It’s not a zero sum game. Sometimes.

I was going to get to work early today to get ahead on some stuff. My older daughter wanted to read some more of this book we’re reading. We had two chapters left. I read one of them. I’ll read the last one when I get home tonight. Reading to her was a nice way to spend part of my morning. The worst parenting moments are the ones where it feels like a conflict over scarce resources, where my priorities are fixed and my time and energy are limited and I have to choose (and I’m not talking hobby priorities, I’m talking about stuff like whether or not I put in extra time to job hunting). The best moments are when I can just turn off the other demands on my time and enjoy being with my kids.

My older daughter is a precocious book listener. She’s a beginning reader, and her reading interests massively outstrip her reading ability. That’s going to be difficult for a while, until those catch up. One nice part is that we know what she’s reading and can edit out stuff that’s age inappropriate. Another nice part is that she’s moved into chapter books and it’s really fun to read these books to her. We’re about to finish The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairlyland and Lead the Revels There, which is the sequel to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. They’re a lot of fun. My daughter’s enthusiasm makes them even more fun: she pretends to be the main character a lot, and will have her dolls act out scenes from the books or things occurring in the world of the books.

Lately my family and I have started going to an evening storytime at our local library. It’s really nice to hear more kids stories and to spend even more time hanging out at the library. I’m checking out more books myself, and reading more for fun instead of just dry stuff for work. My kids are developing a relationship with the librarians, which is fun to see and it’s cool for them to have more ties to adults. My wife and I are getting to know some of the other parents a bit, though there’s not a lot of time for grown up conversation, mostly the harried parent conversation grabbed in moments between children’s needs. The night storytime works well for us because we’re on a late schedule. Getting anywhere by 11 in the morning is really hard for us in ways that are hard to describe to people who aren’t in a similar situation, but going to evening activities totally works. It’s nice being around other families who are wired the same way. We were talking about this with a mom at the library last time. We also tend to just get along well with parents who take their kids out places at night - the other parents who close the library and who are at the playground as the sun sets (and in both places, arguing with their kids about how it’s time to go home now), they tend to parent similarly as us and tend to be interesting people in their own right, even if they don’t have the same taste in books and music and whatnot, the sorts of things that used to play a bigger shaping role in who I wanted to talk with before I had kids.

I haven’t been single in forever and I was never any good at it so I don’t remember this very well but there’s a thing that goes on with other parents that’s kind of like dating or pre-dating-flirting, along the lines of “I like their clothes and how they act and talk, I’d like to spend more time around them, if they’d like to spend more time around me, I wonder if they feel the same way” though now it’s “around us” instead of “around me.” There’s just a sense that maybe this is someone I click with. To really work the kids have to be on board too, at least minimally in the sense of not objecting, and the kids have to be close enough in age for hanging out to make sense. It’s hard to make friends like this with other families without sustained contact, because there’s so little chance to talk when the kids are so little. Social spaces like library story time are important for this because that’s where we get to interact with other parents and families to make these kinds of assessments. Then there’s the whole thing of asking; I’m better at this than my wife, I’m real direct, “we like y’all and want to get together with you. you all want to hang out some time, maybe we could meet at the playground?” My wife’s always like “you’re so much more comfortable than I am with that” but I think mostly I just swallow the discomfort and dive in.

I have an impulse to try to say something deep-sounding here about parenting or about kids’ books, something about a sense of wonder and curiousity or something, but I don’t think I can pull it off without it sounding cheap and I don’t know if those things are ever not cheap, in that parenting is just hard and it will remain hard and there’s no trick or magic to it, it’s just a matter of doing what you can and enduring the hard parts and trying to enjoy the good parts. I resent the things that make it harder, like low pay and joblessness and long hours and lack of health insurance and worrying about all that. With more money and less work, this would all be easier, though it would still be hard.