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Commentary
Me, my daughter and ‘a place that is ours’
I forgot about my daughter in a bar a few days ago. This sentence is softened, at least a little bit, by the fact that the bar in question is also a bookstore, and my wife and I own it. But, still: she is 5 and both of her parents forgot to watch her in a public place, and then were a little proud but mostly relieved to discover her perched on a barstool, nursing a lemonade, eavesdropping on what appeared to be a first date. We went on setting up for a magazine party, and then our daughter materialized with a long rainbow ribbon looking to dance, the moment the magazine’s desired playlist came on.
I tell this story not because it’s adorable (though obviously I think it is, and will probably tell it for years until I notice the glazed over look of recognition on friends’ faces) but because not long ago it would’ve felt inconceivable. Us, together, in a way that did not demand my full presence, or the shelving of whatever else might need to happen in my life until she was asleep or at school? Inconceivable.
I published a book recently that chronicles in essays the first four years of my daughter’s life. As is often the case when you publish a book, I’ve done events to read from and talk about material that is brand new for the audience and years old for me. What’s most shocking to me as I read a depiction of how my life used to be is not the intensity of the constant closeness of early parenthood, but the absence of everything else. It’s a book simultaneously, I realize, about welcoming and negotiating a new life with my daughter and the mourning process for the life I had before her. So much of the parenthood literature I love carries that tinge of mourning, or rather the narrative organizes around a movement toward less mourning, and when you reach that point you know you’re okay.
When my wife and I decided to take over a beloved local bookstore and bar, Riffraff, in Providence, we’d already hit that point. Our daughter was 4 and a half. She was at school all day, and settled into a fairly easy routine in the evenings; my wife went to her office and returned home for dinner, and I went to teach or write, picked my daughter up on the way home. We marveled at how… fine, it had all become, for the most part. Better than fine. The enormous privilege of being able to turn different selves on and off, return from work to your kid as though you’d merely been powered down for the day, and were now ready to be her parent again, the only version of you that mattered.
And suddenly, maybe impulsively, we’d made a decision to insure that dynamic would no longer exist. When my wife and I talked, whether with excitement or in hushed arguments, it wasn’t about our daughter; it was always about the store. When we hustled out the door, and boy were there more of those times than ever before, she knew exactly where we were going, and why. I was worried about the change, especially for me and my daughter. My wife has much more responsibility with the store, but often that skews toward normal work hours. My role is organizing and hosting events; for the first time in our lives together, I was missing bedtime. I had become the kind of parent whose kid heard him say, and not occasionally, I’m sorry, I love you, I’ve got to go. It was hard not to feel like we were screwing up, centering her less, that sometimes we weren’t thinking of her at all. That we’d chosen something over her.
She hadn’t been saying she wanted us to stop the meeting, just that she didn’t want to be alone, left out.
We scheduled our first staff meeting on a Monday that we forgot was a school holiday. We brought our daughter, bleary and loopy in that way children always are on the mornings where their body is primed for the routine of school and then has to linger in the absence of it. We parked her in the corner to color on the couch, which she did gamely until the meeting stretched on. She didn’t start to cry exactly, but after a long while she did give a little whimper, I think to see if our heads would turn. They did, though we didn’t know what to do. I felt frozen.
“No one is with me,” my daughter said. It broke my heart.
“Then come over,” my wife said. This was obvious, but seemed, at the time, revelatory.
She did come over. She moved delicately, holding her little coloring notebook; she smiled shyly at these new adults around her. She clambered up onto a barstool, and listened. She hadn’t been saying she wanted us to stop the meeting, just that she didn’t want to be alone, left out.
It’s not like a light bulb went off for us then, or anything. A couple months later, my parents visited for Thanksgiving. Holiday seasons had always been entirely about family (read: entirely about my daughter, the only grandchild on my side), but now it was a little bit about her and then a lot about Small Business Saturday. We tried to pawn my daughter off on my parents, something she had always loved, but she refused. She was crying, holding on to my wife’s leg. It was a full blown tantrum fairly quickly, one we didn’t expect or react to with much generosity. We ended up taking her to the store with us, the car heavy and silent. At the store, everything was fine — she was smiling, she was asking over and over again if she could help. Again, she hadn’t been upset that we were doing something that didn’t center her; she had been upset that it didn’t occur to us that she might be a part of it.
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It is very rare, now, that if given the opportunity to be at the shop, she’ll turn it down.
When I host a monthly open mic, she likes to wade through the crowd with me to help set up the stage.
It is very rare, now, that if given the opportunity to be at the shop, she’ll turn it down.
When we have kids events, she comes early and seems to hold herself apart from the rest of the children, perched at the bar with her eyes roving the room, the way I imagine we look to her.
When she’s on break from school and her mom is working, I bring her in on a slow Tuesday and she plays Uno, eats popcorn, drinks hot chocolate, passes the time.
These are the little unambiguous snapshots of our life with the store — the moments so perfectly sweet as they happen that I can almost feel my teeth hurting, engineered in a lab somewhere for Instagram. But what is more meaningful, more seismic in my life, and maybe my daughter’s, too, is the way the sometimes irritating, often boring, logistics of our days have opened up so quickly to absorb this space. When one of us takes her to swim lessons on Sunday morning, we have to stop at the bakery and the grocery store to pick up things for the shop — this must happen; it’s an annoyance that cannot be negotiated and so it ceases to be annoying. It’s merely participation. And she wants to participate; she wants to see what we are doing, and in that we have a new way of seeing her back.
I don’t want to paint too rosy of a picture here. Things can be enormously stressful. Sometimes, especially when I’m stressed, I am overcome by a vague idea of all the fictional moments I’m missing with my daughter, because why not toss guilt on top of stress? But that’s my own thing to deal with, my discomfort not hers. What has remained consistent, so far, is the pride she feels at the idea of a place that is ours.
