It was a Sunday night and my daughter, Rebecca, and I were heading north on the Merritt Parkway, through Connecticut, back home to Massachusetts, after a weekend of visiting friends and family in and around New York City. On the radio a father was singing a lament about having missed his son’s childhood—you know the song.

Rebecca was eight at the time, and I was in the middle of two years of teaching as a visiting professor in the English Department at the University at Albany, some hundred and forty miles from where we lived—a five-hour commute, round...

I’m sitting in Sonia Nieto’s kitchen, in the home she shares with her husband, Ángel, and their twelve-year-old granddaughter, near the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where Sonia teaches in the School of Education. It is a clean, spacious room: tile, exposed wood, lots of natural light. The rest of the downstairs is much the same: uncluttered but with most of the walls lined with bookshelves—plants distributed throughout. Sonia is in her early sixties. Her hair, mostly white, is short and stylishly cut, her eyes dark, her cheekbones high, her face mostly unlined. She’s talking about her grandson, Celsito,...

“It’s not easy being a mother, is it?” the librarian says, smiling over my shoulder, as I change my six-month-old daughter’s diaper on a desk in the back room.

I close my eyes very briefly, try not to grit my teeth, remember to breathe.

“I’m notbeinga mother,” I tell her, as softly as I can manage. “I’mbeingaparent.”

“You’re doing what mothers usuallydo,” she tells me.

And I think it best to let the conversation die there.

I don’t have the time, the energy, or the tact to respond.

Situations like that were almost a...

I’m at a picnic at my daughter’s school, waiting on line to get lemonade refills, and a kid a few feet away from me misses his hamburger and unceremoniously squirts ketchup on the front of his shirt. I snatch a wad of napkins off the table that holds the lemonade coolers and hand them to him.

Next to me in line, Tom Andrejev¹ says, “A father is always there.” I don’t know the kid, I don’t know the parents, and Tom doesn’t just mean that fathers are there fortheirchildren.

He means if you’re a father, you take responsibility...

I spent the first few weeks of a recent school year attempting to coordinate one or more overlapping car pools. Quintessential parental work, to my mind: elements of scheduling and organization balanced—or thrown out of balance—by a rich broth of interpersonal issues, the fragile egos of both the parents and the children (and, of course, that of the coordinator) at the top of the list.

It was a fair fight and, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll confess that I essentially failed. My reign as Car Pool Czar was cut tragically short, and I had to unstitch...

Bob Smith died in January 2004, and I was one of a handful of white people in the black church in New Jersey where the memorial was held. His ex-wife, Josie, wasn’t there; they’d divorced more than twenty-five years earlier. His brother-in-law, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, of the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, preached the service. Bob’s brother, Marvin, did a little drumming behind the choir and kept the heat of the crowd and the church’s hardworking radiators at bay with a Japanese fan that sometimes hid his face.

I was there for Bob’s son Darryl, one of...

The moviesMary PoppinsandKramer vs. Kramermore or less bookend my childhood: The first came out in 1964, two years after I was born; the second came out in 1979, the year after my parents got divorced. They are of interest to me in part for that reason; they are images I grew up with. But they are also enduring classics: Whether you like or loatheMary Poppins, the movie is part of the very air we breathe.¹ Whether you respect or disdainKramer vs. Kramer, it was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won fi ve, including...

Ronnie Huang¹ can tell you how many degrees hotter you would feel on average wearing black motorcycle leathers compared to white on a sunny summer day. A software consultant who recently changed careers to become a computer science teacher at a prestigious New England prep school, he has an engineer’s enthusiasm for specificity, a good memory, and a predilection for odd bits of information about how things work. And—as you might have guessed—he’s also a motorcycle enthusiast.

For the three and a half years following the birth of his first son, Lucius, Ronnie was the at-home parent. With...

Most of us still go out to see at leastsomemovies. Other movies—along with video of varying types—we bringtous, via purchase or rental, in the mail, on the Web, through whatever counts as TV from house to house and year to year.

Advertising is fundamentally different, an increasingly pervasive multimediaswarmwith a growing degree of intelligence and intentionality. From logos to product placement, from spam to Webverts, we are inundated with ads. There has been a movement afoot for several years now to make ads sufficiently interesting that we will actively seek them out...

“How many guns is too many?” Kevin asks. “A dozen? Fifteen?”So Kevin has over a dozen guns in his house.

In the back seat of the car, Kevin’s daughters, Paige and Hope, both of them chubby cheeked, have fallen asleep, belted in but slightly aslant. We’ve spent the better part of a stunningly hot afternoon at the Elks Club swimming pool, and though he slathered them with sunscreen they’ve both gone slightly pink.

Now, having returned a few books and videos to the local library, Kevin is driving me around their town—Easton, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—in the...

In writing these stories and in looking at how media have sometimes worked to slow social change, sometimes worked to help it along, sometimes merely reflected what has been happening in our culture, I’m after contradictory goals—both politically and emotionally.

I want men who are taking a role in caring for their children—whether as primary parents or as co-parents—to be acknowledged.

Look at us!

At almost the same time, to pay too much attention to men in this situation borders on disrespect and insult. It provides short-term gratification but ultimately isn’t useful.

What are you looking at?...

Fourteen years old now, my daughter still glides up and down the Merritt Parkway with me, down to New York, back up to Massachusetts. When it’s just the two of us in the car, she sits up front, often texting on her Blackberry. These days I teach at MIT, a much more manageable commute—lots of parents on the Writing across the Curriculum staff and a commitment, robust and gender-neutral, to help each other integrate family with work as smoothly as possible.

She’s still here, Rebecca (Beckie!). But—as I knew I would—I miss her.

I never expected to...