December Daily: Parenthood

kass asks: Tell me, if you will, what you enjoy most about parenthood?

The kidlet, believe it or not, will be sixteen in three weeks.

More and more, I can see them coiling to spring away. I'm going to hate to see them go -- I would be happy if the three of us could live together indefinitely -- but on the other hand, they're looking forward to it so!

Parenthood, taken minute by minute, is sometimes a grind. Especially with small children, it's relentless -- however tired you might be, however many millions of dollars you would pay for an hour of uninterrupted solitude, you still have to be there.

You have to be there with a level of present-ness, of focused intelligence and attention, that very few jobs demand, ready to leap to stop a toddler from swallowing a cigarette butt, or to explain to a four-year-old that animals died so that we could eat meat, or to explain to a ten-year-old that you can't tell bad guys by the way they look, or to help a child understand that sometimes you get really angry at their dad, and sometimes you get really angry at them, and sometimes they get really angry at you, and that's all OK and nobody's going to get hurt, even if your own childhood experience is that that wasn't true.

But for me it's been deeply joyful, too, in a number of ways:

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