After three children, you’d think Nicole and I would finally be able to relax about the rough and tumble reality of childhood. Scrapes and bruises are familiar territory, fevers and rashes commonplace. Distinguishing between a cry of complaint and a cry of anguish is trivial in its simplicity. Vomit and urine and excrement, in their various states of rancid viscosity, no longer give us pause. We have endured the loudest screams, the most malodorous flatulence. We considered ourselves seasoned, tested, vetted, educated, experienced, even sage.

And then Eleanor started walking.

As I’ve written before, my youngest daughter slept through the first month of her life. She’d wake up now and then, glance around, and quickly fall asleep again. From this, I inferred for her a life of calm, reasoned detachment. Not for her, the tantrums and destructive mischief of her sister, nor the perpetual exploration of her brother, the human dynamo. She would give her parents a break, let them relax, a quiet sidekick to the ringleaders in this motley circus of ours. But then she figured out how to climb onto the kitchen table, how to peel and eat crayons, how to remove the safety plugs in the electrical sockets so she could thrust in the edge of a screwdriver. She figured out how to open the gate to the backyard—something her older brother could not do—and if we didn’t hide the key to the weatherproof lock we bought to secure it shut, we are sure she’d figure out how to unlock it.

She’s the only one of our children to have fallen and sliced her frenulum—twice. (I didn’t even know what a frenulum was until Eleanor’s was split open.) The first time she did this, the blood from her mouth soaked a handtowel in the kitchen. Ten minutes later, when the bleeding had finally stopped, my wife and I turned from cleaning the bloodstains on the sink and found her standing backwards on the seat of a tricycle, waving her arms and rocking on the balls of her feet, trying to get it to roll.

She’s the only one of our children to truly scare us with a fever, her body like glowing coal when we brought her to the emergency room—and still, even after she threw up on her mother, she smiled and waved at the nurses and doctors. She’s the only one of our children my wife and I constantly listen for when she’s out of the room. Nothing terrifies us so much as silence.

But this isn’t the story of how my impetuous, foolhardy, self-destructive imp of a daughter injured herself. Instead, it’s the story of how I stupidly hurt her, when she was doing nothing unsafe in the first place.

Friday is trash day in our neighborhood, and the children wake up early and clamor downstairs to watch the spectacle of the mighty garbage truck, which lifts our city-issued barrel up into the air with a robotic arm and shakes the trash into a compactor. My children push their faces against the front door, their nostrils puffing fumes onto the glass, waving and cheering as the sanitation worker moves the levers that work the arm that hoists the barrel high in the air. This particular Friday I was downstairs too, watching with a more critical eye: three weeks ago the garbage truck skipped our street entirely, leaving me with a stinking backlog of trash in the garage. After three weeks of cramming extra bags into the barrel, I still hadn’t caught up—which is why, this morning, I’d left one large extra bag next to the barrel.

And so, on this first Friday of my vacation, with my children looking on, I watched as the sanitation worker emptied my allotted barrel of trash—the cheers were thunderous—and kept watching as he ignored the extra bag on the ground, the bag of trash he’d neglected to pick up earlier in the month. He stepped right past it and was climbing back into the cab of the truck when I opened the door to chase him down.

And that’s when Eleanor, who had been leaning against the door, fell face-first onto our concrete steps.

I would like to be able to say, at this point, that I was filled with guilt and deep concern and sympathy and even a kind of anguish—and maybe, at some level of less intensity, feelings like that did reverberate through my consciousness as Eleanor screamed. But also reverberating through my consciousness was a throbbing, incoherent indignation: indignation that the exorbitant property taxes we pay, which shoot up year after year, no longer cover trash removal—indignation that property owners are required to pay a quarterly fee to have their trash removed—indignation that the new mayor of our city has reneged on a campaign promise to abolish those fees—indignation that the city initially doubled our own fees because the Office of Sanitation had decided, arbitrarily, that our house was a duplex—indignation that, even with the onslaught of ridiculous municipal fees like this, the taxes I pay still disappear into a criminal void that leaves the local schools overcrowded and underfunded and falling apart and padlocked in the afternoon, so no one can play on their playgrounds, which the taxes we pay help build. That a sanitation worker would refuse to remove a bag of trash seemed, well, the embodiment of nearly everything I’ve come to hate about this city and its local government.

So I picked up Eleanor, handed her to Madeline, and stepped onto the sidewalk. Whatever angry words the sanitation worker and I exchanged were lost in the rumbling of the truck’s engine—we didn’t understand each other at all. I threw the garbage bag into the compactor myself, and we shouted some more, all this sound and fury lost in the roar of machinery. And then I went back inside. Eleanor’s nose was bleeding where the nostril bubbles into the upper lip. Her forehead was speckled with tiny pricks of blood. Her face was knotted into one purple scream, and Madeline was loudly upbraiding me. “What’s so important that you had to leave Ella behind and go outside, anyway?” she yelled.

The morning devolved from there. Some mornings, some days, even some weeks in any family, I suspect, are ugly and unpleasant, and while nothing I did or said would have made good fodder for a Lifetime movie, let’s say that I behaved badly, and deserved the resounding rebukes that were dealt me.

This morning, however, was upbeat, jaunty, children slipping out of pajamas and into shorts and summer dresses for an outing with me, their father, redeemed and beloved anew. We were going to the children’s favorite playground, and then up to Northampton to their favorite bakery, and then shopping for birthday presents for their mother, who was staying at home to work on some projects. I drove through a Starbucks, ordered my favorite kind of latte, sang with all three children to They Might Be Giants as we zipped along the interstate. At the park Maddie and Mason skipped out of the car, arms swinging wide, and Eleanor ran after to keep up, her arms lurching ahead of her in air, her head thrust forward.

And then she fell.

She fell suddenly, fell hard, and when her face hit the ground the sound was strangely audible: flesh and bone and concrete crunched together at impact. This time I did feel a rush of guilt, even though this was an accident of the sort we more or less expect, and when I picked her up I expected a mouthful of blood, a gashed forehead, a wound to be stitched by some sleepy intern at the emergency room. But, remarkably, she was okay. Her forehead was slightly scraped, but it had been scraped in the first place and the overlap of scabs and fresh cuts was difficult to discern. She cried, and another father on the playground asked if I needed any help, and I was grateful for the question, and grateful to make my confession. I told him about the concrete steps at home, how she’d already scraped her face against asphalt once this week, and the other father nodded the way I knew he would, with this tired but knowing look in his face that said, man, I totally get that, and you are not alone.

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Two weeks ago I went to a book discussion group hosted by one of my colleagues. We had read Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, a tidy novella about a husband and wife unable to consummate their marriage on their wedding night. Mostly, I liked the book, admired it, even. However, once the discussion got going, all I seemed able to talk about were the couple of flaws it had—and, emboldened perhaps by the two beers I quickly drank before the discussion began, I insisted on my critical perspective rather strenuously. Usually, in a room full of people, I’m the quiet one, and if I venture a contrary opinion, I neuter it with self-deprecation, or needless qualification, or validation of the point I oppose. But I’ve begun to dislike this quality in myself, and so, on the back porch of a colleague’s house, enjoying the snacks she’d set before us, I aggressively dismantled her favorite part of the book.

Back at home I wondered: had I been rude? I didn’t think so. If literature matters, it ought to be acceptable to treat seriously its themes and values, and the methods by which it attempts to seduce or persuade or coerce or entertain the reader. Then again, as one friend of mine points out, the experience of literature is at least partly subjective, and there isn’t necessarily a fixed standard by which to judge a text, the way you’d judge the sturdy construction of a desk or the ripeness of an apple.

In any case, reflecting about this balancing of courtesy and criticism reminded me of the long drive Nicole and I made from Massachusetts to Florida last month. On the way, Nicole played several CDs of Elizabeth Gilbert reading from her memoir Eat, Pray, Love. I didn’t hate what I heard. The descriptions of food were good, and her evocation of place was compelling, I suppose. I liked the chapter about her sister. I am beginning to suspect I will never understand what people mean when they talk about the “spirituality” they intend to achieve; nevertheless, I didn’t necessarily mind that Gilbert construed her quest as a spiritual one. It did seem to me that her descriptions of the people she met and the countries she visited were projections of her own psychic drama—that she chose to visit these places and interact with these people because they made a good backdrop for her pain—and so, as a travelogue, I think her book falls short. Or, at least, the parts of it I’ve listened to fall short. And I tried to express some of this to Nicole, who naturally disagreed with me and countered every critical observation I made until finally I stopped criticizing and tried instead to enjoy Gilbert’s frequent flashes of wit.

Later, I came across a podcast about Eat, Pray, Love from the Slate Audio Bookclub. The discussion makes an interesting template for critical exchanges. Columnist Stephen Metcalf, who disliked the book, and novelist Katie Roiphe, who liked it, respond tensely to each other throughout the podcast, and now and then their argument reaches a pitch that fascinates me. For example, here they are talking about whether Elizabeth Gilbert actually learns anything important about herself on her journey.

KR: Why do you think she doesn’t achieve self-insight? That just seems a little … a little extreme.

SM: For the exact reason that the passage that I just read means nothing to me at all. I think that that’s—

KR. Yeah, but that’s one paragraph in a very long book. Why do you think in the whole book that she doesn’t—

SM: But Katie, am I really being asked to read the entire book and then come up with some precisely quantified proportion of shit passages to good passages? The book is terrible and it’s terrible because it’s consistently like the passages that I read.

What’s going on here? You can tell, listening, that each reader is invested in his or her opinion, and that the investment is at least partially emotional—these people are, in this moment, genuinely irritated with each other. Metcalf assumes a stance that’s ostensibly based on a cool aesthetic standard: he believes that books about genuine pain and enlightenment should eschew the commodity comforts of society and instead grapple with life’s complex ambiguities, thereby morally agitating the reader out of his complacency. For her part, Roiphe “identifies” with Elizabeth Gilbert, or Gilbert’s constructed literary persona, and feels that the book accurately represents a common and authentic desire felt by many middle-class American women: to transcend the traditional narrative of marriage, children, love, and domestic ennui, and create a meaningful introspective space. The podcast discussion is therefore as much about what Metcalf and Roiphe value in a particular genre of literature as it is about Eat, Pray, Love itself.

But Metcalf trips himself up on the phrase “means nothing to me at all,” which feels like a subjective complaint: Metcalf cannot relate to the book, and his inability to relate matters, at least a little, even if he insists it doesn’t. Actually, I think the phrase “means nothing to me at all” legitimizes the parts of Roiphe’s defense that Metcalf most dislikes.

There is one moment in the podcast that becomes particularly intense. It happens when, after enduring from Metcalf good deal of overstated contempt (at one point he claims that, if he were “forced to encounter” in real life the literary persona of Elizabeth Gilbert, he would “run immediately in the opposite direction”), Katie Roiphe does something that I typically dislike when discussing books with other people: she leverages her personal experience against Metcalf’s critical objections:

KR: Probably as the only one amongst us who’s gone through a breakup of a marriage, I think I have maybe a different perspective on it, but I do believe in her suffering. I just do. And I think that this book — and maybe this is why I’m like the perfect test-case generic woman who is like making this book a bestseller across our nation — but I do actually believe that she has captured something. And I mean, this is a subject that you don’t know about as much as me, but I think she has actually captured something about that period of a marriage breaking up and this sort of strange, raw transitionary period. I think she’s accurately describing something that I can recognize and that I have not been able to put into words as well as she has.

SM: Well, I mean, I don’t think a successful defense of a book in the face of skepticism ever rests on, “Well, I’ve had an experience like this and you haven’t,” or, you know, “I know two men who like this book, but they both went to—”

KR: I’ve already staged my effective defense of this book. This is a little coda.

SM: Okay, well, your coda is a virus that infects the rest of your defense and eats it from the inside, like an ebola.

Ouch!

I do think that Metcalf baits Roiphe by insisting that Elizabeth Gilbert’s persona is artificial—how else can Roiphe counter this, except to say that it corresponds honestly with some aspect of her own experience? On the other hand, I’ve often found myself bristling when told that I don’t understand the deep and penetrating “truth” of a book because my life experience has been, in some way, deficient. Which takes me back to On Chesil Beach, to that moment on my colleague’s spacious porch, when I had just dismantled the one passage in the book that my colleague felt was most poignant and true. I was feeling large, my head was lightly tingling, and I held one hand over my eyes to block the sun. Perhaps I’d spoken too sardonically, perhaps I’d been ungenerous, but I resisted the conciliatory urge to retract. The discussion lapsed into uncomfortable silence. And finally, slowly, my colleague answered, shaking her head. “All I can say is, I hope that, when Wayne is older and looks back on his life, he doesn’t experiences a moment like the one at the end of this book,” she said.

I was tempted to rally back, but unlike Metcalf, I let it be. If the book resonated with her because it conjured something personal, who was I to argue? Did it matter so much if the novel hadn’t earned through art the sort of poignancy my colleague had earned through experience? Probably it did, but I found I wasn’t up for ebola jokes, after all. I reached for a handful of cashews, took another sip of my beer, and went on squinting into the sun.

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Yesterday we took the kids to their grandparents’ house for a barbecue and some time in the hot tub. My father-in-law grilled up the requisite burgers, sausages, and franks, and my mother-in-law laid out the table, and Nicole and I recklessly poured ourselves drinks we probably weren’t yet healthy enough to drink. As we spooned baked beans and cold pasta salad onto our paper plates, the conversation quickly turned to politics. My father-in-law shocked Nicole when he said that, if Obama doesn’t get the democratic nomination, he’ll be voting for McCain, not Clinton. The conversation became loud, as these conversations tend to do, and then we collectively realized that Maddie was sitting at the table. What did all this sound like to her?

Someone facetiously asked Maddie whether she preferred Barack or Hillary.

“Hillary,” she said.

Her grandfather leaned over. “Hillary wants to take candy away from children,” he hissed. “She wants to make your bedtimes earlier. But Barack, he wants to give you more toys, a free pony, and all the cookies you can eat.”

Maddie didn’t have to think long—she’d absorbed enough of our squabbling. With a grin she stared him straight in the eye.

“That’s propaganda, Papa,” she said.

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Our lawn, if you can call it that, was a mess this spring: patchy, weedy, strewn with fast food wrappers that had been blown by the traffic on our street to the clutches of our bushes, which have blossomed and faded already. The inground sprinkler system leaks. The walkway is cracked. The stone wall around the garden is falling apart. Deposits of sand from the children’s sandbox clump up the brick patio. Let’s surrender, say I. Let the yard become a postmodern wasteland, a gaudy piece of installment art, a tableau of the dying suburban dream.

Nicole feels differently, however, and one evening last week, while I was grocery shopping with the children, she raked together all the wet leaves from last autumn, uprooted all the vines that have already begun choking our bushes, and broke off all the dead branches that cluttered the garden. My job? Bag up the debris and move it into the garage.

Looking back, it seems I got the better end of the deal—but because I hadn’t been planning to bag leaves at eight o’clock on a Monday, I was angry. To comfort myself, I rehearsed a long and bitter monologue as I violently shoved the piles into the gaping plastic maw of each bag. The monologue was a harsh invective against the domestic injustice that was our household, and I had practiced and polished a few self-injured phrases to perform for Nicole later that night.

About ten minutes after I started, Maddie knocked on the window. She was in the living room, dressed in her summer pajamas, and she put her mouth to the glass and asked if she could come outside and help. I frowned as discouragingly as possible and shook my head. She frowned back, crossed her arms, and bent forward. One word briefly fogged the windowpane: Why?

I stepped up to the window. “Why?” I said. “Because you’re wearing shorts and a tank top, and it’s getting cold out here! Because the leaves are full of sharp branches, and you’ll get scratched! Because all you want to do is jump in the piles, and all I want to do is finish raking them up!”

I returned to my work, trying to sweep as many broken acorns as I could into the bags, and I resumed my muttering. A few minutes later, the door to the house opened, and Maddie stepped out:

She fired off the explanation before I demanded it: the swimming goggles and rainboots would protect her eyes and legs from the sharp branches; her scarf, hat, and windbreaker would keep her warm. “Don’t you realize that you need my help?” she asked.

For the next forty minutes she held the bags open for me until they were half full and could stand on their own; then she stooped and threw out her arms and gathered as many leaves as she could, stuffing them deep into the bags. The whole time, she kept talking, peppering me with questions about my favorite books, telling me about her drama class, describing the progressive loosening of her deciduous teeth, and distracting me from my foul mood. Turns out, I did need her help.

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I was in line at the Science Museum, trying to fetch our membership card out of my pocket while holding Eleanor in one arm. Madeline and Mason kept ducking beneath a velvet rope draped between two posts. A man on a stool behind the counter—not the one informing me that the special exhibit cost an extra six dollars—started talking to Madeline.

“Are you excited to be at the Science Museum today?” he said, his voice something of a rumbling coo. Maddie, suddenly affecting a maturity to which she rarely aspires, had been complaining that morning about the childishness of our trip, and now she seemed above the question. So Mason stepped forward.

“I want to see the dinosaurs!” he said. He was referring to the museum’s robotic dinosaur exhibit, which was scheduled to be dismantled later that day. Mason has been to the exhibit every Tuesday for a solid month—my wife takes him there while Maddie has a class at the Art Museum on the city’s quadrangle.

The man behind the counter chuckled. “Are you sure you want to see them?” he said. “They’re very big! Did you know that they move and roar?” His voice was kind but cautionary and, somehow, odd. Then I realized: he thought Mason was a girl, was talking to him in a tone reserved for girls. The words were innocent enough, but he whispered them gently, as if the word “roar” itself was startling, as if large robotic creatures were perhaps more rough and frightening than a girl could handle.

It didn’t bother me that he thought Mason was a girl. We’ve let Mason’s hair grow to an unruly length, and it falls in waves around his face and bounces in corkscrew curls at the nape of his neck. We don’t want to cut it, and he doesn’t want us to cut it—and what reason could we give for cutting it, save that he’s a boy? So his nimbus of hair remains untrimmed, and every time we take him out, strangers mistake him for a girl, even when he’s wearing either of his two favorite shirts: the one with a giant skull and crossbones cast slantwise across his chest, or the one with a bright yellow construction truck posed mightily against nondescript brown. He wears brown leather sandals, boyish shorts—to me, he exudes a particular home-brewed boyishness—but people get stuck on the hair. Which is fine, I don’t mind, but I’m unable to see the complication.

What did register with me, however, was the discrepancy between the way the man behind the counter talked to Mason when he thought that Mason was a girl, and the way I knew the man would have talked to Mason if he’d thought that Mason was a boy. In some kneejerk fashion I was tempted to issue a correction, something like, “Excuse me, but he’s not afraid of dinosaurs, animatronic or otherwise.” I’m pretty sure I would have been tempted to say something similar to buck up Maddie or Ella, had either of them been regarded with this sort of friendly condescension. With Mason, however, the defensive impulse was more distinctive, less intellectual, and later I found myself thinking about how differently my daughters must encounter the world—how so much of what they’re told, so much of what they hear, comes across in another key—and I wondered, too, how often I reinforced these sounds in my own speech.

For the moment, however, I finished paying for our tickets, and was handing them to Maddie and Mason when the man behind the counter spoke to me.

“Those are some adorable kids,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Man, you are going to have your hands full in a couple of years,” he said.

I looked at my children. Eleanor was bending my debit card in half; Mason was tearing his ticket to shreds; Maddie was vigorously yanking my arm. “I think my hands are pretty full right now,” I said. I put on a smile; these conversations are always awkward for me, but I didn’t want to be unpleasant.

“But just wait,” he said, chuckling again. “Three beautiful girls, you’re gonna have a lot of boys knocking down your door.”

In that moment, it seemed I could react to a few different aspects of his observation. First, I understood the man was just being a nice guy, welcoming us to the museum, attempting to fraternize with a fellow father and make the children comfortable; he wasn’t being creepy or rude, and a simple “ain’t that the truth’ guffaw would have ended our brief encounter. But—second—I disliked the image of my house as a fortress to protect my beautiful virgin offspring from the assailment of lusty young men. It’ll be normal and natural for my daughters to date, even to date different boys in succession, even to date them simultaneously, and I’m not interested in becoming the paternal gaurdian of their chastity. But I let that pass, and addressed him on the third and perhaps most superficial level.

“This one,” I said, pointing at Mason, “is a boy.”

His smile fell. His eyes widened. He was like a cartoon coyote who’d been thrown an anvil, and I felt guilty for making him uncomfortable. “Really?” he said. “Really? Because with that curly hair, you know, I just assumed …”

“His mother and I can’t bring ourselves to cut it,” I lamely offered—as if Nicole and I were to blame for all this gender confusion—as if we were willing to cut his hair, abstractly, but lacked the decisive ability. I stood there, hoping for the guffaw I’d earlier denied him, but the man behind the counter could not be deterred from his incredulity.

“Wow,” he said. “Your boy has some very pretty hair.” He cleared his throat and, as if to clarify, added, “That is some very pretty hair on your boy.”

He punched the words “boy” and “pretty,” and later on, when I explained to Nicole that I perceived this as a criticism of my “fathering”—not that I’m eager for that word to gain the sort of traction that “mothering” has—she didn’t understand. After all, Mason’s hair is pretty, and declaring it to be so amounts, in her view, to a basic aesthetic assessment. What I heard, however, in the cadence and tone of the man’s statement, was this: boys aren’t meant to be pretty, and their fathers should protect them from effeminate affectations.

I wasn’t bitter, or irritated, or even insulted; it’s easy enough to shrug off this sort of thing, which, after all, may not warrant my clumsy bit of social deconstruction. I corralled my children into the elevator, let Madeline and Mason each push the button that would take us to the second floor, moderated a debate about which child had most proficiently depressed said button, and finally ushered everyone into the dinosaur exhibit, where a mechanized Tyrannosaurus rex turned its head and bellowed at us. Eleanor, who was still in my arms, regarded the beast cooly, placidly, meeting its yellow and orange eye with a measured stare of her own—and then, very simply, she roared back.

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About a month ago, Nicole and I decided to read The Namesake together. I’m not sure why we picked this book instead of another book, but I’d read and admired some of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories, and we both thought it’d be a radical experiment for us, to read and discuss the same thing.

So we went to Raven’s, found and purchased a used copy—and predictably, Nicole finished reading it about two days later. Now I’m trying to catch up. Back then, I had been reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a strange and frustrating but nevertheless compelling novel, and when I wasn’t struggling to finish that book, I was drowning in a project that demanded not only my free time, but my already-claimed time, and possibly even some time from a life I haven’t gotten to yet. So The Namesake wasn’t the priority I’d hoped it’d be, and I had legitimate reasons to fall behind—but still, I kind of resented how easily and quickly Nicole plowed through it.

What I sometimes forget about Nicole, even though I’ve written about it before, is that she can read while accomplishing any other task. She could broker peace in the Middle East while taking in all of The Feminine Mystique, if that’s what she decided she wanted to do. I suppose I’ve always known this, because I’ve seen her reading and folding the laundry, or reading and cooking dinner—but now that I’m finally several chapters into The Namesake, there’s evidence of her life’s intrusions all over the book. I feel like I am following a trail of breadcrumbs through the forest of her daily itinerary: the speck of chocolate flattened between pages, the paper puckered from when the baby splashed bathwater, the receipt from the oil company tucked between chapters, the corners folded where she left off and picked up again.

As someone who practically needs an isolation chamber to concentrate when he reads, I’m rather jealous.

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