over the back of the tie. My day was bookended by two preschoolers dropping trou, not really the way I wanted to remember it. But on a day when we learned that anyone can be President, maybe one of those two little exhibitionists can too. All you need is a tie and a microphone.

The Museum of Science and Industry was crowded on January 2nd. The day after the New Year fell on a Friday, so any adult with a choice had taken the day off, plus the schools were still out on holiday break. But the museum exhibits are dispersed widely enough that the mob wasn’t claustrophobic, and my almost four-year-old son Carter and I had a nice time. We toured the U-505 submarine, Carter gawked at the Great Train Story model train exhibit, and we each posed for pictures in a fake Apollo space suit. We shared a snack in the cafeteria, and he didn’t even complain when I didn’t buy him a toy at the gift shop. I judged the trip a success. Then we tried to leave.

The crowd control engineers who designed the museum proper must have neglected the underground parking garage. By the time we reached our car, much of the crowd had decided to leave too, and a line of cars snaked down the aisles from the exit ramps two floors above us. One good samaritan waited to let us back out and join the parade, then we waited.

When I first decided to stay home with Carter, my wife Debbie and I joked that he would never learn how to talk because I’m such a quiet person. But now he chatters away like he’s trying to make up for my 32 years of word deficits, and it’s only gotten worse since he started preschool. Now, instead of worrying that we’ll have to communicate with him through grunts and hand signals, we think he’s going to have a career as a broadcast announcer who moonlights as a lawyer and auctioneer on the side. After viewing exhibits on the solar system and the mechanics of submarine warfare, I had already fielded more difficult questions than Rod Blagojevich at a press conference. But pack that inquisitiveness into a compact car sitting at a dead stop for 45 minutes in a parking garage, and that’s a recipe for frustration.

Carter had been on holiday break from preschool for two full weeks, since both Christmas and New Year’s fell on Thursdays, making for a natural, extra-long break at the end of the calendar year. The first week went by quickly, as we visited my sister in Indianapolis for Christmas and my parents in southern Indiana for a few days after that. But this second week has been interminable.

In my nearly four years of staying at home with him, I’ve marveled at my patience, developed in those endless days of arguing with a toddler about everything from why he can’t have a popsicle for lunch to the science of banana peel decomposition. I can literally squat on my knees for 15 minutes, holding out a pair of pants and waiting for him to get dressed, while he runs around in his underwear, shrieking “Poopy!” at the top of his lungs. Yelling and demanding obedience doesn’t work; it’s best to wait it out. But Carter started full-time preschool this fall, and I’ve learned that patience must be practiced rigorously, like a Zen monk, if I’m expected to possess a semblance of it for more than an hour or so each day.

This week I’ve struggled to find ways to entertain him without completely losing my cool, and believe me, it’s been misplaced more than once. I’m at a loss how quickly that parental muscle atrophied; I don’t know how I ever managed before he started school. Granted, much of it has to do with the cold weather. My go-to solution when the temperature is above 50 degrees is to spend the afternoon at the park. But I don’t remember the days being this exasperating last year, when he had a similar, if not so long, break. I can only chalk it up the honeymoon that his absence at school has given me.

Debbie and I have tried everything, from timeouts to confiscating toys to the occasional, good old fashioned spanking, none of which do much good. Our biggest success has been recreating the stoplight, smiley-face/sad-face sign that his teachers use at school. Each one of the kids has a clothespin with their name written on it. If they’re good, it stays on green; starting to act up, yellow; the final straw, red. We hung one on a doorknob near the kitchen with a chip clip to indicate his status, and he’s responded accordingly. He gets upset and repentant when we move his clip down the scale, but it’s hard to gauge the severity of what constitutes a yellow or red offense, and we’ve already diminished the effectiveness of the nuclear option with overuse.

The problem with Carter of course, aside from the usual preschooler insanity, is that he has a new baby sister, Sadie, who was born in September. He wants our attention, and no form of corporal punishment or cutesy signs are going to fix that. When we’re trying to explain the arcane reasons for why he’s move from yellow to red, he’s getting what he wants. He doesn’t care about the volume or tone of our voices, which explains why I was taking such care to explain everything I could at the museum. I felt bad for losing my patience with him so much during the week, and I owed him some undivided daddy time.

I did my best with all his questions about planets and trains and airplanes, but things started to go off the rails in the submarine exhibit. The U-505 is a German U-boat that the U.S. Navy captured during World War II. This led to all kinds of unanswerable questions about war and death and life jackets and torpedos. Carter was particularly concerned with a display that showed two bloodied American sailors floating on a piece of driftwood after their ship had been destroyed by the sub.

“Why are those men on that piece of wood?” he asked.

“Because their boat sank,” I said. “They grabbed on so they don’t have to swim.”

“But why do they have blood on their faces? Why didn’t they put on Band-aids?”

“Well, they didn’t really have time. Their boat sank and they had to get out.”

You can imagine the rest. This kept up off and on into the long wait in the parking garage, until our attention turned to the music I was playing on the stereo. As I fiddled with my iPod, he asked for his favorite band, the Beatles, which of course I didn’t have loaded. This led to another discussion about why the Beatles aren’t recording music anymore, during which I unfortunately told him that John and George were dead.

“Don’t say that!” he wailed. “They’re not dead, we still play the Beatles on my CD player!”

I tried to explain to him how we could still listen to recorded music even after a singer dies, but this only made it worse. The conversation went downhill as I grew increasingly frustrated with the stalled traffic, and ended with me shouting, “THERE ARE NO MORE BEATLES BECAUSE TWO OF THEM ARE DEAD!”

Way to go, Dad. As terrible as I felt though, the outburst didn’t seem to make an impression. When we got home, he told Debbie, “Daddy bought me some Cheetos and I took a picture in the astronaut suit!” and the next day, he treated us to a karaoke concert of the Beatles greatest hits album, hopping around on his bed, sans pants. Science and industry; submarines and war; death and the Beatles and no pants. This holiday break has been a long and winding road.

I.

To think, a mere two weeks ago I was happily adjusting to a new/old routine, reviewing the proper cleaning and field assembly of a Dr. Brown’s bottle like an infantryman with his rifle, and relearning the subtle difference in pitch between the “I’m hungry” screech and the “I’m dirty” wail. It was a comforting return to the days when all problems had a tangible solution–a little formula here, a little wipe there–instead of the Alice in Wonderland insanity of dealing with a manic-depressive schizophrenic, otherwise known as a normal three-and-a-half-year-old.

I should know by now from these last three years that nothing ever goes as planned, and that the Sadie Revolution wouldn’t go as expected either. Now that things have calmed down after her arrival, I had intended to spend the first few weeks knocking off various chores and projects shoved onto the back burner during all the excitement. But Carter managed to pick up a stomach bug along the way, which, long story short, ended up with me cleaning up copious amounts of vomit from his bed Monday night. I should also know better, especially after reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, an account of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London that sparked our modern understanding of how disease spreads, that by doing so, I had doomed myself to the same fate.

The bug laid in wait until the next night, multiplying its strength like a hurricane bearing down on a poor Gulf Coast community. Then, as I watched Simon Baker hustling his wiles on the premiere of “The Mentalist” on CBS, I said, “Boy, that lasagna isn’t going down well.” I’ll spare the gory details, but imagine taking a water balloon and squeezing it in the middle until it bursts at both ends. That was my body, suffering from a list of symptoms that makes one of those TV drug ad disclaimers seem concise. Forget routines, I could barely lift my cramping, nauseated body out of bed to wring itself out again and again, let alone care for anyone else. Once again, my best laid plans had ended up down the rabbit hole.

II.

It’s fitting that the same week my insides liquefied, the economy did the same. The similarities between the onset of my stomach flu and the impending collapse of the US financial system were uncanny: the initial shock and sudden upheaval, followed by wave after wave of bad news, followed by persistent nausea and dread.

Fortunately, I had a responsible adult around to take care of me. Debbie was downright heroic that first night, waking up with the baby, plying me with Gatorade and Tylenol, and getting up the next day to walk the dog and see Carter off to school. I couldn’t have asked any more of her; quick, decisive action borne out of love and an understanding of responsibility.

As I laid in bed the next day watching hours of cable news against my better judgment, I expected to see some adults taking the same kind of responsibility for the economy. But instead I watched House Republicans short-circuit the bailout deal to uphold their conservative ideological views, a scared, lame-duck president who could do nothing to convince them otherwise, and a presidential candidate playing reckless politics with a cheap stunt that left even the most seasoned Washington observers slack-jawed with disbelief. The queasiness from my stomach flu was simply amplified by watching such self-serving bungling.

III.

We use the word “flux” to describe situations that are changing. “The economy is in a state of flux,” one might say, generously. Ironically, the word flux used to describe the particularly gruesome symptoms of dysentery. In Alex Haley’s Roots, the “bloody flux” strikes the slave ship carrying Kunta Kinte to America, spreading to slaves and captors alike so viciously that one of the sailors has to man the ship while standing in a tub to catch his own mess.

My life has been in flux lately, though thankfully in the more modern sense of “continuous change.” Carter started full-time preschool. We had a new baby. I’m starting graduate school again in a week. And now my family’s livelihood in the real estate industry is threatened by collapsing credit markets. After last week, that word flux may be taking on more of its original connotation again.

IV.

Last Thursday morning, two days after I got sick, we feared Debbie had caught the bug too. She hustled up to bed, leaving me to perform the same single-handed family orchestration that she had the day before. As it turned out, she never reached the toilet-abusing depths that I did, but Carter didn’t know this when he headed off to school that morning.

On our walk to school, he started complaining that his toe hurt. He wanted me to carry him. It’s an old trick of his, and I said no. He persisted, and I became more frustrated. “What, do you want to just turn around and go back home?” I finally said.

“Yes!” he wailed, and burst into tears. I managed to calm him down and get him to class, but he broke down two more times on the way. Once at school, I finally understood the problem. “Are you worried about Mommy?” I said.

The waterworks started again, this time sobbing into my shoulder when I picked him up. “When’s Mommy going to feel better?” he said.

I’d forgotten that Carter’s life has been in flux too, even more so than mine. A new sister, a new school, a new routine, and now two days in a row, he had seen both of his parents fall ill and retreat to bed. He was afraid all the responsible adults were abandoning him too.

Carter with his new sister, Sadie, September 2008

Someone asked me the other day when I was going to write an official “reaction” to the recent birth of our daughter. The thought had occurred to me, but when I sat down to put my feelings into words, I knew I hadn’t had an original thought about her arrival. Sure, I’ve experienced the joy, pride, and anxiety that swaddles every six-pound, newborn cherub like bubble wrap in a UPS delivery, but having been through this once, I realize those feelings aren’t altogether interesting to anyone outside my family.

Since Sadie is our second child–Carter, our oldest, is now three and a half–the real impact of her debut can’t be drawn out with the questions I answered the first time, like, “Are you getting any sleep?” “Who’s been doing the cooking?” or “Has the baby peed on you yet?” (Answers this time around: “Sort of,” “No one,” and, “Yes, repeatedly.”) Instead, it’s in how she fits into the family routine. In that context, Sadie’s birth was a big deal, but not even close to causing the most drastic change in our lives that week.

Carter started full-time preschool the day after Sadie was born; all-day, five days a week. That seems like a lot for a three-year-old, but for a kid with enough energy to power a city block on a hot summer day, it’s just what the doctor ordered. Not only that, the school is a block away from our house, so I can walk him to school in the morning and be back at my desk before 9 a.m. No more public transit adventures to the north side for his old part-time school. No more arguing over the basic laws of nature when we take the dog for his lunchtime walk. And no more being embarrassed to open the windows when the weather is nice because Carter is the loudest kid in the Chicagoland area. The silence in our house, now that he’s gone for seven hours a day, is deafening. You might think a newborn makes a lot of noise, but the difference between a a well-fed, diapered, and swaddled infant and a three-year-old boy is about the same as listening to AM radio with Kleenex jammed in your ears versus standing next to the speakers at a Metallica concert.

I almost feel bad reveling in his absence like this, but I’ll get over it. I look at this milestone as a job well-done. I felt like I’d reached the end of my usefulness for him anyway, at least in the sense of keeping him entertained for eight to 10 hours a day. He’s already blossomed in his first two weeks of school: his vocabulary has increased, his attention span has shown marked improvement, and I’m seeing the beginnings of a legitimate sense of humor. The fact that they haven’t sent him home yet for biting or throwing scissors is proof that I didn’t create a social deviant. I deserve a break, even in a house once again perfumed by the scent of moldering diapers and sour milk.

Sadie was born four weeks early. It’s tempting to say this was perfect timing because of the overlap with Carter’s school, but I was holding out hope that she would stay in the oven to full-term so I could have a month of being truly, completely unemployed. The Interregnum, I was going to call it, a summer’s end between rulers where I answered to no one (between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., that is). Hopefully, it wouldn’t end with my head on a stick like Oliver Cromwell, a distinct possibility since I’d basically be sponging off a fully-pregnant lady. But the promise of lounging on the patio for hours with a book, or riding my bike to the lakefront at a moment’s notice, if only for a few weeks, was intoxicating.

The best laid plans land in a diaper pail, of course. It’s probably for the best; I don’t do well with boredom anyway. My impatience for Sadie to get here so we could move on with our new, all-American, two-kids-plus-dog family far outstripped my hopes of goofing off for a month. And I didn’t forget that in spite of losing a little sleep, the first few months with a newborn are surprisingly easy. She’s basically an adorable, animated plant that we water and clean every few hours, and with enough coffee, even the groggiest parent can manage that. It’s a deceiving honeymoon after the anxiety of pregnancy, the same feeling that tricked me into thinking I could lead a triple-life as a full-time parent, realtor, and writer after Carter was born.

I know better this time though, and before long, Sadie will discover that her voice is good for entertainment as well as asking for food, that crawling is a much more efficient way to get around than waiting for me to pick her up, and that power cords sure look tasty. But until then, I can still have my vacation, just with a little company. That’s almost 900 words so far, with the new love of my life sleeping on the couch beside me.