In “Familyhood,” his follow-up to the best-selling “Couplehood” and “Babyhood,” comedian and “Mad About You” star Paul Reiser turns his wry eye on the highs and lows of marriage, kids and midlife. Read an excerpt:
Chapter One: Family
It’s a funny word — family. It can mean a lot of different things, depending how you use it in a sentence.
There’s the smile-drenched “Yeah — going to have a nice relaxing weekend, just me and the family.” Versus the clench-jawed “Uch — I got the whole family coming in for a week! It’s going to be brutal!” Same word — and in this case — same family. But very different meaning.
We all hold on to some image of the family we want, based one way or another on the family we had. Lots of people are thrilled about the families they came from, others couldn’t get away fast enough. Most people fall into that vast middle ground: great affection mixed with a few ideas for improvement. A couple of things they wish could have perhaps been done differently.
That’s where starting your own new family comes in handy. You get to start from scratch and get it right.
I don’t know about you, but growing up, I kept an actual list, a lengthy running tally called “Things I’m Not So Crazy About in My Family.” I kept it in my pocket (and in the forefront of my brain) at all times, for the express purpose of being better prepared when the time came to raise a family of my own.
Years later, that time came — and I was ready. This, I said to myself with unwavering confidence, will be the ideal family! How could it not? I mean, I know exactly how I want a family to be now, I’ve married a woman with a perfectly compatible blueprint in mind, we’re equally determined to get everything right ... Yesiree, this is going to be it!
Ah ... there’s such promise at the beginning, isn’t there?
Well, as with any attempt to start society over from scratch, it doesn’t always work out as planned. You pick the perfect deserted island, you bring in fresh, pristine people, you set it up just so, and before you know it the constituents of the New World are squabbling and shoving their way through their overcrowded, polluted, crime-ridden paradise exactly like last time. It’s just the way it goes.
Shifting paradigms
With building a family, what remains unknown is specifically how you’ll fall short of your goals. In exactly what new ways you’ll get it wrong. That’s the mystery. That’s the sport to the whole thing.
Sometimes it’s simply that the paradigms have shifted. My children and I grew up in different millennia, in different parts of the country, at different points in history. So many variables have changed.
As a kid, I grew up with a mom and dad, three sisters, no dog (though that’s all I really wanted), and periodically, some fish. As a grown-up, I have a wife, two boys, a dog, and no fish. The rules are necessarily different. Boys, for example, play differently. They fight differently. They certainly smell different.
So, what I’ve brought with me from my original family does not necessarily apply to this new family.
I grew up on the East Coast, my children are growing up in Southern California. They don’t have to take a jacket every day; it’s 75 degrees out. But I’m still thinking of the wrong childhood; on this day in October in my childhood, it would have been cold out. Here it’s not, but I haven’t adjusted properly. I continue to run after them in the streets with sweatshirts yelling, “Do you not see what month it is?” (The psychological damage to my children has not yet been fully assessed.)
Sometimes it’s something new that takes you down; something you couldn’t have known about. It turns out, for example, I’ve underestimated the significance of video game-playing skills. I’ve never had any particular dexterity with my opposing thumbs, or hand-eye coordination or, for that matter, any real interest. We didn’t have these games when I was a kid, so I couldn’t have anticipated that this particular shortcoming would lead to my own kids growing up nursing the pain of their father’s glaring absence from this sphere of their lives. Who knew?
But even the areas of concern I did see coming, the very things I sought to adjust from my own childhood, may end up “corrected” but not necessarily any better.
Rules of engagement
Example: Growing up, if I wished for anything, it was perhaps that my dad — who worked nobly and tirelessly around the clock — would perhaps work a little less and hang around the house a little more. So I grew up determined to do it differently with my own family.
As best as I’ve been able, I’ve endeavored to always put work second and make it my priority to be home and “just be there” for my kids. Result? My kids wouldn’t mind if I were actually “there” a little less. I’ve heard the prayers: “Oh, Lord, could you maybe get my dad out of the house once in a while, and if possible, could he go away for a couple of days sometime? We’re talking two, three days tops. Really, we’ll be fine. Leave Mom here, though.”
I made notes not just about kid-raising; I also jotted down a few things about marriage — or at least my parents’ marriage, which was, after all, my only real point of reference. I had some very concrete ideas about what I wanted to change, and what I wanted to keep; what I thought worked and didn’t work — as I understood it from my kid’s-height view.
Definitely saw a lot of love and a lot of commitment. Keep. Selfless devotion and sacrifice for their children. Keep.
But I also remember wishing my father would have noticed my mother a bit more. Been perhaps a tad more demonstrative. Or tangibly appreciative. Which is not to say he wasn’t appreciative; I’m sure he was. Just not so’s you’d notice.
And, shrewdly working the other side of the aisle, I simultaneously and actively wished my mother would notice a little bit less that my father didn’t seem to notice her so much.
What I took away from the experience, though, was a commitment to be different when I had a family. I was determined to be unbelievably and demonstratively appreciative of my wife. Which has paid off handsomely — with the exception of the countless thousands of times my wife has nonetheless felt forlornly underappreciated.
I clocked the rules of engagement in my house growing up; the way we communicated with each other as a family. In a word, I think it’s safe to say that clarity was not our strong suit. Nothing said was exactly what you wanted to say, and what you were aching to say was, regretfully, almost always left unsaid. Almost encouraged to remain unsaid. My remedy? Go the other way. In my “new and improved” family, I leave no sentiment unexpressed, no feeling unshared, no fleeting thought unspoken. Good, right? Not really.
“Dad, dial it down, wouldya? That’s just too much information.”
“Really? But I thought you’d want to —”
“No. We’re kids. We don’t need to hear everything.”
Do you see the problem here? There’s virtually no way to win.
Striving to make your new family different from your first family is no easy task. And, I’ve come to realize, making it your life’s work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it’s a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We’d be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because your parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using 10 letters of the alphabet; it’s hard to do, very limiting, and ... makes it impossible for foreigners to understand you over the phone. (Which, while not germane to my point about parenting, I felt was worth mentioning.)
I know my wife and I will raise our kids to the best of our ability. Undoubtedly, our kids will have their own counterbalances in place, and swing back the other way with their own families, messing up their kids in the exact opposite direction. Their kids will hear nothing direct or emotional from their fathers, resent them for never being home, and wonder why, when they were home, they never told the kids to take a jacket when it’s cold out.
And so the cycles will repeat, on and on through time, until the earth is pulled so close to the sun that I’m guessing nobody’s going to need a jacket anyway.
Excerpted from “Familyhood” by Paul Reiser. Copyright © 2011 Paul Reiser. Published by Hyperion. All rights reserved.