Keith Gessen - Raising Raffi: The First Five Years

All the Sad Young Literary Men

A Terrible Country

I wrote this book out of desperation.

For the first few months of my son Raffis life, I felt like I was merely surviving. Through the sleeplessness and terror, I put one parenting foot in front of the other and tried not to look too far ahead. But when this passed, what I wanted, more than anything, was to talk. I had never before experienced such a contradictory mass of feelings; had never engaged in an activity so simultaneously mundane and significant; had never met anyone like screaming two-month-old Raffi, or cuddly one-year-old Raffi (Uck, he would say, when he wanted a hug), or scourge of our household two-and-a-half-year-old Raffi. Through each of these phases I was amazed by his transformations, his progress, and my own complicated reactions. I wanted to know if other people were going through the same.

Parents talked, of course. My wife, the writer Emily Gould, and I talked all the time about Raffi, and we sought out other parents on the playgrounds, on street corners, even on the subway. Some of us, when we talked, couldnt help but brag. He started sleeping through the night last week, someone might say, alienating their interlocutor forever. Or: His grandparents took him for the weekend, and we slept late. (An active in-town grandparent was worth, by my informal calculations, about forty thousand dollars a year.) Others went in the other direction. Their child wouldnt nap; he threw his food onto the floor; he bit a kid in day care. Emily and I were in the self-deprecating camp. But of course this left out something, toothe physical joy of being with Raffi, the hilarity of much of what he did. There was, in short, a limit to what you could get at when chatting with other parents. I felt like these conversations never went far enough.

There were books about parenting. Some of them were very good; most were not. In its main current, parenting literature was the literature of advice. The books diagnosed a sicknessyour childs sleep problem, your sons behavior issueand promised to solve it. When the solution didnt work, you blamed yourself. Then you sought out another book, one that would work better, and went through the cycle again.

There was a particular gap, I thought, in the dad literature. In the few books out there, we were either stupid dad, who cant do anything right, or superdad, a self-proclaimed feminist and caretaker. I was sure those dads existed, but I didnt know any. The dads I knew took their parenting responsibilities seriously, were not idiots, and did their best around the house and with the kids. With some notable exceptions, they did less parenting than their spouses. (The gay dads I knew hired a lot of child care.) Nonetheless, they thought it was one of the most important things they were going to do with their lives.

At the time I started working on this book, when Raffi had just turned three, I was supposed to be doing other things. I had a novel coming out that I needed to promote, and then a nonfiction book on U.S.Russia relations that I should have been researching. But I couldnt stop thinking about Raffi: about our situation with him; about the situation of all parents with their little kids. I began taking notes and eventually I started writing these essays.

I felt ridiculous about it at times. To write about parenting when you are a father is like writing about literature when you can hardly read. Almost without exception, in every male-female relationship I encountered, the mothers knew more about their kids than the fathers and parented them better. My own relationship was no exception. Emily was an extremely well-informed parent who also, not long after Raffi was born, started writing occasional essays about him. I love those essays as much as anything she has written. But there were things that I did with Raffitalk Russian, play sports, yell in Russianthat were particular to my experience. And I came to think there was some value in recording my own groping toward knowledge in this most important of human endeavors, a kind of record of a primitive consciousness making its way toward the light. I was part of the first generation of men who, for various reasons, were spending more time with their kids than previous generations. That seemed notable to me.

I recently asked my own father if he remembered my second-grade teacher, Ms. Lynch, because I had just called her up to interview her about education. He said he didnt, and wouldnt. But you must have gone to the parent-teacher conferences? I said. Oh no, said my dad. I was at work. My father had relocated us halfway around the world so that we wouldnt have to grow up in the Soviet Union; drove me to every single hockey game I ever played in from the ages of six to sixteen, which was hundreds of hockey games; almost never traveled for work; and taught me math, physics, how to drive, and how to throw a left hook. He was hardly an absent father. But to him the idea of attending a parent-teacher conference was risible, whereas I consider the quarterly parent-teacher conferences for Raffi major events in my life.

This book consists of nine essays, arranged by subject: birth, zero to two, bilingualism, discipline, picture books, schools, the pandemic, sports, and cross-cultural parenting. Each of the essays describes my experience as a parent; draws on some of the literature and conversations Ive found most helpful (or unhelpful) in thinking through this experience; and comes or doesnt come to a conclusion. Ive tried to make it so that the essays can be read independently, if a busy parent doesnt have any interest in, for example, bilingualism; but Ive also sought to avoid repetition and placed things in a more or less chronological way so that a reader going through the entire book can see Raffi (and me and his mother) slowly moving into the future.