Quirky Parenting Tales
Some of the most interesting parenting memoirs come from writers who could easily be deemed quirky parents. Often more lively than sentimental, these books impart truths about the love between children and their adults in surprising ways. What ties these favorites together is how clear the voices are, how honest and how richly detailed. [End Page 174]
Marion Winik, in The Lunch-Box Chronicle, writes about becoming a single parent after her husband’s death, when their sons were quite small. She had no model for this, as she grew up in a very traditional family: “The basic shape of family was a square—mommy, daddy, and two kids—or perhaps a pentagon or an octagon if the family was Catholic. Almost as rare as a divorced parent in those days was a family with only one child. Widowed parents I never even heard of.”
An essayist and NPR commentator, Winik’s voice is funny, honest, and wonderfully focused on details. For example, about making dinner, she writes, “As I tell myself when I load my cart with three-for-a-dollar boxes of instant macaroni and cheese, they wouldn’t manufacture these things in bulk and stock shelf upon shelf of them at the supermarket if great hordes of people didn’t buy them, if millions of parents out there didn’t breathe a sigh of relief as they dump quote-unquote cheese out of a paper packet rather than grate and melt the genuine article. . . . This is not just the food of convenience. It is the food of mental health.” What comes through when reading Winik’s tales is her love for her children, her command of dialogue, and her willingness to take an unexpected view of the quotidian. Her writing can make you laugh and cry on the same page without this feat’s seeming at all effortful.
Edwin John Wintle isn’t a parent. He’s a gay uncle assuming the parental role when his sister cannot cope with her young adolescent daughter careening toward a troubled teenhood. Hopeful that his life wouldn’t change in profound ways, he felt excitement more than fear as he prepared for Tiffany’s swift arrival. He writes, “My life needed that proverbial shot in the arm. What it would get, though, would prove to me more like electroshock therapy.”
Even cooking was traumatic. “The sight and smell of scrambled eggs cooking that early made me want to hurl. The radio I’d set up in the [End Page 175] kitchen to distract my senses wasn’t doing the job, and it only got worse when Tiffany doused her portion liberally with ketchup.” But he wanted to give her more than he’d had growing up, so whatever it took. “I wanted to sit down to a proper breakfast with Tiffany every morning, like a regular family. During my high school years, I’d had a cup of tea, a Carnation Instant Breakfast, and a glass of Tang every morning. I’d thought that was normal and nutritious, but people seem horrified to this day when I happen to mention it.”
Wintle succumbs to doling out Carnation Instant Breakfast—and caring for Tiffany did in fact change him. He shows us how, with humor and wisdom that anyone raising teens or pondering the possible roles within an extended family will find helpful—and a relief.
Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser, a graduate of Hampshire College and Warren Wilson College’s MFA program in fiction, has had work appear in the Georgia Review, Story Quarterly, and Brain Child, among others. She lives with her husband and three sons in Northampton, Massachusetts.
