I am a new parent. Well, no I’m not. I am a new stay-at-home dad. And not a good one. I’ve been a parent for five years. But it’s all different now. I stopped practicing law in October to move to Austin for my wife’s job opportunity and a chance to do what I felt like I was missing out on every day — being a dad to my my two kids, Harlan and Cerys.
As a stay-at-home parent, I feel like I should have plenty of time to write. There are a lot of hours in the day. A lot of hours I’m no longer practicing law. I thought this recently as Cerys, my daughter, sat on my lap while I stared at an empty screen. Her brother was consulting a choir of animated Christmas chipmunks in the background. Each time the chipmunks hit a battery-powered-singing-toy crescendo, Cerys headbutted me. I gave up. But what was I doing before? While I was managing hundreds of clients? Yearning to write. Fighting ideas back. Voice-memoing ideas in the car. Wishing I had more time with my kids.
So here I am. It’s all a blank page now. And here’s the thing — I don’t know what I’m doing as a stay-at-home-dad. This is what I wanted, right? To break gender stereotypes? To be free of the law (as a vocation not behaviorily — obviously I’m not engaging in any sort of open insurrection standing nude in my public weed garden). To explore a part of myself not associated with my lawyer persona.
I was recently in Ohio visiting family for the holidays. After multiple attempts to write had been scuttled by the aforementioned headbutts and dime store holiday Chipmunks, I set out to learn two new things — to learn to make my mom’s banana bread (or as the kids call it — “Nana bread”) and to learn to do something with my daughter’s birds nest of hair. Not at the same time. But that would be some sort of success, wouldn’t it? Broken off toddler hairs in baked goods are not that appetizing. Put them on a crispy garbanzo caesar salad and you might have something the hipsters could get behind though.
My mom showed me how to make the bread while I kept one eye on the kids as they flew down a hill on plastic cars. My parents’ farm is in the middle of a national forest and the thousands of acres of woods just beyond the periphery of the farm have always seemed to me to be a reminder to keep track of my kids. Not that I am paranoid. But I hear the coyotes there every night. So with one eye out the window and one on my mom’s cooking demonstration, I tried to focus.
At any rate, I’ve never understood baking. Last time I tried was in college, decades ago. I wanted to make my grandmother’s beer biscuits. Lord, I messed up. I had a couple of the beers from the 6-pack to start off. Then I mistook crisco for bisquick. With a plastic bowl full of shortening, salt, and beer, I thought, man, I’m not a chemist but I haven’t a clue how this stuff is going to turn into a biscuit. But I trusted my instincts, imagining that baking was some sort of alchemy that could turn liquids solid. It didn’t make biscuits. It melted. I wasted a beer. I would say I wasted 2 cups of crisco but I couldn’t imagine any other uses for it.
I was thinking about this college experience when I came to and realized my mom was already taking the bread out of the oven. Magically, it came out crusted and browned. Perfect.
As for Cerys’s hair, I couldn’t catch her to try my hand at pigtails. I was still on personal probation anyway for having used a bbq spray bottle to wet her hair. Parenting tip: apple cider vinegar and spices don’t work that well in a little girl’s hair. It gets really soft but it stinks.
Next month, I thought. Maybe when we have a house and aren’t staying with family. That’s when the routine will come together and I’ll make biscuits with some dry ingredients besides salt.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll figure out how to do this stay-at-home dad thing.
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If you’re interested in the recipes, here they are:
Nanny’s Beer Biscuits
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
3 tsp baking powder
¼ cup shortening
a beer
Mix ingredients. Bake at 450 degrees (in an oven) for about 10 minutes. Inhale because your kitchen is gonna smell great.
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Brett’s Ohio University Liquibiscuits
2 cups crisco shortening
salt
beer
Go to store. Buy beer. Drink a few. Think about recipe. Tape recipe to cabinet drawer so you don’t get distracted. Find recipe after you lost it looking for tape. Mix ingredients. Bake. Any temperature will do as long as it melts the shortening. Take pride in your new skillset. Wonder at the sheer brilliance of baking. Be thankful you had capable people raise you.
jbrettdavis 