On family

We've been sick for more than a week now. The other night I was asked to go into Sadie's room to check on her. She was at the door, coughing, with her hair sweat stained. "Get out of my room!" she yelled, pushing me back. "I want mommy." One of the best things about parenting is that it's always rewarding, every gesture, every lost minute of sleep is always lauded by your children, which is why it's so easy. Another night, these nights run together now, she's been waking up multiple times since last Wednesday, I walked into her room and she said she didn't want me to snuggle her, so I lay on the floor in her bedroom, in the dark, waiting for her to fall asleep.

I keep trying to talk Stephanie into watching that new movie by Shane Carruth about the couple who wakes up from being poisoned by a plant or something, which is pretty much what it feels like. The little boy is sick now. Luckily, he's not as picky about his caretakers. Just tonight, when he woke up with a fever, I picked him up and rocked him against my chest while he whimpered. Eventually, he rested his head on my chest and drifted off to sleep.

I've been binge watching Breaking Bad over the last couple of days and am forty or so minutes from the conclusion. If you haven't seen it, oh well, if you have, I like the connection to Whitman, his songs about America, which are songs of the self. I like the inversion of the American dream that is being told as the show's characters head towards the finish in one way or another. The myth of the self-made man. We are islands only in our minds. In life, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we are frail and dependent creatures who are only capable of telling ourselves mythical stories of the self, which help us to sleep.