He reads Nicole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times and says, “I started to hate my fellow white parents” for the segregated school system they created. Not just because Raffi is a difficult child who doesn’t want to sleep or listen to his parents’ instructions, but because Gessen is constantly charmed and amazed by his son, and actually wants to spend time with him-usually.Īs a member of the New York liberal intelligentsia, though, it is perhaps inevitable that Gessen is concerned about his parenting choices from a political perspective. It is as predictable as it is charming that his son does not allow for this. He recalls that prior to fatherhood, he had not given the matter much thought, but spent years "imbib the heroic male literature of family neglect: Henry James who skipped a family funeral because he was finishing a story… Philip Roth, who refused to have children Tolstoy, who had many children and a long marriage but who still managed, at the end of his life, to walk out on them.” He adds that he was “adamant that must not interfere with my writing.” And it gave him a lot of time to think about what kind of father he wanted to be. What is true is that Gessen recently had to live through a pandemic lockdown with two small children and probably did more child care without any help during that time than most parents in history. According to a Pew Research report, “In 2016, fathers reported spending an average of eight hours a week on child care–about triple the time they provided in 1965.” The hours men spend on child care has been steadily increasing for the past half century. That seemed notable to me.” But that doesn’t seem entirely accurate. Gessen says he is “part of the first generation of men who, for various reasons, were spending more time with their kids than previous generations. They don’t have a lot of money or family nearby who can help, so Gessen does a significant amount of child care. The couple, who are both writers, have a younger son as well. Trying, with his wife, to civilize a rambunctious, obstinate toddler in a small apartment in New York City was a challenge in many ways. You succeed when you make yourself irrelevant, when you lose yourself. When they leave, that is success when they do something because they want to do it and not because you want them to do it, then you have done your job. There is no other thing you do in life only that the person you do it for can leave you. Considering the first five years of his son’s life, he notes,
“I think now that there is no tragedy like the tragedy of parenthood.” So writes Keith Gessen in his sometimes moving, occasionally facile, and usually observant memoir, Raising Raffi.
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