Category: Parenting

  • Short Story Review: “Nocturnal Creatures” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

    (The short story “Nocturnal Creatures” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh appeared in the May 5 th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

    I like this story a lot, so I’m not gun’na fart around with some cute opening here. “Nocturnal Creatures” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a very good story and you should read it.

    Overly Simplified Synopsis: A exterminator meets a single mother and her son while on the job, and they all become involved.

    To start with, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh crafts this story very well. Every time I have read this story, I keep coming to a better appreciation of how all the pieces of this story are laid out, how they interlock and interact. For example, the first section of this story establishes the character of the exterminator, how he views himself and his job. Then going into the next part, when he meets the mother, we are shown the ways she tries to take care of herself and her son which leads us to understand, from the previous section, why the exterminator would identify with her. It’s a little cheesy to say this, but Sayrafiezadeh does an excellent job of “showing” us who these characters are, and not “telling” us. (And somewhere in the world, a creating writing professor just got his wings!) But seriously, each section builds on the previous, creating a momentum in the story with their actions. The narrative never gets mired down in explanations, because Sayrafiezadeh provides a clear understanding of these characters motivations by what they are doing.

    And these are characters that have lived, and maybe they haven’t had the best breaks in life, but they aren’t broken either. There is an optimism to them, but also a melancholy. Are they repeating past mistakes, or trying to make amends for their past? I was fascinated with how the exterminator never said he cared about the mother and her son, but his actions were that of a guy who wants to take care of them. The fact that he gave up his day sleeping time to be with them, wasn’t lost on me. And this was a mother who hadn’t given up on her ambitions, but she knew she had responsibilities which she did her best to uphold. I felt I knew these people, and wanted them to succeed, to carve out the happiness they deserved. But there felt like a little dark cloud hung over their lives, keeping the story grounded in realism, because life’s not always fair, no matter how good intentions attempt to be.

    I wanted it to work out. I wanted them to be happy, but there isn’t a clear, concrete answer to what happens next, and that’s okay. I’m good with the decision that Sayrafiezadeh made to end it the way he did. Maybe it’s a bit of a ploy – yet I would argue that over the course of the story, we have been shown how these characters continually make choices to be together. So why would that change at the end of the story when they reach the crux of their situation?

  • A Manic Laundry Monday

    A Manic Laundry Monday

    In case anyone has forgotten, I am a stay at home dad. Though hard to believe, blogging don’t pay the bills, and as such, I take my responsibility as the primary caregiver of my family very serious. Well… Serious enough. I’m not great at this stuff, but I do get the job done.

    And the one jobs I do on the regular is my families laundry. I do lots of laundry, and as the kid keeps getting older and bigger, I am doing more and more laundry. I have started to fear and dread the teenage years, and the amount of clothing that will be coming my way.

    Now, I have only been the stay at home dad for the past five years, but my mastery of all things laundry has been ongoing for eleven. Even before the kid was born, I took care of out clothes. Sometimes I would drop it off at a wash and fold service, sometimes I would get up early on a Sunday morning and take care of it. But for whatever reason, be it through decision or frustration, I became the laundry guy.

    And full honesty, it is my least favorite chore. Cooking, cleaning, doing the finances, going to the school meetings, dropping the kid off/picking her up – all of that I am fine with. Just not the laundry. It’s a thankless task, and no one likes it, and it eats up so much of my time. I try to get it all done on Monday, as no one likes Monday, and I have found that at my local laundromat, Monday is the least busy day.

    But I have started to wonder of late, that I can’t keep this up forever. I have to carry the laundry to the mat, and as I pointed out, each year, more and more clothing gets added to the task. I fear that at some point, the laundry chore will become so big that I will either have to split it up over two days, or I am going to have to beg my landlord to allow us to have a washer/dryer hook up. Not that we have a place for it in this tiny apartment. Surely, I don’t want to be that old man carrying a sack of dirty clothes, or worse yet, have to use a granny cart…

  • Need to Get Outta Here

    Need to Get Outta Here

    I have been feeling a little stir-crazy in the apartment of late. Spring has arrived, we even had two days of Summer, and with the windows open, warmer weather, and everything turning green, being in the City all the time has started to feel like a drag. It’s time to do some travelling and see something new. Well… newish would also work.

    We are fortunate enough to have a car, and during the Pandemic, it was a lifeline as it allowed us to get out of New York, and see green spaces, or spaces that had no people so we could spread out. We even went through, what we can now define as, our hiking phase which took us all over the Tri-State area. But the wife has a back injury, so hiking has taking a backburner role in our life, at least until the wife gets her full mobility back. Yet, with the car, we can travel in the realm of day trips.

    That’s where I am at right now. I’m a bit anxious to get in the car and just drive up along the Hudson, and look at antiques. Maybe even a charming café would be nice. I won’t say no to a craft brewery, as I am a man of that age, and the wife can drive home.

    But what I really want is to just go. To move, get action, sully on to someplace. To be in motion and not feel static.  

  • Local Middle-Aged Man Buys Shoes from His Youth

    Local Middle-Aged Man Buys Shoes from His Youth

    This is a long story, but follow me here…

    So, back in 1992, I was a sophomore in high school, and the way my town ran their schools, 10th grade sophomore year was your first year in high school. As such, we sophomores were the new kids in class, and as such, we were all figuring out how high school worked.

    I had come into high school with this idea that theatre was going to be one of my things, as my high school not only had a proscenium theatre, but also a theatre classroom and a blackbox theatre as well. Now, let’s not get crazy here, this was still Texas, so the entire focus of the school was on football, and that got all the money and attention. Yet, for some reason, there was this little pocket of theatre in the high school, and I wanted to be a part of it.

    And as I navigated this new world of high school theatre, with all of the pretension and promise, one of the upper classmen, a senior whose name I no longer remember, told me as he looked at my Reebok high-tops, that theatre people wear black high-top Chuck Taylor All-Stars. I was gullible and desperate for approval, so clearly I had to go out and get a pair of All-Stars. To my mother’s dismay, as she had just bought me a new pair of Reebok high-tops for school, I had her take me to Dillard’s so I could spend my own money ($20) to buy a pair of black high-top Chick Taylor All-Stars.

    From 1992 to this day, I have always owned at least one pair of All-Stars.

    Now, the only change that has occurred with my owning a pair of All-Stars came in 2000, when I went to buy some, but the store was sold out of high-tops, so I bought a pair of the low-tops.

    And Thus! From 2001 to 2025, I have owned only black low top Chuck Taylor All-Stars.

    Except when I went shoe shopping with the kid the other day. As she was looking at a pair of pink All-Star high-tops, I was drawn to the black high-tops. More for a lark than anything, I tried on a pair just to see. The kid encouraged me to get them, as she hasn’t seen me in anything but low-tops her whole life. I had to make sure she wasn’t messing with me, like telling me to do something to make me look silly. But, my kid isn’t vindictive like that, so she must have meant it, that the shoes looked good on me.

    Funny how that guys comment from high school has stuck with me; He was probably messing with me when he said it.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Everything is Green, Son of a Clothes Horse, and Sick Kid on the Couch

    ODDS and ENDS: Everything is Green, Son of a Clothes Horse, and Sick Kid on the Couch

    (Who said that!? Not Me!)

    …And I hope you enjoy the weird AI image that was created for this post…

    Came out this morning to do the Alt Side Parking Dance, and discovered that our little car was covered in green. The wife had parked under a tree, and now there is a fuzzy haze of pollen all over the vehicle. Besides the fact that my allergies started weeping in despair as I felt my nose simultaneously running and clogging up, I also wondered how much pollen could this car collect? Could my car have so much pollen on it that if I drove around the City, even out in the country, it would act as a pollinator? I know the bees are dying off, but if push came to shove, couldn’t we just drive are cars around to, in a very basic rockbottom way, pollenate the world? Just an idea, cause there is a crap ton of tree pollen on my car.

    First of all, let me start by saying this very loaded statement; I love my wife very much. And as such, we tease each other often, as is our want. There are many things she makes fun of me over, but one of the most recurrent jokes of her’s is to call me a “clothes horse.” Going on twenty years, she’s called me this. Until I had met my wife, I had never heard this term before. A clothes horse is a folding frame used inside someone’s house to hang laundry on while it dries, or a fashionable person who thinks too much about their clothes. (I bet you can guess which definition my wife uses for me.) Most specifically, she will uses this term towards me on days when I have a sitting around the home outfit, a running errands in the neighborhood outfit, and then a third running around town outfit. Not that I do this all the time, but it does happen; I have been known to wear three different outfits in one day. So, I was home visiting my dad the other week, and I witnessed my father doing the same thing; over the course of the day, he had three different outfits he would put on. I had never noticed that, nor thought about it, as that’s just who my father is. Now, I clearly see the depths of the influence this man has had on my life, for I am the Son of a Clothes Horse.

    The kid was sick the other night. Like very sick, and throwing up. She was weak, and needed to be comforted, which I was more than happy to do. As she gets older, the opportunity for a snuggle starts to decrease, you know. But I noticed something as we were on the couch at 2am, hoping that she would be able to keep crackers down; That when she’s sick and on the couch in the daytime, I watch whatever she wants to watch – But at night, I make the kid watch what I want to watch. Nothing inappropriate, but it’s my choice. So, the other night, at 2am, I made my kid watch the MST3k episode “Cave Dwellers.” It’s one of my favorites, and to be honest, I wasn’t too concerned with what the kid thought, as she was nauseous and going in and out of sleep. The next morning, she was feeling better, still a little under the weather, but better. And to my surprise, she was making Cave Dweller jokes – like, “I fell on my eight sided dice,” “Gotta a Minute!” and “The tapes not queued up!” I couldn’t have be prouder to be her father!