Here is the episode of the podcast Mommy Has Questions that I was interviewed on. It was a fun conversation about stay at home parenting, male roles in the family, and the couple of other things. I had great time, enjoyed the discussion, and the whole Mommy Has Questions team made me feel comfortable and right at home. So thank you for having me.
Please, give it a listen – follow, subscribe, leave a comment. You know the drill.
Boy, did I get yelled at by my daughter this morning, and I didn’t deserve it, but I let her do it. She was angry, not at me, but she did take it out on me. I thought it best to let her express her frustration at having to go to school on a Monday morning.
She is just now beginning to experience emotions that are much stronger than she can grasp or fully express. I need to pick my battles, clearly, but more importantly, I need to make sure she is given space to figure out what it is that she is feeling.
Somewhere, way up in the Either of the next plane of existence, my Mother is laughing her ass off right now. Because I fully deserve this. I deserve to get berated by my kid, because I was that kid not too long ago and did this to my mother. And I am sure that she did this to her mother, and so the chain – this cycle – continues on.
It is humbling, reassuring, and somehow also disconnecting, knowing that everything that I emotionally experience, my child will experience, and that my parents also experienced. That my emotional individuality is kind’a a sham. I’m not original; I’m just like my parents, who were just like their parents, and so on and so on.
(The short story “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff appeared in the November 10th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)
Photograph by Bryan Schutmaat
“Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff is a good story, except for one thing. And I’ll get to that.
But before I get to that, this story made me think about the world my mother lived in. She was married with three sons, and though she told us she loved it, she did have to deal with three stinky boys, who became men, and all the baggage that came with it. Later in life, when me and my brothers got married and had our own families, did it start to dawn on us how much of her life was confined with masculine demands. In that context, much of what is expressed in this story by the narrator rang true to me; that men are always in her house, how her boys were now men, and the need for her home to be a safe place.
When the stalker is added to the story, and thus kicking off the plot, the menace that this man places on the narrator, is not only an immediate threat to her, but also to her home, and these men in her life. And this stalker is truly a threat, because he does have a gun. This weapon also functions as a reminder that violence and men are never too far apart from each other. Her husband has a baseball bat, her sons offer their own cocky protection to their mother, and the narrator even tries to enlist the workers from her home renovation for additional security. All of this raised interesting questions of violence and safety, of masculine and feminine roles, how a mother goes from protector of her sons, to needing protection from them. Even the title of story, which is also the title Catholics use in reference to Mary mother of Jesus, wasn’t lost on me, and added another layer to the piece. Great stuff.
And then the climax happened. The stalker enters the home at night, the narrator is unable to take action, so her son asks the stalker to leave, which the stalker does. And it felt completely incongruent to everything that had come before in the story. This climax broke Chekhov’s Gun Rule, which means if you introduce a gun in the story, you have to fire it at the end. There was an expectation of violence, threat, even menace in this story, and to not deliver a resolution to that expectation left the ending of the story feeling hollow. And I did spend time thinking about this climax and the choices that were made, but I kept coming back to the same conclusion – the gun needed to be fired.
The other day, as we were putting together the kid’s costume for Halloween, she asked me, what did I dress up as for Halloween? At first this seemed like such an easy question to answer, and I started to respond that I went as a pirate, a cowboy, a California Raisin, Indiana Jones… and… and then I couldn’t remember. I drew a blank.
I could remember being a pirate when my family lived in Alabama, which would have made me five. Then I remembered the first Halloween in Texas, a cowboy – real shock there. I know that I did the California Raisin thing in 6th grade because there was a girl I liked and she thought it would be cute if I went as that, which I think shows you how desperate I was to get any female attention. And then Indiana Jones I did in 7th grade to coincide with Last Crusade which had come out that Summer, but it was also my last Halloween because I did feel too old to be out Trick or Treating.
That leaves a gap in my memory from 1st to 5th grade.
Now, I remember going Trick or Treating with my friends over those years. I remember the old guy who gave out pennies, and the house that gave out toothbrushes. There was the could that gave apples, and the family that wrapped Bible verses around mini Snickers bars. And there was the family that turned their home into a Haunted House that you could go through. I remember the junior high boys that would throw eggs, toilet paper, and water balloons at people. I remember families being out, and the police driving slowly through our neighborhood, keeping an eye out, making sure it was safe, and trying to catch those boys on their bikes. I remember the years my mom took me and my friends out, and the times my dad took us.
But nothing when it comes to my costumes from those years. It’s a blank, while also it feels like it’s on the tip of my tongue, but still won’t materialize.
It’s a very strange feeling to not be able to remember this. Like, I know it was a big deal dressing up, and taking time to figure out my costume. I know my mom would help me put it together… but I just can’t remember.
