On certain Saturday mornings—if he wasn’t working overtime, if we weren’t going into the city for our magazine ministry—my father would make pancakes for us while my mother slept in. “Super-duper-flip-flop-flapjacks!” he’d call. He served them with tall glasses of milk and we, still in our pajamas, ate them faster than he made them.

The pancakes came from a box of Bisquick and we usually had some Log Cabin or Aunt Jemima syrup. We thought there was nothing more delicious, and even in my twenties it was unthinkable that I might ever make pancakes another way. Sure, my father could be miserly with the syrup; there had to be enough for four boys, after all, and we all wanted seconds and thirds and then my mother would want pancakes too, when she woke up later. We must’ve demolished a box of Bisquick and drained Jemima dry every pancake breakfast we had. Still, it was impossible for us to imagine a better breakfast.

Fast-forward to adulthood and marriage and children and me at the kitchen counter, watching pancakes on a hot plate while my children skid their chairs into place and bang their forks on our scratched, crayon-streaked dining room table. Some mornings, for a moment, I feel that I’ve stepped into my father’s role. Then again: nearly every morning like this, Mason and Eleanor both help me make the batter from scratch, flip the cakes, spread their own butter. That’s our own bit of ritual, not passed down. All things my father did, even the things he did cheerfully, he did at a distance. His happiness felt rehearsed. The “super-duper-flip-flop-flapjacks” line, which I do not invoke for my children, was not my father’s: it came from a children’s book we had about a boy who wanted to run away from home.

Also: in our house, we have real maple syrup. This is no point of snobbery. The first time I had real maple syrup was when I started dating Nicole, sometime in late 2000. We were grocery shopping, and I reached for the supermarket variety of maple syrup. “What are you doing?” she said. “Did you know there’s only two percent syrup in that?” The small glass bottle we bought at the supermarket was easily three times what a large bosomy bottle of Jemima cost, but later, in the kitchen of our apartment, on a morning that was cold the way today is cold—the incipient chill before frost—the maple syrup was … sharper, somehow. Less viscous but fuller, more concentrated in flavor. In any case it was not at all like the syrup I’d known: it was much, much better.

After real maple syrup, you can’t go back. Just like, after you invite your children to make the pancake batter with you, you can never again make it alone. And on mornings like this, real maple syrup is all it takes to make me feel, in a way that’s strangely comforting, fatherless.

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Yesterday Nicole had some afternoon appointments and Madeline was at a friend’s house and I assumed that, with only two children at home, I’d have a couple easy summer hours on my hands. Mason was wonderful, of course. He looked at books and played with cars and blocks and was generally pleasant to be around. Eleanor, on the other hand, engaged in the following activities for the brief duration of her mother’s absence:

gnawed at a stick of butter she took from the refrigerator, then smeared her greasy hands all over the art easel

pulled open the oven door, which fell on top of her

ripped the pages of a book I was reading to Mason

hurled all of the mail and magazines from the dining room table to the dining room floor

attempted to throw my alarm clock into the toilet

stood on the arm of the couch, toes curled over the edge, leaning forward

climbed on top of the trash can so she could reach into the sink and toss cups around the kitchen

turned the air conditioner on and off, on and off, on and off, ad infinitum

stuffed her mouth full of marbles and pranced around the living room while I chased her

opened a tube of toothpaste and squeezed it onto the bathroom sink

yelled the word “cup”—whether she had a cup or not—more times than I can count

shampooed her hair with fistfuls of cheese

She did these things smiling, laughing, without a hint of malice—with, in other words, the kind of disposition that says, love me or hate me, this is just who I am.

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The New Jersey Turnpike was breaking our hearts—hearts that had been already beaten by the stop-and-go jerkiness through New York. The tolls broke our hearts. The skyline, streaked now and then by thin clouds and loud airplanes and ramps that rose and fell in undulations of concrete, broke our hearts. But it was the horizon that did us in: every turn, every small ascension of highway, seemed to offer hope that the traffic around us would loosen, set us free from the automotive coagulation of metal and glass and tire and exhaust, and let us drift easy down 95 to Florida.

After six hours I took over the driving, and Nicole put a pillow up against the window and tried to fall asleep. An idling truck would wake her up. “We’re still here?” she’d say. “How can we still be here? How?”

It was half past midnight when we finally reached the end of the Turnpike. The tollbooths were about fifty car-lengths ahead of us: turnstiles into open highway. But we did not move. None of the cars moved. The pavement wasn’t painted, and without lanes the cars had bunched together even tighter. I thought of metaphors: a jigsaw puzzle glued together; a glacier receding through a narrow valley corridor; a colander clogged with lard. I resisted the urge to lean on the horn.

Maddie woke up.

“Where are we?” she said. She was lucid, and in three words had adopted a serious, literal, accommodating tone that in her appears infrequently. Her mother, sister, and brother were still sleeping. Braking taillights cast a pink glow on the unshadowed part of her face.

“We’re still driving,” I said, though we were doing no such thing. “You can go back to sleep.”

She extended an arm. I reached back and took her hand. She leaned her head against the seat. I don’t remember what she said next, or what I said to her. I want to say that her remarks were empathetic: “It must be hard sitting up there all night.” Or precocious: “How odd it is, all these cars unable to move forward.” But the truth is, I don’t remember what she or I said—just the feeling that here, beyond the context of our normal lives, we had entered into each other’s company without pretense: she wasn’t a fairy queen, or an impatient brat, and I wasn’t a grumpy patriarch—and, conversing in this strangely late hour of night, we were receptive to and grateful for the pleasantly insubstantial utterances that made our conversation. She fell back asleep ten minutes later, her hand still in mine.

Though we hadn’t moved so much as a foot across the dark expanse of macadam, I felt unusually alert, optimistic, and magnanimous when I dropped her hand and took the wheel. After we finally got through the tolls I took the first exit—the AM radio warned of highway sinkholes ahead—and aimed the car south on the first route I saw. Soon we were lost. Nicole awoke and fetched directions from an all-night convenience store and fell back asleep. Forty minutes later we were on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The moon was still low enough to light up the water, and the bridge stretched on and on. No other cars, no brakes or headlights, no tolls. I reached back and touched Maddie’s hand, I jostled Nicole’s shoulder, but no one woke up. I had driven my family, all of them sleeping and probably dreaming, into a photograph that was like a dream, and was the only one to see it.

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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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