When Joe is older I will say, I remember the day you were born. It was the first cold day of the fall, and as I drove down into the city along the river all the pleasure boats were gone, but the work boats were out, hauling God knows what up and down the Hudson. The boats were red and black, enormous, you had to look and look back again to see the whole of them while keeping your car on the road. I drove my car down the highway next to these tugs and barges and I could imagine their metal insides, their dark stairways, the raised sills, the clanging noise their doors made when they swung shut. I could imagine what it was for the people on them to stand out on deck and look over the water in my direction and see people driving into the city, headed towards the mysterious things that we were all headed for, driving south that morning. Or maybe I wasn’t mysterious to them, maybe they could see me, in their mind’s eye, as I drove my car, parked my car, and walked down the street that first bright cold day of fall, as I stopped in the store to get your mother an egg and cheese sandwich. Maybe they could see—and why couldn’t they see this? They moved freight up and down the Hudson, so what couldn’t they do?—maybe they saw the man at security, the elevator, the sign that instructed me to press the button to get into the maternity ward. They could see your mother, tired, happy, lying on the bed in a pool of light, and your father, tired, happy, sitting in a chair. Could they see you, Joe, in the hat that wouldn’t stay on your head, eating your blanket, trying to eat your mom? Could they see anything as beautiful as you, Joe, on the boats that went up and down the Hudson that day?

If you have a dog you must love your dog. You must love your dog and at the same time, you must build a can of coins to shake at your dog if she barks in the night. You must build the can of coins to shake at your dog if she barks in the middle of the night and when she barks in the middle of the night you must shake the can of coins at her and say, No barking!, and go back to bed, and in the morning you must feel, mixed with other feelings, relief it was your husband who rose early to take her out for a walk and found shit in her crate. You must feel this. You have no choice.

Henry and John, but really, for the time being, Henry, have a new computer through which he receives regular doses of Lego Star Wars. Lego Star Wars, like alcohol, is a drug that relaxes one’s inhibitions, without providing any additional insight, or even a profound but imaginary sense of insight. There are some deleterious effects on coherence, although less than you would think, and it is also, sadly, addictive. Still, as Henry’s current major inhibition is a reluctance to tell his mother and father any information about his life, and as Lego Star Wars significantly reduces that inhibition, I have been administering Lego Star Wars to him in judicious amounts. The questions I ask are not nefarious! I observe certain boundaries. And there is something nice, I think, about talking about math problems, and what happened on recess, and, gingerly, cautiously, whence he received his information about something recently referred to as “sexy moves,” while Henry blasts droids apart. Why did you do that? I asked him recently, after he killed a droid in a non-combat situation, i.e., for fun, and he said, The game doesn’t care.

Now that I have a dog I have to talk to my dog. I talk to my dog the way people talk to their dogs. It feels strange. One thing I’m focused on is that I don't want to say I'm her Mommy. That seems weird to me. So I tried using other referents for myself besides Mommy. Instead of, Mommy doesn’t want you to do that I said, Your female owner doesn’t want you to do that. Female to differentiate myself from David, her male owner. He is trying so hard to have a good relationship with the dog, and I didn’t want to sabotage it. You see how crazy it gets, right away. Anyway, I said, Your female owner doesn’t want you to do that and then it sounded so strange that I thought I needed to explain things to the dog, so I tried to explain my discomfort, to the dog, about being called her Mommy and then I just tried to walk a while without saying anything, which also seemed strange, and then I took her for too long a walk so I had to end it by carrying her home in my arms. I was worried about her.

She’s very beautiful. I think she’s very smart.

Mom called from Rome to ask about the dog and in passing noted that her dog is my dog’s uncle, which sounded fine until I figured out that this was because he is my brother. According to my Mom. So do you think that I don’t want to say that I’m the dog’s Mommy because I’m acting out some kind of Freudian drama? I don’t think so. I think I’m just being a jackass. I think it’s like the time I went to a small town in France for a wedding and there was some old tradition in the town having to do with cows and weddings that had, over time, become a tradition in which a plastic inflatable cow was brought onto the dance floor and people had to dance with it. I fled the dance floor but one American woman, trapped, danced the hell out of that cow. Sometimes committing oneself to idiocy is the only honorable thing to do.

The children are fighting downstairs. I can hear them thudding into the walls. Early this morning I thought that one of the children was upstairs, dropping marbles on the floor above my head, but it was squirrels dropping nuts in the gutter, instead. The children were asleep in their rooms.

Now the children are fighting downstairs. Henry has a friend over and I’m sure this is part of the fight—John would like to be included in the play date—but the boys don’t need something to fight about in order to fight. They have all of childhood and adulthood to fight about. They can fight about the possibilities of outer space and endless time.

Yesterday morning David left for work and the children woke and came into my room. I turned on the bedside lamp and everything was cozy and nice. You’re warm, Henry said, getting under the covers. John sat on the floor reading. Then I went to the bathroom and closed the door and they started hitting each other. On the phone later David and I imagined what happens when I close the door. The children turn to each other. What should we do? one of them asks. I could hit you in the head, says the other. You hit me in the head last time, says the first one. Anything else? Naw, all out. All right, all right, hit me in the head. Then, cooperatively, lovingly, they hit each other and cry.

David just said to me, Why don’t you write the history of our marriage to date? Isn’t he a bold and saucy fellow! And what would he like me to tell you? Is he expecting some kind of paean to his strength and fortitude? A paragraph or two on his warmth and love for our children? An ironic aside about his romantic foibles? Bastard. He’s not going to get any of that.

Or is he being serious, he wants a history? Doesn’t he know that marriage isn’t historical, it is the end of history, that once the marriage begins all is as it should be, and will be forever? I love you, I love you more, I love you always. Is that a history? I didn’t think so.

At temple on Friday, I was worried that my father would misbehave. Scoff and get restless and telegraph his contempt for the proceedings to the other people there. Mom and Dad raised us antireligious, and inconsistent. Otherwise I couldn’t have this situation, I couldn’t be worried that Dad would misbehave at the temple I joined so that my children will be able to understand what Judaism is, before they reject it.

There was a period in my 20s when I had just married David and my parents and I fought bitterly, and I thought that I would never have the relationship that I wanted with them. David and I moved to Brussels and had a baby, and for this reason and others, things improved. I used to wish that I hadn’t had that period with my parents, first because it was painful for me, and then, more recently, because I hated having hurt my parents. But now, strangely, I realize I’m glad that we had a period of acrimony and grief. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to see my parents as clearly as I do, and love them as much as I do.

At the temple I was worried about Dad. The night before he’d started laughing when Mom said the word bima and at the temple he’d been making jokes as we settled down. I guess Phil Spector got out for this, was one, on seeing a man with enormous head of hair. Also, I had no idea what the service was going to be like, and I wanted everyone to like it and not, if they were my father, think it was stupid and a waste of time. This isn’t a story about God, this is a story about my family, and how, as I listened to the music and read, in the prayer book, about repentance, which is the act of being sorry for what you’ve done and changing yourself, making yourself better than you had been, I stopped worrying about my Dad, because I knew that down the row he was reading the same thing, and that he would feel the same way I did about it.

I couldn’t write yesterday. There’s no excuse for that. I should probably be punished. But perhaps you’re not used to punishing people. You don’t know how, you say. You never do it. While I don’t believe you at all, I am happy to help out. I punish my children from time to time, and I think I have the hang of it. Also, although I don’t generally admit this, sometimes I get angry at other adults and punish them. I actually like it much better than punishing the children. Do you remember the part in Anna Karenina when Levin is angry with Kitty and realizes that he can’t punish her without hurting himself? Unfortunately, it’s like that with my children, for me. So it’s better to punish other people, people I don’t love, if it’s at all possible.

Two ways that I punish other adults, while we’re on the topic, is that I forget their names or don’t call them back. Those are my main techniques. Does anyone else have another good way to punish an adult you know? If you did, you could use it on me.

Otherwise, you’re kind of stuck with the kids’ punishments. You know, no TV, no dessert, no special thing that you’re looking forward to. You have to find something I really care about and take it away from me. Sometimes, with the children, I miscalculate, and take something away from them that they don’t actually care about. But they usually let me know this right away, and then I find something they do care about and take that away.

You could also give me a time out. I don’t know if that’s really a punishment, though. It works great with the kids, in the sense that everyone cools down and in fact the kids generally forget what the whole thing was about and just start happily playing by themselves, but you may not think it’s harsh enough for me. Remember, there’s no excuse for me missing a day of writing. There are billions and trillions of things to write about and I wrote about none of them, even though I said I would.

Maybe you don’t want me to cry? I can’t promise that I won’t. I cry a lot, although less than I used to. If you’re really worried that I’ll cry and you’re uncomfortable with this, I have another idea for you: positive reinforcement. Set up a chart and give me a star each time I write. When I get twenty stars, let me choose anything I want as my reward.

Saturday morning John and I sat on the bathroom floor, me in my bathrobe, him naked and wrapped in a towel and waiting to vomit again. I was sorry he was vomiting, and he was really sorry he was vomiting, but at the same time it was cozy together on the cold tile floor. He knew I loved him, and I knew I loved him, too. Later we both fell asleep in the playroom and were woken when he vomited on my chest. This is the easy part of being a mother.

I went to the movies last night. Gasp and throw things wildly in the air, readers, because it is true. (Now pick things up and put them neatly away.) You Kill Me. If I had made the movie, I would have done it a tiny bit differently. If I tell you how, it may spoil the movie for you. Oh, you want me to tell you anyway? Very well, if you insist.

Ben Kingsley plays an alcoholic hit man whose condition is adversely affecting his work. For no reason I can tell he is sent to San Francisco to dry out. He works at a funeral home making dead people look nice, which is cutesy but I let it slide because there he meets Téa Leoni, with whom I have been in a fight since Spanglish (plot summary within a plot summary: My wife is powerful and independent and so very mean. I want a woman who doesn’t speak my language and is my subordinate. Oh, Spanglish, I love you) but who begs for my forgiveness by being very good in this movie, and so is forgiven. Let’s never fight again.

Fine, so they love each other and he needs to dry out so he can get back to killing people but then should he keep killing people? Montage of them practicing knife work on a watermelon together. What I’m saying is, one starts to hope that this will turn out to be like Trouble in Paradise, in which two people meet and realize that each is at heart the same kind of criminal, and then love each other madly and commit crimes together. But while Leoni helps Kingsley wrap things up via knife and gun, there’s no indication that they then kill people together into the sunset. So in the end it’s a good movie, when it could have been better than good.

There are very few things I couldn’t improve.

Maybe a year ago, I felt so much love for my husband that I thought the sentence, “I must get a tattoo to commemorate my love for him.” Obviously, the flacks at the tattoo lobby have been doing their work. I accept that at least half of my thoughts have been planted by people with a commercial interest in me. I am grateful for this, because otherwise I would spend half of my time not thinking anything at all.

Oh, I don’t mean it. Do I? Lately I have instituted a new program of not buying things, so that we can pay for the kitchen, which is going to be, of course, more expensive than we thought. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you about the progress of our renovation, a subject only slightly less deadly than the topic Why I’m Late to This Thing I’m Late to. [And slightly more deadly than The Dream I Had Last Night That I Don't Understand (But You Will, Because It's Transparent).] I’m not doing anything drastic, of course. The program is just that, when I think, Should I buy this thing? I then think, No, I’m not buying anything. Then sometimes I don’t buy the thing.

I’m not crazy, like some people.

Anyway, I passed some time thinking about tattoos. I wanted a classy tattoo. I wanted an upper-middle-class tattoo, a tattoo that would signify taste and knowledge at the same time it communicated undying love for another upper-middle-class person. Also, I wanted a tattoo that would look nice as my body deteriorates.

David’s father gave a beautiful toast at the wedding. He told us how much he loved us, and how much he already loved Jess, Dan’s wife, and how happy he was that she was now a part of our family. It wasn’t original, maybe, but it was felt, and it was wonderfully said. One thing I love about toasts is that they allow normal people to step forward and rip off their workaday clothes and throw their glasses away and say something beautiful and profound.

I’m afraid I’ll bore you, if I go on saying that things were truly wonderful, and beautiful, and that everyone loved each other. Sometimes it happens.

We were in Oregon. Out west. Before we went David said, Maybe we can take the boys to a rodeo and I said David, it isn’t the West, it’s the Northwest. Rodeos. Please. And roundly abused him for this idea. Meanwhile, there are rodeos everywhere in Oregon. We didn’t go to a rodeo, though. We went to a very depressing aquarium, where a dead shark lay on the bottom of the tank. The aquarium is also where, because of displays about the giant squid, John became obsessed with the dream of seeing a giant squid. Which has never been captured alive. Someday, maybe, his dream will be realized, although one hopes not at this aquarium, which needs to feed its fish or change their water or something.

We also went to the beach, where everyone set off firecrackers around us while we built a fire in the sand and handed the children long sharp skewers for roasting marshmallows. This was my quota of dangerous activities with the children for the next year or two.

Nothing bad happened.