I have been reading a copy of one of Stewart McLean’s books of short stories from the 1990s that I found at the local library on sale for a dollar (who says a dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to eh?).
McLean is one of the finest storytellers I have ever had the pleasure of reading (and listening to). He is funny, captures the love of a family, the randomness of life, and has a cadence and pacing all his own that never ceases to delight.
What I have been noticing reading him this time around is the parents in the stories. I could have been a better reader when I was young but I always thought that while the main character Dave was funny I associated more with the kids in the stories. This, obviously, was because I was young, not because they were the main characters. This experience is also a handy reminder that rereading books is fine practice, you never read the same book twice, as they say.
So as I get older, and I continue in the life-long process of parenting three kids, what I notice is the nuance with which McLean captures the emotions of parenting. For instance, Dave’s fears and nerves around his daughter saying she thinks she would like to be a Wiccan. “As his daughter looked around the table [having just announced her desire to become a Wiccan], Dave dropped his attention to the food in front of him. He didn’t want to look at his wife. He felt embarrassed that his daughter, their daughter, could say thing like this. He felt responsible for this. He felt helpless.” These are the human moments and truths that McLean masterfully captures in his fiction; the parent simultaneously feeling responsible and yet powerless.
Sometimes a parent just wants to be loving, and yet they are scared, it is a strange position to be in. In the same story there is much about how to pick ones battles with the kids, how to trust them to make the right choice, how sometimes a child wants you to draw the line for them, so they can blame you to their friends. It’s all so tender and true to my life as a parent.
Maybe a criticism of McLean is a lack of handling kids that do serious wrong or times when things do not work out, though mostly, via Dave, we see a consistent effort to see the humorous side of life, even—or especially—when things are not working out as one might have expected (like when cooking a turkey for the first time). Besides, there is enough darkness in life to leave space for a little unadulterated joy in our fiction.
In one story Dave is going to be late for work, the way things are going the whole family is going to be late for their day. We watch as Dave says the wrong thing to his wife as she struggles to get everyone out the door, and he knows it is the wrong thing to say even as he says it. Dad’s the world over have all been there! Later, he fights the urge to yell, to whine to himself, or start a pity party, instead he leans into something like a “chin up” mentality and moves along. Parents tend to be parents because they have chosen to be so, after all. In this way I find the stories nuanced, real and also encouraging.
It takes a sort of bravery to get through the day being who we set out to be. If we decide to be someone who doesn’t eat muffins, that is easy until there is a muffin with out name on it, if we declare ourselves no longer yellers, well that is easy until someone does something that makes us want to scream. Books like this one, stories like these ones, they help us to feel less alone in the journey, they reminder of the value and importance of the effort, and maybe, just maybe, they will help us laugh when things go sideways.
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