I just ran up the street to one of those front lawn libraries to pick up three books: Meet Molly, Molly’s Surprise and Meet Kirstin. On our way home, my son and I were walking ahead and my daughter stopped and peek inside and called out to me, and I called back, without listening, “No!” Why, you might ask, was my answer so quick and so terse? It’s mostly because if I let them choose a book every time we pass one of those front lawn library posts, their rooms would be overrun. Don’t get me wrong. I love books, and I love that my kids love to read, and I love that, in addition to them loving to read, they also love when I read to them. But their closets are already filled with book series and individual books they’ve never read. And I’ve adopted that fatherly position where, if you have books you haven’t read, you shouldn’t bring new ones into the house! Total hypocrisy: I have so many books I haven’t read, not only on my shelves but in my Kindle. I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for the $1.99 ebook. When I look through the app at all the unread books, there’s over 600, and that doesn’t stop me from browsing, trying to refrain from adding to the number, failing. I read a little over 100 books a year, so that’s six years worth of reading at the least. Although some of my Kindle books are also complete author works in one volume. The Complete Dostoevsky. The Complete William James. The Complete Plato. Each of which has something between 15-40 books contained therein. And of course, I can’t help picking books off those front lawn libraries from time-to-time myself (I’m 200 pages into Richard Powers’ The Overstory now, although I paused to read Elizabeth Strout’s Amy & Isabelle, since I’ve been working through her collected works with Lucy by the Sea on the horizon).

So, I shouted, “No!” and kept walking because it’s hot out and I was sweating and I wanted to get home and shower. And then I got home and showered, and finished up a Teams message with a work colleague and came downstairs to find my daughter reading on the sofa. She was reading an American Girl Doll book, one of the books she’s read many times because she’s obsessive about the things she loves in a way I’m rather familiar with. When I passed her, I asked, “Good book?” At which point, she said, “Yes, and there were three other American Girl Doll books I haven’t read yet in that library that I wanted to get.” And I said, “Oh, I see.” And she said, “Can I get them tomorrow?” And I felt a little guilty, so I told her I’d run back up (the front lawn library in question is around the corner) and get them for her myself. And when I returned I handed them to her and she got up and hugged me, like the conquering hero come home.

Now I have to cop the fact that she caught me in a certain mood, right time, right place, right question. Right? I had been listening to an episode of the Dan Harris podcast 10% Happier earlier today while I was doing my stair climb workout (don’t think, stair master here; think I actually sometimes get a workout in during the day by simply going up and down the three stories worth of stairs in my house), and the episode was about how to deal with the emotionally immature people in your life. And naturally, the first question that popped into my head as I listened to the psychologist Lindsay C. Gibson, his guest, was: am I emotionally mature or immature? And as it turns out, asking this question may be one of the first signs you are, in fact, emotionally mature because one of the symptoms of emotionally immature people is that they tend to not be too self-reflexive. Still, although it’s a sign your trending toward emotional maturity, it’s not the whole picture, so I listened on, learning about the ways in which emotionally immature people arguing in such a way as to muddy the waters, to obfuscate the issue at hand with circuitous logic to make those they’re arguing with give up out of simple exhaustion. And I couldn’t help thinking, I’ve known a few people like that in my past.

But the real question on my mind, and the reason I thought emotional maturity matters, is the question that’s always on my mind, day-in, day-out: Am I setting a good example for my kids? In my head, I never quite feel entirely emotionally mature. Lately I’ve been having difficulty controlling my temper with my son. He’s going through a phase where every time I give him an instruction, he does the opposite of what I just asked him to do, and he does it on purpose. He’s even admitted to his sister he’s doing it on purpose, and I’m doing my best not to raise my voice, but it’s touch and go, and I find myself yelling more frequently than I’d like, and every time I end up yelling, I feel like I’ve failed him and failed myself because I should be leading by example and demonstrating patience. Of course, with an adult, with a stranger or even a friend who was acting the fool like this, I could simply walk away and either return later when I’ve calmed down or refuse to deal with this other person until they learned how to interact with me like a decent human being. But I can’t do that with my son. Even if he’s acting like a jerk, I’ve still got to get his teeth brushed and get him out the door to school by a certain time every morning. And a lot of times when he gets under my skin the most are like this, we’re under a time limit or deadline, we’ve got a chore to accomplish and he’s doing everything within his power to make things harder than they have to be. But lately, even when we have all the time in the world, he’s getting under my skin as well.

Take our nighttime ritual, story time. Like most families with young children, we’re ritualized the bedtime routine. After dinner, we have our kids shower, get into their pajamas, and brush their teeth. The girl is old enough to brush her own, but either my wife or I am still brushing the boy’s teeth since he hasn’t quite cross the threshold where I can trust him to do it right (she does it mostly before bedtime, I do it before school in the morning). Then, when they’re done the brushing, flossing mouthwash portion of the evening, we head into the big bed (as my children call my wife and my bed) and they each take a spot to the side of me, and I read to them from whatever book it is we’ve been reading from. Lately, we’ve been reading Pax, which is about a domesticated fox who’s forced to separate from his owner Peter by Peter’s father during an approaching war. Now I’ll admit, this book was my choice primarily because we had just read twelve Lemony Snicket tales, and I needed a palate cleanser because twelve of any author’s books in a row can become a little too much. Anyway, lately, when we’ve been reading Pax, the boy child no longer sits in the bed with me and my daughter, but flips about on the pillows, changing position constantly until finally he drops the floor and crawls around the rug.

And oh, he’s still listening. He apparently likes the book enough to ask if I’m going to read them the next one when I’m done (no, dead son, I’ll be biting the bullet and finishing that last Lemony Snicket first), but he just can’t sit still. And I try to calm myself and I think, he’s a boy with a lot of energy, maybe he’s overly tired from a long day of school and can’t control himself or maybe they didn’t wear him out enough at school, but you just have to let him do what he’s going to do. But I also have anxiety, and my nerves can be set on edge, so this is not a good combination, and the last thing I need when I’m trying to relax and bring the children into a state where I’m getting them ready to sleep is quick, sharp, jagged motion on my periphery and it can set my nerves to humming, and at times, he wins, he breaks me, and I snap, “Go to your room!” And he’ll pretend to go to his room but really just sit in the hall and listen as I continue to read to his sister. And I let him sit there because I know he likes the story and I don’t want him to miss a chapter, but at the same time, when he goes to the hall and sits, he’s COMPLETELY STILL, and I wonder, why are you able to do that only after I send you out of the room? Why can’t you just sit still while you’re here? But of course, the reason he’s completely still is he thinks that I think he’s in his room and he now has a legit reason to be still: he’s trying to make sure I don’t know what I already know, which is that he’s sitting in the hall and hasn’t actually gone to his room like I told him, which is just one more act of defiance.

And oh, I know he’s going to outgrow this, and I just have to be patient. And a lot of days, I do manage patience. I might clench my jaw and grit my teeth and ball my fists. But I refrain from snapping at him and let him be the boy I know he is, but I always feel, whenever this anger boils up, like I’m losing, like I’m not setting the right example, like I’m emotionally immature. But part of being emotionally mature is being able to talk about and communicate why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling and I try to do this with him to, later, after I’ve sent him out, after I’ve pulled him back from the trash can because he’s just put fingerprints all over the display case inside the store and I told him to stop because someone’s going to have to clean that and instead he runs his hands all over the trashcan, and I ask him to stop that too because it’s dirty, and instead of running his hands along it, he decides to tap the flaps of the trashcan lid and play the drums on it, yes, after all that, I try to tell him that I don’t like to make up a bunch of arbitrary rules I’m enforcing for now reason, I’m not trying to control every aspect of his life, I’m trying to teach him how to behave in a way that shows respect for the workers there (in the case of the glass needing to be cleaned) or prevent him from contracting some kind of viral or bacterial infection (in the case of the trash can lid) or stop him from being hit by a car (in the case where he steps into the street without looking), and I’m not just talking to hear myself talk. And he’s smart. It’s clear he understands what I’m telling him. I’ve even become THAT guy: you know? the one who asks him to repeat what I just said back to me to make sure he heard it.

If run-on sentences are a sign of exhaustion, I think that last paragraph displays just how tired I am of all this. And so, my behavior in running back to the front lawn library (didn’t think I forgot, did you?) was to some extent a gesture, not so much intended to win points with my daughter, as a sign that I was reaffirming that I’m interested in the things she cares about, and yes, it’s the other child, the child I’m not having these issues with, but it was a way of exercising that muscle of saying, the things you’re into matter, and I’m not just all about myself and I’m sorry I was in such a rush to get home and shower, but I got these for you. And as for my son, well, both children have had their devices confiscated the past week because they were arguing last Tuesday about which one of them should get in the shower first, each insisting the other should, because they were distracted by games they were playing, and today, I gave him permission to do IXL and Prodigy since I know he’s been itching to get back online and I figured educational games were a good compromise. And at the end of this all, I still don’t know if these were things I did because that podcast episode reminded me I should send them signals that I care about things that matter to them or because I felt guilty about being so angry with the boy lately or simply to show myself that I’m not emotionally immature. Could be a little of each column there in my behavior, but I suppose that’s okay as well. We’re complex creatures, we humans. And if I had it all figured out, where would the fun in living be?