I can still remember, vividly, the day that my father taught me to ride a bicycle. We lived at the end of a quiet suburban street lined with cherry and dogwood trees, our house set back from the cul-de-sac by what seemed to me, at age 5, to be a very long and very wide drive, perfect for small bicycles, and my dad and I spent hours there together as I circled that drive, round and round and round, on my little bike with the big training wheels. On the day that the wheels came off, we left the security of that smooth-paved drive and went out onto the street.

Dad kept his hand on my back as I pedaled down the street, and he kept it there as I pedaled back up the street, and he kept there as I pedaled down again and up again and with every pass the pressure of his hand became lighter and lighter and lighter until suddenly I couldn’t feel it there anymore, and I was flying, all on my own, and I remember that moment, I remember it keenly, that moment of sudden, terrifying, exhilarating realization that I was on my own, that I was doing it on my own, that I could do it all on my own, and I turned my head to see where he was, and he was there, of course, just some distance back, smiling as wide as I would ever see him smile, thrilled, proud, because this was something we’d done together, this thing, this getting me to be able to do this all on my own, and he was prouder of me than I was of myself, and the cherry trees and the dogwood trees flashed by me as I sped along, not looking where I was going, and it was wonderful, wonderful. And then I crashed into the bushes on someone’s lawn, and I cried.

It hadn’t occurred to me until this morning, watching my husband teach Emilia how to ride her bike all on her own, that my own bike-riding lesson with my own father summarized our relationship perfectly, that it did, in fact, summarize parenthood perfectly, if one could overlook the banality of the trope of lifting parental hands from the shoulders of the child, inasmuch as that moment – the banal lifting of one’s hand, figurative or otherwise – is in some ways the moment, the moment that stays with us, parent and child, as the moment during which everything changes and yet becomes – in the very same moment – ever fixed. I can still feel my father’s hand on my back, I can still hear his footsteps running alongside me as I pedal harder and faster, harder and faster, speeding along, speeding away. And I can still sense him there, behind me, smiling, proud, watching me go.

This is what a father gives to his daughter, what a parent gives to a child; this what I saw my husband give to our girl this morning, this encouragement to fly, this promise to always keep his hand ready to catch her, this covenant of letting go and holding on, this pact of saying goodbye and never parting. This lived promise that is family, that is love.

I can still feel my father there, I said, and that’s true. I can no longer see his smile, because he’s gone, but I know that it’s there. I can still feel his hand on my back.

Today I saw my daughter’s father put his hand on hers. This is how life goes on.

———

(If you have HBO, you need to watch or DVR this film today and share it with the dad in your life. It’s a wonderful, heart-lifting and heart-yanking meditation on fatherhood and parenthood and the love that we feel for our kids and as I said last week at the film’s HBO premiere, it’s the kind of film that reminds you of things that you didn’t think you needed reminding about. Like telling your kids that you love them. Your parents, too.

It’ll be out on video next month. I’ll remind you about it then. You’ll thank me.

Now, go hug the dad in your life.)

Here is what I’m worrying about today:

1) My husband has taken the children camping.

2) In a tent.

3) Without me.

The camping itself isn’t worrying, I suppose. My parents took my sister and I camping all the time and it was awesome, and I love the idea of doing the same with my children. But, see, in that scenario, it’s a two-parent camping trip. I can’t imagine camping alone with my children in our backyard, let alone out in the wild. And not because I worry about all the dangers that wilderness potentially poses to children, but rather because I fear that my children – who sometimes, as I have said many a time, remind one of rabid honey badgers – will be too at home in the wild, and that the wild will call forth their inner feral natures, and that they will overpower their father and leave him tied to a tree or something while they race through the woods terrorizing woodland creatures.

And/or interrogating them.

The alternative possibility is, I suppose, that they will spend a couple of days working their inner honey badgers out of their systems, and I will return home from New York to exhausted and placid creatures who, after days of living in the wild without Barney and Dora and mac and cheese on demand, have come to appreciate the finer things of indoor life.

Or not. I’m guessing not. I’m guessing someone might need to send out a search party for my husband.

It’s Kyle’s birthday today. I’m not going to tell you how old he is, because I think that he’s feeling a little weird about that, and if the 21st century has taught us anything, it’s that there’s nothing weirdmaking that can’t be made even more weirdmaking by being broadcast on the Internet. So.

Emilia got him sticks for his birthday. She put a lot of thought and planning into that, and it’s important to realize – as she explained at some length this morning when she presented them, with great fanfare, which is to say, wrapped in ribbons and pulled with a flourish from behind her back – that they aren’t actually sticks, but tools. “Car tools,” she explained. “For your car.”

The largest stick is a tire tool. “It’s for when you want to get new wheels for your car,” she said, waving it in a circular motion above her head, presumably to illustrate the concept of ‘wheels.’ “You just poke your tires with it like this” – jab jab jab – “and you make a hole and then you get to have new ones.” The three smaller tools, she explained, were simpler instruments: “you use them to scrape the paint from your car” – she held it horizontally, gripped in both hands – “for when you want to get the paint off so it can be painted a different color.”

Kyle, needless to say, was moved and proud: his daughter invented a portable kit for car vandals in his honor, which really is every father’s dream.

“I’m going to keep this always.”

“You’d better keep it in your car, Daddy. But maybe I should help you with your tires, first.”

Her future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades – and carry lots of bail money.

… is unparalleled.

Happy Father’s Day, you.

*****

(And for my dad, best of men, always loved, always missed, this.)

My husband made this commercial. It’s kind of what he does, but this is a little different, because it’s something that he did on his own, with a partner, instead of with a massive creative team and production company and crew of whomevers doing everything from pointing giant cameras to making sandwiches, and it’s for a kind of competition, the result of which exactly will be I’m not sure what, but still. It’s important to him, and it’s a sweet and funny video, and so I’m going to make you watch it, and you will be grateful:

Please enjoy. And pass it on. The husband doesn’t ask much of my Internets, so it’d be nice to indulge him.

(We’re road-tripping right now – this post comes to you courtesy the free Wi-Fi at the Hampton Inn in Louisville, Kentucky – and to say that my attention span is crunched almost flat is to understate things dramatically. So.)

(We’re road-tripping because I’m going to run the Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, at Disney World this weekend. I’m doing it for Tanner. You can read more about here.)

(Also, puppies.)

My husband and I have been together for over seventeen years. That’s pretty much the entirety of my adult life, and almost half of my whole life so far. Hopefully, it’s only the beginning. Hopefully, we’ll both live long lives and will celebrate the births of grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren and those years of our lives that were spent without each other will seem distant and momentary and we will tell people, we have been together forever.

It seems such a rare thing these days, couple staying together forever.  My husband sometimes remarks, when we hear that yet another relationship – a relationship of someone close to us, or someone not close to us, or someone that we only know through People magazine – has foundered on the rocks of infidelity or irreconcilable differences, that it seems that everything, everything these days is stacked against lasting love. What that everything is, he’s not sure, but it worries him, sometimes. What if it comes after us, he asks? What if it sneaks up on us when we’re not looking and consumes us before we even know what’s happened?

It won’t, I say. Because we’re always looking. Because we value what we have too highly to let down our defenses. Because our love is our defense. And so on and mushy so forth. But I understand his concern. We live in an age wherein the opportunities for undermining one’s relationships are more numerous and more varied than ever before. There is more to be distracted by, more to be tempted by, more to cause one to forget – for a moment, for many moments, for far too long – about what really matters.

I’ve seen, in the last few years, too many marriages crash on the rocks of the Internet, too many relationships suffer because there is so much else to do and so many others with whom to do it. I’ve listened to peers complain that their partners don’t want them to write about this or that private matter; I’ve read the e-mails attached to countless submissions to the Basement, cursing the fact that a husband or wife or significant other doesn’t understand their need to share. I’ve seen far too many friends and acquaintances take their sharing elsewhere, away from the person with whom they share their offline life, to someone else, someone online, someone who better gets them and their deepest, innermost thoughts, the ones that they publish online. I’ve watched, and lent a sympathetic ear, and understood – this world, this virtual world in which we finally, finally get to tell our stories, uncensored, often seems so much more vibrant and more real than the world in which we change bedsheets and diapers and argue over who will drop the kids at school and who will make the doctor’s appointment and who will pick up the milk. In this world, we are writers. Artists. Activists. In this world, we are noble, we are fascinating, we are awesome. We get to project our best selves onto a virtual screen and see ourselves – and see others see us – as our best selves, as the selves that don’t change diapers or bedsheets, or that make the changing of diapers and bedsheets funny and interesting and – maybe, if we’re really on our game – poetic.

It is so easy to be seduced by those selves, by the idea of those selves, by the idea of being received and understood primarily on the virtues of those selves. It’s the dream of anyone who is a geek or has ever been a geek, anyone who feels or has ever felt misunderstood; it is the high school dream of having your secret poetry-and-sketch-filled notebooks discovered and seeing everyone realize that you are, underneath your Sex Pistols t-shirt and ironic barrettes and black fingernail polish, really a genius! And so funny! And then they all want to be your friend, or fall in love with you! Or both! The difference, however, in the age of the Internet, is that we put the contents of those notebooks up on Blogger or Twitter or Facebook and wait to be adored and when – if – the adoration comes, whether from one person or one hundred or one thousand or more, we sit back and tell ourselves that we always knew that this could happen, that we always expected this to happen, if we only had the opportunity to show ourselves as we really are. And we forget, some of us, in the thrall of this lived dream, that there are people who have always adored us for who we really are, only they don’t say so on Twitter.

This, I think, is the dangerous thing, the monster, that can creep up on us: this forgetting, this unvaluing or undervaluing – when held against the sparkle and glitter and heat of the virtual world – of our real, ordinary worlds, and the relationships therein.

There are corollary dangers, of course – the dangers attendant to finding ex-lovers on Facebook, the dangers of e-mail flirtations, the dangers of cultivating any virtual relationships that might supplant the one that is the basis of your real-world home, the danger of placing greater value upon one’s life in the virtual world than upon one’s life in the real world, the danger of simply being distracted. Such dangers are not, of course, restricted to interaction in the virtual world, nor are they new: Helen’s desire to pursue a new and more interesting life with Paris launched the Trojan war; Emma Bovary’s attachment to romance novels prompted her to seek romance outside of her marriage; Anna Karenina, of course, followed her unfaithful heart and ended up – broken and broken-hearted – underneath the wheels of a train. And so on. It’s an old, old story. But it’s one that, I think, becomes more common the more that we embrace opportunities to speculate upon and indulge the fantasies of what if? What if my spouse were more dashing, more romantic? What if I had a partner who loved discussing philosophy in the middle of the night as much as some of my Twitter friends? What if I were married to someone who truly understood my obsession with Glee?

The Internet – taken in the larger context of a mass media that assaults us, constantly, with images and stories about how much better our lives could be, if – has, arguably, become the postmodern, poststructuralist, interactive equivalent of Emma Bovary’s romance novels: it tempts us with the possibility that there could be something or someone better out there, that we might be happier with that something or someone else, that everything that we have here, right in front of us, is so much less interesting, so much less sparkly and fascinating and fulfilling than that those other possibilities, and then it invites us and gives us the means to explore those possibilities from the safety and security of our kitchen tables or home offices.

We don’t all do this, of course. And not all relationships that founder these days do so because of social media, and not all relationships that do founder for any reason related to social media are relationships that would have otherwise survived. It just seems, though, that this – this phenomenon, this thing – is so much with us, and that it carries so much potential for harm where harm mightn’t otherwise have occurred and it just makes me so sad every time I hear about another relationship being shattered after battering against the hard, glittery edges of new media. I tell my husband, when he voices his concerns, that these relationships probably would have shattered, anyway – any relationship that is so fragile that it could be disrupted by the Internet, or by what its participants see in magazines or on television or in movies, could not have had long to live, I insist – but is this true? I read another Basement submission or talk to another friend or hear another rumor and my conviction wavers.

I’m secure in my marriage, but still – I’ve set some ground rules. I won’t publish a story against my husband’s express wishes (just as I would expect him to do, were our situations reversed), I don’t seek out exes online, I don’t cultivate intimate relationships with members of the opposite sex, I don’t bitch about him online, I don’t share with others – confessions, secrets, grievances – anything that I wouldn’t share with him. Not because I believe that our marriage would be in mortal danger if I did any of those things, but because I don’t want to take any chances. What I have is too valuable, too precious. It wouldn’t be worth the risk. It just wouldn’t. I want to hold hands with my husband when we are in our very old age and the Internet and blogging and Facebook are so much far-distant retro bullshit and say, we have been together forever…

And then we’ll turn to our hologrammatic communication avatars and have them Twitter that directly into the post-electronic hive-mind, and we’ll high-five each other with our wrinkled, iPhone-bent hands.

This post was prompted, in part, by last week’s Basement post about a Facebook-fueled affair. It was not the first such post of its kind, of course, but came in a week wherein it seemed that every magazine and news feed had stories about infidelity and after a weekend during which I sat on a conference panel about memoir-writing and fumbled over questions about how and why I share or don’t share certain stories online and what my husband and family think about all that sharing. Which, you know, prompted some reflection. But am I overthinking this? Am I overexaggerating the dangers? Do you keep your real-life relationships front of mind when you’re deciding what to reveal – or to whom to reveal it – online? When you’re cultivating relationships online? What would you do if your marriage and your Internet came into conflict? Are you certain that your marriage would come first? What do you do – do you do anything – to make sure that it does? Could I have come up with a better topic with which to harsh Valentine’s Day?

Text of e-mail: “What you can’t see is the epic turd. I spared you that. So the four year old sits on the John and reads Vanity Fair while dropping bombs.”

This is what happens when I leave the house for the day. Everybody gets all up in the body art and then someone takes a massive crap – while, apparently, reading Vanity Fair, which, thank god she’s picking up the important life skills early – and then someone e-mails me the evidence.

And I am left to puzzle over the following questions:

1) Why is my four year old reading an article entitled ‘The Bank Job’ while moving her bowels? Is she trying to understand the market? Is she planning a heist? Did she learn anything? If so, how can I turn this to my advantage?

2) Why are the two children in the bath without water? Was my husband actually planning on bathing them, or was this just some sort of bizarre time-out?

3) Why does my husband think that he is sparing me anything by not sending a picture of the alleged ‘epic turd’? I have witnessed those turds first-hand. I have shared a bath with them. I am hardened. BRING IT.

4) Why did my husband capitalize the word ‘John’?

5) Why did I spend more than 30 seconds scrutinizing this picture when it is clear that the allegedly ‘epic turd’ cannot be seen from any angle?

6) Why am I forcing you all to look at it, turd or not?

Mysteries, all.

*****

Oh hey! I’m a finalist in the Bloggies – Best Canadian blog. Which is really kind of exciting, because I never win anything, except a bowling tournament once, but that was when I was six and the winners were picked at random. You should totally vote for me, because. (It’s kind of weird and complicated at the Bloggies page, because you have to scroll sideways through the categories, but really, it’s worth it. To me. Just don’t mistake me for one of the vegetable or sandwich blogs that’s nominated with me. It’d be understandable, I know. But don’t.)

This is what passes for humor in our house. You’ll be forgiven if you get confused and think you’ve stumbled onto rehearsals for a kindergarten performance of scenes from the works of Ionesco.

Yeah. I didn’t get it either.

Because, when I’m not looking, he makes our daughter a Christmas suit out of foil wrapping paper and dresses her in it.

And then, suitably attired, they sit down for cocoa with marshmallows and smashed candy canes, and when I say to myself, this is golden, it is true both literally and figuratively. And my heart shimmers like her Christmas Suit, and life is good.

He gives me this. This is better than the bounty of a thousand Santas.

I don’t say much about him, here. I wrote something about that, once:

I don’t say much about my husband here, on the blog. He appears, now and again, a peripheral character in the stories that I tell. Sometimes, rarely, he comes to centre stage, as an antagonist or foil, in some adventure or misadventure that I’m recounting, but even then the story is usually not about him but about our home or our neighborhood or – most often – our child, and his prominence in the story is merely a function of his indispensability to the scene.

I don’t say much about my husband here, nor about our marriage. I don’t, I feel, have enough propriety over those stories to assert myself as narrator of those stories. They are not mine to share. They are his stories – or, in the case of our marriage, our stories. So it is that you rarely read anything substantive about my husband.

Which is a shame, because you would like him, you really would. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man: one of those souls who is just genuinely good, genuinely concerned about the world around him and everyone in it, who is just naturally, effortlessly generous and kind and not in the cloying manner of someone who wants recognition or a place in the kingdom of God for their efforts but in the straightforward and authentic manner of someone who knows that we all just have to be good to one another if we’re going to get along. And he loves animals and children, all of them, except maybe the really unpleasant ones and the older ones with the silly pants dropped below their skinny asses (the kids, not the animals), and always has, even before we had our own. I’ve seen him moved, really moved, at the sight of young children at play. All of which might make him sound kind of wussy, but he’s not, he’s really not, and that’s the thing, probably the biggest thing, that I love about him: he is at once the kindest and gentlest human being that I know, and the strongest.

And then I said:

He’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination… But I’m not perfect either; contrary to all appearances, I am far from it. But I’m perfect for him and he’s perfect for me and that, my friends, my dear, dear friends, is probably all that you need to know.

It is all that you need to know. I struggled for a long time this morning, trying to figure out how to say more. He does, after all, sometimes ask why I don’t say more about him (Do you want me to say more? I reply. Would it be about me not putting my underwear away, or about my vasectomy? – Probably. – Then maybe not.) And I sometimes wish that I did say more about him, so that you could know him, because as I said above, you would love him, you really would. But as I said above: for that, I think, you need only know that I love him, more than I can ever put into words.

It’s his birthday today. Wish him a good one. He’d love that. Because although he doesn’t want you hearing about his underwear or his vasectomy, he likes to know that you know that he’s there, and that he’s awesome. Which he is. So.

(Happy birthday, doofus. Love you.)