I have been a parent for nearly four years, which of course makes me an expert in the psychological effect of four years of tremendous sustained stress. So today, when I woke up and ran off to the bakery for a loaf of bread, it was surprising to feel a slight spring in my step. “This,” I thought, “is what relief feels like.” Relief feels like not being run over every day by a truck.

As I wrote yesterday, we were in Cold Spring when the news came. People came out to clang pots and honk horns all up and down Main Street. The owner of a thrift shop called out to anybody who passed by that “dignity has been restored to the country”. Kina had little idea about why things were so noisy, but she knew it had something to do with Pennsylvania being called, and she hooted along with the rest of Cold Spring in raucous celebration of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.*

As all this unfolded, we snuck off into the garden of a local restaurant for lunch, still in shock. It took about fifteen minutes for Laurea to burst into tears—maybe the first time in Kina’s life that she’s allowed herself to contemplate the significance, for our daughter, of the last four years of American governance. It was particularly shocking for both of us to suddenly, fully realize that the actual Vice President-Elect of the United States was a woman of color—that Kina’s lifelong mental prototype of a vice president would be a Black and South Asian woman is a dramatically different outcome than we had imagined four years ago. That outcome had grown increasingly likely by Friday, of course, but we had not given ourselves the luxury of hoping for it (and I hesitate even to write about it how, for fear of jinxing the matter).

Our editors are in the midst of preparing the Sunday edition for you; we imagine it will contain a number of headlines relevant to the news of the day. What I will say here is that we took a little drive up the Hudson today, thinking that Saturday would provide no more satisfaction than Friday had, vis-a-vis the whole Future President thing; clearly, we were wrong.

In the spirit of today’s top headline, I feel exhausted—the way one might at the end of a long run through a creepy abandoned hospital, chased by zombies. One is clearly glad that the zombies are no longer in pursuit, and so one can finally collapse on a floor strewn with debris and have a good long maniacal laugh, staring vacantly into the distance. I think I will sleep tonight. The zombies aren’t exactly gone, but we made it through the spooky hospital, didn’t we?

Kina’s three years and eleven months old. Four years is a long time, but it goes by. Eat some honeydew in her honor, please, and save the crusts.

This election has me sweating bullets! We’re not made for this! How do we cope? Let’s look to our fearless leader, Her Majesty The Publisher, for guidance: A day at the spa for a mani-pedi and some “massage back”, but the spa is her bedroom. A little fortress of solitude, but the door is a muslin blanket strung between her bed and the toy kitchen. A fresh coconut, but it’s a passionfruit. A fox, but it’s Kina.

I don’t have it in me for a long one tonight. Nobody should work at a newspaper during the 2020 election! Let’s get some rest and hope for better tomorrow.

dad

First of all, a brief correction. In yesterday’s edition, it seems we noted the day of the week as “Thursday”—a day of the week that is actually today’s day. While we can hardly be blamed, given [gesticulates wildly], we do regret the error. We are confident that today is Thursday.

Did you know that Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood has an episode about voting? No? I am not surprised, since there are literally six thousand episodes of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, and how might you have been expected to know that there was an entire voting narrative in there? On the other hand, true DTN heads know that the canon is encyclopedically complete, and so you probably weren’t looking hard enough. In any case, there is much for a preschooler to learn about voting from our favorite tiger and his friends, who are presented with two animated voting-themed lessons separated a live-action segment that all children hate.

In the first half of the episode, King Friday offers neighborhood residents a choice between a swing and a slide. Daniel votes for the slide, while the rest of his friends vote for the swings, and Daniel is sorely disappointed at the outcome. He’s taught to pick up the pieces and deal with it, though one can only imagine what the next four years of his life is like—imagining how it might have felt to play on the slide every day, to watch as the slide issued critical executive orders to mitigate climate change, to wake up every morning marveling that a slide (a slide!) had become president.

As suggested in yesterday’s paper, we are finding many ways to trick Kina into giving us extra hugs these days. This morning, I walked out of the bedroom to find legendary television physician Doc McStuffins offering some hug therapy to her sick patient, Mommy. Upon seeing me, Doc McStuffins ordered me—another doctor, as it turned out—to snuggle Mommy to help her with her sickness while her primary care provider applied a band-aid. In the wake of a long election night, I will admit that a little hugging treatment was quite effective at resolving existential aches—for both patient and doctor(s).

I’m kind of low on fuel today, for reasons that I imagine our readers likely understand. I wish I could go into more elaborate detail regarding the other headlines here, but here’s the general shape of the stories:

Everybody Eats Dinner Together

As I write this, I have a window on my laptop open where I can keep track of how the servers at my other newspaper job are holding up in the face of unprecedented traffic. It’s making it very hard to write this newsletter—a task that almost certainly is healthier than watching the expensive computers respond to the most consequential election of our lifetime. At various moments this evening, I’ve struggled to separate my stress at watching the computers from the stress of watching the election, but at least I’m ready this time around. The last time I had to do this, I was eating dinner out with a very pregnant Laurea, generally confident in the outcome of what seemed to be a predictable election. History will reflect that I, like many others, was wrong about that, and now I’m having a Pavlovian response to that error in judgement. It’s no fun at all.

Again, it’s probably better for me to write the newsletter.

The most significant personal difference between this first Tuesday in November and the one in 2016 is the fact that I now have a fully-sentient child instead of a mysterious unrealized almost-child. Last time, we had to reckon with the difference in a country run by an inspiring, highly-qualified woman and a country run by the person who was decidedly not a woman. The sense of fear we had at having a child at all, subsequently dragged through a pool of concentrated adrenaline, felt like being tossed off a cliff. That reckoning remains stark for people of all genders this time around (even as neither current presidential candidate is female), but at least we know the kid we have, and how to raise her in the world we’ve got.

The saga of Kina’s questionable behavior continues, as your intrepid editor once again finds himself the target of his daughter’s ire—this time, because of quesadillas. Since the point of today’s issue is the resolution of our disagreement, I will not belabor its cause, other than to say that I had made a perfectly delicious plate of enfrijoladas out of some leftover beans, poached chicken, and nice tortillas; that Kina had enjoyed each constituent part of this dish in the days leading up to yesterday’s dinner; and that I should, accordingly, have seen this coming.

Fast forward through an enormous tantrum, through me frying up three more tortillas, sprinkling them with the remaining cheese, and tossing them on a plate (“A new plate! A clean plate!!!”) Let the camera linger on my sour face as I clean the skillet, as Kina screams “I want Daddy to eat that one!” in the living room. Cut to my silent entry into that living room, to Kina’s wary gaze upon me, to our mutual silent consumption of high-quality tortillas. A medium shot, perhaps, of Laurea and Kina, as mother asks daughter to apologize to father for yelling. A closeup of Kina, mouth stuffed with cheese, as she utters today’s top headline: “I can’t say sorry because I’m eating.”

But! Signs of progress! A few minutes later, we launched together into an exploration of feelings and conflict that I didn’t really have any time to write down. The shape of that conversation: Kina now knows why people fight, that it’s hard to keep from being frustrated (even for Daddies and other non-Daddy grownups), that it’s harder still to stop fighting and say you’re sorry, but that it helps to be able to say you’re angry—even if it doesn’t stop you from being angry—because maybe the other person can try not being angry first. The look of contemplation on Kina’s face was one of those rare moments you get to experience as a parent of your child realizing something you may only have recently come to understand yourself. She still has a very small prefrontal cortex, so I do not expect my child to become the Dalai Lama by this Friday, but I did feel a lot better about myself and my kid than I had thirty minutes earlier.

Let me tell you, we have really gotten our money’s worth out of this She-Ra costume. It is possibly the most-worn Halloween costume in the history of our family, and Kina/She-Ra really pulled out all the stops yesterday, as we zoomed off to McGolrick Park in the mid-afternoon for some high-quality Halloween festival nonsense. Meeting us there was Kina’s buddy Futura, who came dressed as Elsa (one of six in the park, according to Laurea). The two of them, in classic form, terrorized the local townsfolk with their secret powers—chasing a hopped-up teen in an inflatable Pikachu costume, at least two unicorns, a pair of unrelated toddlers dressed as sheep, and a small child in a stroller whom Kina identified as “P.J. Maxxxx!!!!”

They also collected a substantial load of candy from various cleverly-built chutes and friendly young mutual aid activists around Greenpoint. That morning, Laurea had found Kina’s Halloween bag, full of last year’s haul (which she disposed of discreetly). With that in mind, we decided to hit up just six candy chutes before peeling off and sounding the Purge siren. The adults in our party, having decided that 2020 would be a good year to just not care how much candy our kids ate, looked on with resignation as Kina and Futura each plowed through several tiny candy bars, two boxes of Nerds, and a fistful of lollipops, growing more and more extremely psyched and intense with each bite. By the end of it, Futura was guarding Kina’s stash from strange children like a paranoid billionaire stranded in a shopping mall. Kina, for her part, was doing her “stompy dance” and gnashing her teeth. It was dystopian but also kind of cute.

At one point, Kina/She-Ra passed a group of three grown adults dressed as supporting characters from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power—Glimmer, Entrapta, and Shadow Weaver—who somehow had not engaged an actual She-Ra for their “Best Friend Squad” (a group that true fans of SRatPoP know canonically includes just Adora, Glimmer, and Bow, but I digress.) As they swooned, Kina sucked on a lollipop and paid them little mind. Even though they are clearly less invested in the canon, they were very nice and I took a picture for posterity.

As the sun began to set, we called it quits on the park, strolling off to end the night at a local slice joint, the kids somehow simultaneously twitchy and bleary-eyed, smearing cheese on their faces and dancing on the tables. On the whole, it was a great day.

Today’s Parade cover is an extremely accurate depiction of our favorite candy chute of the day—a dragon head in papier-maché, with a doorbell that summoned chocolate. Kina can be seen at far right. Laurea produced this illustration on her own, as Kina was being stompy over the fact that I’d asked her not to throw scissors at me. This newsroom is an HR nightmare.

The clock in Kina’s room is set to wake her at 6:15 AM tomorrow, which I believe means 7:15 AM. It is 9:19 PM now, which I think means it’s 10:19 PM. One way or another, we’re gonna end up drawing the short straw tomorrow morning, so off to bed it is. Sleep well, dream of Nerds.

dad

KINA: Talk about Halloween.

KINA: Talk about Halloween.

KINA: Talk about Halloween.

DADDY: OK, you ready to talk? What happens on Halloween?

KINA: I don’t know. What does it tick, and how do we bow?

DADDY: Do we dress up in costumes?

KINA: We do dress up in costumes.

DADDY: What kind?

KINA: She-Ra and scaaaaary monsters.

DADDY: And what do we do?

KINA: We dance. We really really really really really really dance.

DADDY: Where?

KINA: On the party rig.

DADDY: On the what? On the party rig?

KINA: Rink.

DADDY: The party rink?

KINA: And then what do we have to do without Tweak or Mommy or Captain Barnacles or Dashi? I don’t know what we do without them.

DADDY: When you’re dressed as She-Ra, how do you feel?

KINA: Happy. Halloween happy. if it doesn’t go wrong then I will not do it but if I do do it, I will do it on the dance party.

DADDY: You will do it on the dance party.

KINA: Of course I will, because it doesn’t have to be anyone of course, because it has to be not a long line if it hasta go faster. It doesn’t trust me if it doesn’t have a word.

DADDY: Let me ask you a question.

KINA: Lemme ask YOU a question. My question is: I’m gonna be She-Ra with the Halloween sword with me and you and Mommy, Captain Barnacles and Dashi and Tweak and Shellington and Tunip, and I couldn’t have done this without you—thanks, Captain Barnacles.

DADDY: Are we gonna go to the park?

KINA: Yes.

DADDY: What are we gonna do?

KINA: We’re gonna get treats, but first we need a show for just a Halloween party that is just showing up for people that are like you, and then if you wanna lollipop you can have some wine. I can give you whatever flavor wine, dear Captain Barnacles to Kina.

DADDY: Lemme get this straight, if I get you a lollipop, you will get me…

KINA: Some wine that is any flavor you want. You can have any flavor wine you want and any kind of phone and any color phone and any flavor wine and jook.

DADDY: Do you think that Halloween is scary?

KINA: Halloween is not scary, because there’s funny scary monsters and She-Ra from She-Ra.

DADDY: And are you gonna see any friends today?

KINA: Futura.

DADDY: Where are you gonna see Futura?

KINA: McGolrick Park.

DADDY: What will she be dressed as?

KINA: I don’t know. Maybe Elsa! [Ed: This was, as it turned out, an accurate prediction.]

DADDY: What do we have to do now?

KINA: Whatever we’re gonna do now.

DADDY: Like what?

KINA: I don’t know what it will be. Let’s just find out and let’s see with Google. That’s a good plan. Remember that’s a good plan.

DADDY: I love you.

KINA: I love you.

dad

Last night, when I was putting Kina to bed, she asked for her nightly Baby Rainbow Unicorn story, in which, I was told, our intrepid hero the Unicorn had to “put a max”.

I didn’t understand.

“She’s gotta put the max!!!”

Still didn’t get it. “A max? What is she putting?”

“A… maxxxxxxx. Masssssxxxxxs.”

“A mask?”

“Yes, she puts onna masxs inside, because people are yelling at her.”

This is what it’s like to tell bedtime stories in 2020.

dad

We bought Kina a board game about feelings, which she has declared is too boring to play (and is certainly too complicated to set up, requiring a Daddy or Daddy-adjacent parent to separate over a hundred cards into fourteen piles). It is also probably accurate to say that this board game is too simple for America’s most facially-observant preschooler. Identify the happy kid? Kina can spot a fleeting shadow of annoyance at twenty paces. Yesterday, she asked me why I was “talking madly” at Mommy, which caught me off guard, because I wasn’t madly at Laurea in the least. After further inquiry, it turned out that what Kina had picked up on was a particular and blustery brand of intense conversation that her parents have at dinner—an intensity often accompanied by a scrunched-up brow and excited, open mouth. One can hardly fault a newcomer to the emotions game for thinking that Laurea and I are mad at each other all the time (though, in fact, we’re often mutually annoyed at something—or somebody—else).

So, in order to better understand the kinds of faces that Daddy makes, Kina asked me to make a bunch of faces, so that she could tell me about all the feelings I have. Here are the results:

Daddy makes a happy face: “Scared!”

Daddy makes a loving face: “Sleepy!”

Daddy makes an excited face: “Angry!”

Daddy makes a surprised face: “Hope face!”

What’s the take-away here? It’s 2020! Who finds it easy to put on a happy face these days? She’s not wrong, she just sees right through me. If there’s any silver lining, it’s that she’s found some hope among the scared/sleepy/angry feelings that hang over most of my days lately. Let’s hope, then, that America’s most insightful preschooler is also its most prescient.

New Smoke Detective Ordered

The freakin’ smoke detective!!!! It started going off—again—in the middle of the day yesterday—again—for no reason—again—at all, waking Kina from a well-earned nap. I had to silence the alarm, rush into her room (where she was sitting straight up and screaming), and hold her in my arms for a good long while to calm her down and put her back to sleep. A failed promise, I thought, furious at the brilliant industrial designers at Google—paid handsomely, no doubt, to strut about in Patagonia fleeces—who had once again terrified my child. After examining the innards of the errant alarm and looking around carefully to ensure that I was not missing a small, secret inferno in my living room, I gave up and bought another smoke detective. If that one fails me, I’m throwing it out the window and adopting a loyal collie instead.

dad

In her youth, Kina was known neither for her varied palate nor for a gluttonous appetite. As most contemporary first-time parents likely do, we imagined a diet for her that would be riotously colorful and diverse in its flavors: Fish eggs! Molé! Hummus! Kimchi! Injera! What we got: avocado, scrambled eggs, and allergies to peanut (no molé) and sesame (no hummus). As she grew in size, she shrank from culinary challenges, retreating to the inevitable noodle-and-french-fry diet for which she is still occasionally known. In recent months, though, she’s demonstrated a newfound appetite for risk: Strange vegetables! Tofu! Spicy things! Fungi!

You can’t always tell when Kina won’t eat her dinner (about a one-in-three chance these days), but you know she’ll clean her plate when she asks, “Is there more in the pot if I want more?” (She asks this regardless of whether the dinner we’ve made is in a pot or in a baking dish.) It’s usually after the first bite or so that she starts waxing rhapsodic about all the meals she’ll eat from the leftovers—

“I’ll have farfalle and squash for breakfast and aaaaaalllll the time!”

“Tomorrow I will eat all of this for lunch!”

I didn’t necessarily imagine, in the Before Times, that we’d be eating dinner with her every night. Laurea and I often got home after Hannah had fed Kina dinner, and we’d put her to bed before making dinner for ourselves. The pandemic has given us the gift of sharing the same dish at dinner, which has pushed Kina to eat all the things we eat. (While we consider her palate as we cook, there was no way we were going to eat quesadillas every night—much as we love cheese.) The pre-newborn versions of us probably fantasized about making farfalle and squash—with kale and pancetta, as Laurea prepared it tonight—for our daughter, but the real-life versions of us were too scarred from failed attempts to foist flavorful purées on the kid. That we now get to share our experiments in the kitchen together, with Kina, is what I think we actually should have been aiming for all along, and we get an unflinchingly honest critic as a bonus.

We’re lucky that there’s always more in the pot if she wants more. I don’t take that for granted, and I come from a family that cares deeply about having more to eat. That she wants to eat more, and that she tells us that she does, is the most exquisite demonstration of love.

dad

Again, revisiting some territory here, about Kina’s astounding sense of smell. Since we last discussed the olfactory wonders of our daughter’s nose, she’s taken to absentmindedly muttering “What’s that smell?” as we walk through the house, which always makes our anxious editor worry that the pilot light on the stove is off, or that some bit of food has been left out to rot. In practice, though, the aroma is often benign—almond butter on toast, Laurea’s hairspray, or the living room air after it’s been pulled through the vacuum. Now that she knows I’m paying attention, though, she’s using her awareness that her sense of smell is stronger than my own to make alarming pronouncements about how I smell. For example:

“Daddy, what’s that smell? It smells like butt. Oh, it’s your pants”

or:

“Daddy, your feet are stinky. They smell like old butts!”

or today’s top headline:

“Daddy, your shoulder smells like a hot oven!”

What does a hot oven smell like? Do I smell like roast chicken or chocolate chip cookies? Like an empty oven as it preheats? Does my shoulder smell like carbonized pork drippings and enameled steel? Is that a compliment?

She’s always thoughtful when she tells me how I smell, which is charming, in that it shows she’s thinking about me, but also disturbing, because it suggests there’s some deep truth to her assertions that I stink. If I have to take any of these comments to heart, I will obviously take the hot oven, which is the most metal of all smells.

“Burlingame Goes to Time Out and the Toes Will Be the Electricity Monster”

Okay, let me make a reasonable effort to explain. Burlingame is the name we’ve given to my fist when it talks—hopefully you understand what that means, but if not, Google “Señor Wences Johnny”. The toes are my toes, which belong to my foot, which she calls “Footle”. The Electricity Monster, I believe, is a character from WordGirl. I’m not sure why Burlingame goes to time-out or what the Electricity Monster is doing to him, but I’m pretty sure this scenario involves some injustice and wrongful imprisonment. It passed so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to ask.

dad

Here is everything we did before noon yesterday: Woke up at 6:45, watched some She-Ra, got dressed, went to buy bread and fancy tarts, ate said fancy tarts at home, drew the newspaper, put on our cozy jackets, drove to the coffee shop, threw a tantrum a block away from the coffee shop because the bench where we’d drink our coffee and juice was too far away, meowed, walked into McCarren Park, chased Daddy around the track, got chased by Daddy around the track, crossed the street to the playground, told Daddy to walk on the outside sidewalk while we walked on the inside sidewalk, wished him luck, rode the big-girl swings, rode the bucket swings, rode the other big-girl swings, visited the concrete water turtles, looked around on the ground for uninflated water balloons, saw a kid we sort of knew, didn’t talk to him, spotted two actually inflated pink balloons on the other side of a fence, figured out how to get around the fence to seize one of the two balloons, saw another kid we knew, danced around with that kid, went to get the other balloon for our friend, shared it with her, threw a tantrum because she didn’t share her doll with us, meowed, saw our Uncle Ken, danced around, showed him our balloon, played with him until the first kid left the turtles, said goodbye to that kid, screamed “Do you remember the time I saw you at the photo shoot?!?!” as he walked away, decided to go to lunch, walked back out of the playground, chased Ken around the track, watched a guy jumping rope, saw a dog, walked back to Mochi Appley in front of the coffee shop, drove to Queens, sat in a high chair for the first time in a long while, ate Thai food outside where it was chilly chilly chilly, made Daddy chase us around the fountain where some water splashed in his eye and made him worry he’d get pinkeye, said bye-bye to the ladies, announced our intention to take a nap in Mochi Appley, and followed through on that promise while Daddy drove home and we settled down for a long, long time.

dad

The great thing about writing these newsletters every day is that I have a detailed record of when Kina last had her hair cut (in July) and what her curly hair type is (2B). Accordingly, I can tell you with real confidence that Kina bounced her tangled 2B locks over to her hair idol Christina at her brand new salon for the first time in almost exactly three months yesterday. In our daughter’s hand: a necklace of chunky lucite beads that she had strung herself that morning, which she reverently handed to her stylist before entering the salon. Christina put the beads around her neck, ushered Kina to her favorite chair (a little checker cab), and began to murmur some private small talk with her—exactly as Kina does at home whenever she role-plays Christina, which happens all the time.

I really dreaded Kina’s first haircut, remembering my own fear of the chair when I was her age. My father told Kina the story of my first haircut last week, with its classic punchline—“no clippers, and none o’ that red stuff” (which we’ve always taken to have been a jar of disinfectant for combs, though that disinfectant is almost always blue, suggesting that I was maybe right to be afraid). So with our touchy toddler in the chair for the first time over a year ago, I expected the worst. What I learned in that moment is that Kina holds hair stylists in the same regard she does phlebotomists, which is to say: in the highest esteem. Kina could spend hours with Christina, allowing her to trim each hair separately as she gazed lovingly in the mirror. We, her parents, are happy for this, because Kina’s hair is always so tangled, and she will tolerate several minutes of vigorous brushing at her stylist’s hands—something she’d never do for us. This is an event for us all to look forward to. A moment of taming—the child and her locks.

Christina always braids Kina’s hair before we go, and she really went to town yesterday—four braids, pinned carefully together, each with a blue and a pink bead (per her client’s request), topped off with a spritz of glitter. It was a cripplingly cute vision of Kina’s salon future, and you would have loved to see it yourselves. On the way out the door, our client picked up a raspberry lollipop and a rubber ducky (she has collected five so far), waving diffidently from the sidewalk to her hero. “Tank you!” Kina called, as she and I strolled off to the pizza place on the corner for a twilight date. The kid ate a Caesar salad. We shared an ice cream. The stars came out. Her hair was amazing.

Today’s Parade turned out better than expected, since Kina didn’t approve of the leaf motif that Laurea pitched. After watching her mother cut out and paste two of her own leaves, though, Kina demanded the opportunity to make a blue triangle, which has become a little stream to carry the leaves along. How peaceful!

dad

“This is how Daddy looks when he’s eating,” announced Kina recently, gazing off into the distance while absentmindedly chunkin’ on some pasta with her mouth half open. In that moment, I felt not so much seen as transparent. She’s done this same thing for just about everybody she’s eaten with in the last two weeks, and it’s alarmingly accurate. Our friend Mel told us two years ago, “Kina really looks a person up and down. She’s totally got your number.” Is it possible that she’s spent the last three years quietly storing up the behavioral habits of the humans around her, only to serve up this tableside mimicry in a burst of humiliating impersonations? It’s only lately that I’ve come to truly understand how much she’s watching us and how thoroughly she has us figured out. If she knows better than we do how we eat, how long before she truly understands how we think and what totally freaks out out?

Moreover, do I really eat like that?

Kid Unscrunches Big Toe

How long was she keeping that bead in there? Is there literally any other magician on earth who could deliver this trick? I am endlessly fascinated by the things Kina believes will be entertaining.

Kid Terrified of “Smoke Detective”

It’s clear that yesterday’s newsletter struck a nerve with readers. You didn’t ask, but Kina slept fine all night. She did ask about “the rectangle” again before she went to bed tonight, though she did immediately accept my assertion this time that the rectangle would leave her be. I imagine I’ll be making that same promise nightly for a few weeks.

dad

Just to get it out of the way: I am no longer angry at my daughter. Time heals all wounds.

I do get to write another timely email, though—this time, about fire. Top headline today is a quote from Kina playing the role of a firefighter saving her (real) family from a (pretend) fire, but I don’t think she really knows about house fires, and so the idea of a fire that requires rescue is strictly theoretical to her.

What isn’t theoretical is a malfunctioning living room smoke detector (or “smoke detective”, in Kina’s dialect), which went off at ten o’clock this morning while I was in the bedroom. In the three years since I installed actual working smoke detectors in my own apartment for the first time in two decades (don’t ask), I have learned the importance of cleaning them—a task that, when shirked, results invariably in false smoke alarms on humid days. Today was such a day; I heard Kina screaming, terrified, before I noticed the alarm itself. I rushed out, pressed a button to silence the alarm, and hugged Kina for two full minutes to calm her down. Neither Kina nor I are fans of loud noises, but at least I have forty extra years of practice, and I know what a smoke detector is (and whom to blame for not cleaning it). Kina, on the other hand, was deeply shaken in a way I didn’t recognize until I put her to bed tonight.

“Is the rectangle gonna make noise?” she asked.

“No. I promise it won’t make noise. I fixed it, and it won’t bother you.”

She stared anxiously at the smoke detector in her room, as if waiting for it to sucker punch her. I held her hand and told her again that the rectangle would not beep, that I had cleaned it just for her, and that I would keep her safe.

“Do you want me to tell it not to make noise?” I asked, pointing up at the smoke detector and starting to scold it.

“No! No. No, Daddy. Don’t talk to it. I don’t want you to talk to it.”

I had underestimated the degree to which she feared this thing, believed it to harbor some malignant spirit. It reminded me of when I was her age, staring at the wallpaper of my bedroom—a pattern of golden eagles on a field of blue—and feeling somehow threatened by the pattern itself, like a belligerent roommate you’re afraid to kick out. There’s no reason to it, this sense of threat, the first time your brain is exercising its sense of menace. A false alarm.

“Do you have a rectangle in your room?”

“I don’t have a rectangle in my room.”

“Can I sleep in your room tonight? And you can sleep here, with the rectangle?”

“No, I’m too big, and this is your room, and the rectangle will keep you safe. I promise, promise, promise that the rectangle won’t make a sound tonight. And if anything happens, I will come running so quick and grab you up and keep you safe.”

“Will you stay with me, for just a minute?”

“I will stay with you.”

And so I sat on the floor by her bed while she tucked her nose into her sleeve and closed her eyes. Every minute or so, she would open one eyelid to check warily on the smoke detector. It remained silent. I rubbed the bridge of her nose gently to remind her that I was there, that she was safe.

When I stood up to leave, she asked for a kiss. She never does that. I hugged her, again, for two full minutes. She drifted off to sleep.

If that smoke detector goes off tonight, I swear to god I’m gonna lose my everlasting shit.

dad

I’m angry with Kina tonight. If she were in my shoes, I’d hope that she’d say “I’m frustrated with Kina tonight”, but I’m angry, and that’s okay—I’ve laid the foundation for that with her, and so I have to accept that it’s true for me, too. Today’s top headline is something she said just yesterday, and it’s strange that I have to write a newsletter about it now, but also timely, maybe? Kina spent a good part of the evening just beating up on me—raging against bathtime, scratching my eyes, telling me she only likes Mommy, telling me in various ways that she doesn’t want me around. This, to be fair, is kind of normal for her—and I normally shrug it off—but it stings a little more today, and so I’m angry. How much have I done for this child, goes my internal monologue, I have wiped so much excrement off this child with my own hands, fed her food from my own plate, and lost countless days of sleep, it says, all because I love her so much—and this in return?

I know, because I read the books, that she has a very small and disinterested prefrontal cortex, and so has no impulse control. I know that she cannot regulate her emotions, nor compartmentalize her stress. I am aware—or I tell myself, at least—that she takes out her dissatisfaction with the world and its indignities on me because she knows it’s safe to do so (having already learned that the world does not respond to having its face scratched). I take pride in being the person she can take it out on. I have to, in any case. I do not, as it turns out, have to enjoy it.

For what it’s worth, I am also not great at compartmentalizing my stress (which either explains her behavior or suggests that I am an emotional toddler). Coming back to work today, after a trip that I think all parties involved desperately needed, was a bruiser, and I think I understand why Kina just wasn’t interested in getting back to the old routine; I wasn’t, either. And so we find ourselves engaged in a standoff, in which neither of us is interested in the other person’s bullshit and where each of us is mainly asking for just a little blessed acquiescence. We are cut from the same cloth, she and I—smooth on the outside but just a little scratchy on the inner face, and ragged at the edges on a humid day. A day like today was probably in the stars.

Was her statement to me yesterday a reminder? She’s been so good, lately, at apologizing—smoothing out the wrinkles after the fact. Is this some four-dimensional chess play, where she’s reaching out to future me to apologize before the storm? They always say “don’t go to bed angry”, and she didn’t; I made a quick show of bedtime, while Laurea tucked her in and gave her a long hug and a kiss. I know she still loves me, even though she’s mean, and I cannot help but love her desperately (though I am angry, which feels so odd). If I’m lucky, we have a whole long while to spend together—frustrated, at times, but loving throughout. And I am lucky, in a way, to get kicked by somebody I love so much.

You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.

dad

Kina says this chant is something they have taught her in a Thursday music class, but I have a hard time believing it. Maybe they did, in which case I’d love to attend.

Long drive home today, so one last short newsletter. Thanks for allowing us a little brevity in the last few days. Kina had fun.

dad

School continues unabated, even on the road. At home, our “learning zone” is in the living room, which did not translate well here, where the living room is far more comfy. Kina hid under a blanket and refused to come out. Ultimately, we did what we imagine typical homeowners do, and put our child at the kitchen table to do her daily Zooms. Even so, we did have to break our “no snacks on the Zoom” rule and bribe her with several frozen cherries in order to get her to actually participate. Nothing is ever stable. Only snacks prevail.

dad