The Last Word On Nothing

This post was originally published on September 3, 2018

I have a confession to make. I’m worried that I don’t like parenting.

Don’t get me wrong, I like being a parent. And I definitely love my kid. I like hanging with my family, grilling dinner, listening to my son babble incoherently as my wife giggles and pretends to understand. But the actual work of child-rearing, I don’t know that I like it.

There’s the potty training, sleep training, diaper changing, life changing, sick kid, then sick wife and sick me right afterwards. There is screaming and whining and spilling and peeing in the wrong places. Weekend mountaineering adventures have turned to two-hour trips to a pond that take two more hours to prepare and clean up after.

And playing with my child isn’t what I expected either. When I imagined playing with my son, I envisioned throwing a baseball, wrestling, teaching him to rock climb. But my kid can barely catch a rubber ball thrown from five feet away, let alone shag fly balls.

And the worst thing is that I know I have it so much easier than many parents. He doesn’t have any intellectual or physical disabilities, he’s mostly calm and obedient, has an amazing smile, sleeps through the night and just wants to to hug his daddy all the time. It’s like someone programmed him on “Beginner Parent, Level One.” I really should be enjoying this. So what’s the deal?

I’ve been making candied orange peel regularly for some time now and I say this fearlessly: I have nailed it. The second secret (the first is, never trust sugar chemistry), which I sensed only dimly when I first wrote this, back on May 15, 2014, is that the orange peels have to be thick and taken off the heat early: see the bottom of this post. They’ll still be thickly drippy and will bond to a china plate, so I let them cool on one plate, wrestle them out of their sugar puddles, move them to another plate, repeat until they stop bonding to the plates. The Hungarians do not keep them in the refrigerator; I do, but I have no good reason. A lot of fussing but it ends in revelation. Not that the universal forces can’t shift again and make the whole recipe useless.

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The neighbors came over, maybe a year ago now, and one of them, a Hungarian physicist, brought along candied orange peel he’d made from his grandmother’s recipe.  The physicist is the nicest human on earth, but his grandmother is the one I love; I’d love anyone who thought up those orange peels, their orangey goodness and little spike of bitter, the soft white sweet pith and the dense, bitey, red-golden skin.  I had raptures all over the dining room table.  “Yes, of course you can have the recipe,” said the physicist.  “But I must tell you, you need to be careful how you make them.”

“Oh I know about sugar,” I said, and told him about the hot fudge sauce I made once and reheated twice, and the second time, it made a standing cage over the melted ice cream and when I ate it anyway, I chipped a tooth; and the little left in the pan had bonded to the metal and the pan had to be thrown away.  So the physicist gave me the recipe and the most careful directions, and I made the orange peels and they were perfect, as good as any Hungarian grandmother’s.  Then I made them many more times until suddenly, one day, some mysterious force in the universe shifted.