Fathers like Doug Nelson and Wayne Pomeno would likely lament modern disciplinary practices. They’d say we coddle our children with time-outs and ineffective little sermons. Back in the 1950s, if a smart aleck mouthed off to his parents or, worse yet, pilfered from their money jars, he’d get a whooping, and if your no-good deadbeat mooch of a stepson wouldn’t move out and get a job, he might have a change of heart after a short discussion with your Smith & Wesson.
Parents today are expected to show more restraint and better judgment, even when our emotions rise to the same levels that would have driven parents of previous generations to violence. Parents claiming not to have been pushed to a life-altering breaking point must be lying or, alternatively, not spending enough time with their children. I recall vividly the day that a neighborhood schoolteacher stopped to chat with me in my driveway. “I was afraid if I stayed in the house any longer, I’d wind up in prison for murder,” she said, laughing but serious about her teenage daughter.
After Carl Schunk and Doug Nelson, Ryan and I had come to accept that his chemistry with Irie was grease on water. In every benign dispute, she used emotion, and he used logic, neither of them much willing to switch-hit. He often treated our domestic life with a lawyerly approach. When he wasn’t swearing, grumbling, or bellowing, Ryan was deliberate in his speech patterns, even though, underneath it all, he carried the stress of working with criminals like a chronic illness. When Ryan would calmly lecture Irie—about being sloppy with piano practice or being cruel to a sibling—she would respond, hysterically and predictably, with, “Stop yelling.” When he explained that he was not yelling, she’d raise the ante: “Stop being so mean.” Her style was always to bait him into a fight, the opera singer yearning for the libretto of family drama. Ryan and Irie would work their way, crescendo-style, to yelling about Irie alleging Ryan yelled, irony at its finest.
One time, their fight escalated more quickly than ever before, and Irie trapped him into her emotional corner. As her level of disrespect and accusations mounted, the rest of us in the family receded to the outskirts of the living room. Ryan lunged toward Irie and grabbed her face with the vise of his strong hands. He began to squeeze and to push her backward. She seemed to waver above the floor like a human hovercraft.
“You make me feel like I want to kill you,” he growled.
All of us were caught in the treacherousness of the moment. We felt dead ourselves, preserved with formaldehyde, momentarily beyond our bodies, until I finally intervened and screamed, “Ryan, stop it, you’re going to hurt her!” When he let go of our daughter’s face, the room was strangely quiet, even though Leo and Fern were crying. Frank, as usual, was nonchalant, oblivious, a fourth child in his own quiet world. Ryan snatched his car keys and left for a long drive along the lake, swaddling himself in the lullaby of the warm engine.
We’d recently received another foreclosure notice for our house on Hazel Street, this one from Aurora Loan Services, our mortgage company, which had swooped in to pay our back property taxes in 2008 but was now forcing us to escrow our taxes each year in addition to paying them back. Our mortgage had risen from $600 to $1,400 per month, and we were already three months behind again. I tried to tabulate Ryan’s short fuse against the ledger of our debt. I worked hard on forgiveness. Without my daily dose of oxytocin, maybe I’d be just as much a menace.
Ryan had been considering a second job, added to his fifty-plus-hour workweek as a lawyer. Maybe he’d be a cook or wait tables. That was how we’d afforded graduate school in Ann Arbor. Or maybe he’d leave the profession altogether.
“I could be a pipe fitter,” he said. He reminded me of his summer at Glatfelter, the paper factory where he fitted a never-ending network of lines that transported water to the pulp vats. “It was hot and miserable, but at least the paycheck was steady.”
How much professional regret does one man’s life contain? When I’d catch Ryan in action, singing or dancing, I’d swoon and assert, “You could have been an actor.” Daddy’s Dance Parties were our favorite home events. Ryan would crank up the iPod and blast everything from Beastie Boys to Paul Simon, lifting and twirling the children while headbanging and rocking his hips. He could have been an artist too. One evening he sketched a full-body portrait of my father, sitting cross-legged at the dining room table, depicting him more accurately than any photograph. But none of those forfeited talents would have brought us the stability we needed. Even our years of being educated at prestigious public universities seemed like a waste.
I too felt I’d missed my calling—midwife, pediatrician, childcare provider—any profession that might boost my oxytocin levels as part of my daily grind. I imagined sometimes all the surrogate children I’d nurture and how, according to science, children I’d not even birthed could wrench the throttle on my neurotransmitters. All those student loans, straight As, the flush résumé—what was it all for, if we couldn’t afford to make a family or, worse yet, if we screamed at
