I’m still relatively new to this whole blogging thing, so I was a little bit surprised when I got an email from a representative of Chin Music Press asking if I’d be interested in receiving a copy of Jeff Gillenkirk’s upcoming novel Home, Away, explaining that it follows a professional baseball player who walks away from a Major League career to care for his son, so it might be of interest to me as an at-home dad.

I was definitely intrigued!

I won’t pretend to be a professional book reviewer, but having now (finally) finished the book I wanted to share my thoughts on it.

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Home, Away

By Jeff Gillenkirk
Chin Music Press, 2010

“A powerful, stirring novel about family, love and the depths of compassion played out against the dramatic backdrop of professional baseball.”

Jason Thibodeaux is a promising 21-year old pitcher, with a young son he adores and a bright future ahead. Having just taken the year off from college ball to care for his son Rafe while his wife Vicky finished law school, Jason is anxious to return to the field and kick-start his very promising baseball career again. But with the sudden, messy collapse of his marriage, a bitter divorce, and an unwillingness to repeat the mistakes of his own absent father, Jason finds himself forced to fight tooth-and-nail for his son. Sadly, it’s a fight Jason can’t win, even as his career catapults him into the big leagues — complete with $42 million contract…

Sometimes what I need most is a reminder that this special time with my son Tucker is going to be limited, and to make the most of every moment we have.

The other day he and I were playing like we often do with his favorite big green rubber ball (his “BAOW”) in the living room. Tuck loves it. I’ll kick it or throw it, then he’ll chase after it, giggling all the while, and bring it back for more. I’ll encourage him to try throwing it back to me, but his arm is pretty terrible right now so he usually just shoves it at me and then runs away, laughing and trying to anticipate where I’m going to send it flying. It’s a hoot, even if in some ways it’s not unlike playing “fetch” at this point.

We do a lot of running around, and as the old fat one in the game I tend to wear out a lot faster than he does. So this time I ended up eventually sitting down in the desk chair, but continued to toss the ball as he brought it to me.  I’d just watch him joyfully chase after it from my comfy chair is all.

But inevitably, the siren song of the computer called to me, and I started turning away to read snippets of emails/blogs/tweets while he ran around…

Recently New York Magazine featured a cover story entitled All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting.

It’s an interesting look at the conclusion that many social-science researchers keep coming to recently that, contrary to popular belief, having children doesn’t bring happiness but actually makes adults less happy.

From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines. Perhaps the most oft-cited datum comes from a 2004 study by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities.

Honestly, I find the whole idea of asking whether having children “brings happiness” as any sort of a YES/NO thing to be kind of a silly, loaded question.

This has been a strange Father’s Day Week.

While the media spends most of the year rightly lamenting the plague of absent, uninvolved fathers, The Atlantic magazine took upon itself this week the opportunity to offer up articles on whether fathers are necessary at all and if we’re on the cusp of the end of men. Slate, meanwhile, offers up an exciting Boston College study which reports a huge increase in men’s participation in domestic and childcare responsibilities, and interprets it as further evidence that men are liars.

Now, to be fair, at least 2 of the 3 articles above are, on the surface, trying to put a positive spin on their attention grabbing headlines. Isn’t it great that women have come so far in a short period of time, as to be the majority of both job-holders and college graduates? And don’t you see? The silver lining to men lying about being involved dads is that not that long ago men would instead be lying about spending their evenings at the bar rather than be seen as the kind of guy who goes home from work and changes diapers!

Okay. I guess. You have to wonder a little at the timing though. I always figured Father’s Day was a chance to thank and encourage dads for what they do, not to marginalize their contributions to family and society AND call them liars. But maybe that’s just me.

Is this some sort of poorly thought out application of John Nash’s non-cooperative game theory, where they just bet against the assumption that everyone else will be running fluff pieces about good ol’ dad? Maybe. Given that it scored “The End of Men” author Hanna Rosen a spot on the Colbert Report, perhaps it worked. They’re definitely getting attention.

And I suppose it’s better than the alternatives, like MomLogic’s annual Father’s Day Week reprinting of their 10 Reasons Father Doesn’t Know Best list, or their gift guides for stinky, couch potato, lazy, and deadbeat dads.

The subject of “dad in the delivery room” has come up a lot lately and, surprisingly, it has often been by people saying they are against it.

They suggest a return to keeping dads out.

Some dads have written about witnessing the birth of their child having caused a loss in the spark of their marital intimacy with their wife. One “expert” claims that a man’s presence causes the mother to be more stressed out, prolonging labor and increasing the need for more drugs or c-sections. Another even suggests that if a man is there he can’t really do anything and ends up feeling like a failure of a father from the start — making him less likely to be involved later, his ego shattered.

For all of them, the answer is apparently to get men out of the room entirely, I guess to go sit with Don Draper in the waiting room.