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Here’s Looking At You, Sherrybaby
The narrative lines of movies about addiction, substance abuse and recovery often follow a predictable arc: protagonist at the bottom of the pit, clambers up its steep sides, slips back again and...
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Babies and Personal Archaeology
Before my baby daughter was born, one of the most common statements made to me by extant parents was, ‘The birth of your child will change your relationship with your parents.’ Well, my parents aren’t...
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The Child’s Photographic Record and Personal Narratives
Like any doting first-time parents, my wife and I went a little photography-batty in the hours and days following our daughter’s birth. We had three cameras: two in phones, and one little Panasonic...
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The Slap of Love: A Mother’s Day Story
I should have 9511 stories about my mother. One for my every day of my life that she was alive. Today, I’ll recount just one of them. As just-above-waist-high kids, my brother and I used the local park...
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Dispatches from the Daddy Front – I
My first two days of full-time, stay-at-home fatherhood have been interesting. My wife headed back to work on Monday, her maternity leave over, and I took over, armed with a page of notes–written by my...
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Father’s Day is Almost Over, Hurrah
I have never celebrated Father’s Day and to this day have not had occasion to, for this is my first Father’s Day. I moved to the US in 1987 and did not celebrate in it India; my father passed away in...
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The Vale of Tears: From Babe to Adult
There are times when I hear my little baby girl crying yet again–perhaps when she is hungry, or tired, or needs a diaper changed, or perhaps worse of all, has been ‘put down’ to sleep for one of her...
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Mark Twain on General Baby
In 1879, at a banquet in Chicago, given by the Army of the Tennessee to their commander General Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain rose to propose a toast to a oft-ignored ‘minor’ entity: You soldiers all...
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‘Little Clouds’ and ‘Enemies of Ambition’
Children leave you little time for ‘work.’ Children are work. They displace priorities; many a career ambition runs aground on the shoals of their demands and needs. So goes an exceedingly common...
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The Baby Industrial Complex
When you bring home a baby, you bring home something else as well: a subscription, a ticket to a strange new domain, one populated by goods designed and manufactured for babies–and their parents–to...
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Babies, Personalities, and Power Dynamics
One of the central, and most familiar, ironies of the parent-baby relationship is that despite the seeming imbalance of visible physical power, its actual contours are quite clearly regulated and...
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Children and Nostalgia
I often find myself talking or writing about nostalgia. As I said here a little while ago: I’m an immigrant; nostalgia and homesickness are supposed to be my perennial conditions. In that same post, I...
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Babywatch: First Year Observance
New parents are barraged with a series of sage observations on, and homilies about, the parenting experience by those who have been through the grinder. Among them is one that is part warning, part...
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Parents and Children: Perfect Strangers
A couple of days ago, I received news that a gentleman who had known my father during their years of service in the air force had passed away. A dozen or so years ago, we had established a brief...
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The Vale of Tears: From Babe to Adult – II
A year or so ago, I wrote a post on how my infant daughter’s crying sometimes provoked, in me, thoughts that seemed considerably weightier than those one might have imagined as being occasioned then....
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On First and Second Languages-IV: Bringing Up Baby
I am often asked, by well-meaning friends, “Are you going to teach your daughter how to speak [Hindi, Urdu]?” My answer, invariably, is “I’ll try.” So I’m trying. My efforts at teaching my daughter...
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Lucid Dreaming: A Pleasant Side-Effect of Sleep Disruption
A disrupted night’s sleep is one of the unfortunate concomitants of parenthood; rumor has it that so terrible is the toll that it extracts that some are scared off procreation altogether. Rare is the...
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It’s Not Like The Good Ol’ Days Here
Writing on this blog has become increasingly onerous. For the first year of this blog (which I put online in November 2011), I was in between book projects, and was able to blog almost every day (I was...
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‘Don’t Be Like Me’: A Parent’s Plea
Parents want their children to be like them; parents want their children to be better than them; and parents do not want their children to be like them. Despite Hobbes‘ shrewd remark that most humans...
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Repent, The End Of Yet Another Year Is Nigh
It is June 30th, 2015; half the year is over. Depending on your age, you will react to this news with indifference or a curious mix of panic, terror, and melancholy. My reaction, as you might guess by...
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