Category: Personal Essay

If you happen to be married with kids, you’ve probably had the discussion about whether the stay-at-home-parent route is right for your family. For years, the assumption was that moms would take care of the kids and the home, and dads would bring home the bacon. Then, as more opportunity became available to women, both…

Here’s the situation, folks: I have a serious keeping-up-with-the-Joneses problem, and, as a result, I need to reset my priorities as a parent. I really don’t know where it came from. I suspect it’s my competitive nature—a propensity to assess myself against others in a quest to win. It really doesn’t matter what the competition…

Are you a new parent? If so, I want to give you the real about what that felt like for me—a dad. But be warned! This ain’t the made-for-facebook version, meticulously crafted to present the most positive, look-at-how-great-my-life-is, you-really-should-be-a-little-bit-jealous-of-us-right-now take on how things went. This is the I-just-saw-something-both-remarkable-and-weird-and-now-I-feel-joyous-and-tired-and-relieved-and-scared version. This is how things really went….