When I’m in Santiago with Matias’s family, there’s a feeling I’ve tried to put into words for a while. It’s not just the food, or
There’s an argument I’ve had with my father maybe four hundred times. I win it every single time. It’s a flawless record, really, because he
At some point (and often the parent cannot say exactly when) the nature of the calls changes. There used to be a request buried in
What does a parent do with a relationship when the work of parenting is finished? The question sounds simple, but for a particular kind of
There is a particular kind of warning that traveled through mid-twentieth century American households as a kind of cultural inheritance, passed between generations with the
My daughter is at the age where she points at things. She points at birds, at passing dogs, at the particular patch of light that
Picture a retired parent on a Sunday afternoon. The children are grown and settled somewhere else. The house is quiet in the way houses get
A friend said something to me recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. We were talking about his uncle — he was
It happened at a café a few months ago. The server brought over two coffees, set them down, and was about to turn away. I
Think about the parent everyone talks about admiringly at a family gathering: the one who coached the team, drove hours to tournaments, read all the
There is a version of this experience that almost everyone knows how to recognize. The parent who tears up at the airport. The one who
Language does something beyond description. When we name a feeling, we give ourselves permission to have it. When there’s no word for something, the feeling
