Kids are the ultimate trump card: a way to get out of co-op board meetings or lunch with a friend you don't want to see or your brother-in-law's set at a comedy club. It's fair to use your kids as an excuse to sidestep what you don't want to do; it's less fair to blame them for not being able to achieve what you do want to do.

Rumaan Alam

Categorized in : You Friend Lunch Blame

Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world.

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product literature children world

Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon.

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autumn shopping clothes time

Baking is a matter of precision and timing, but I just make things up as I go.

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things go baking matter

Children's picture books are a unique record of social evolution: in gender roles and racial politics, as is much discussed, but also in fashion and interior design.

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picture fashion politics children

For a long time, I thought that I was an enlightened parent by virtue of being an enlightened person. What a fool.

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fool parent time long

I think that in the cultural imagination, motherhood has a primacy that fatherhood just doesn't; and that's not to say that there aren't many fathers who are active and engaged and for whom that is their life's passion. But somehow, in the imagination, there's something different about maternity.

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motherhood passion imagination life

When my husband and I first became parents, we joked that our chubby baby was destined to grow into an Alex P. Keaton Reaganite - the most unlikely, and therefore hilarious, course for the child of an interracial gay couple in gentrifying Brooklyn.

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parents child gay husband

In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.

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emotions performance great way

I'm not black myself, but my sons are.

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sons myself black

I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page.

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think empathy life art

Parenting is love, sure, but it's as much about receiving love as it is giving it. Parenthood is a kind of vanity.

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vanity parenting love giving

By a considerable margin, my family's largest-ever financial expenditure was the adoption of our two sons.

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our financial family two

It is true for my family and many others: Adoption has made us infinitely richer in the ways that matter most.

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true others family matter

My husband and I adopted our children through a private agency, Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children. As a nonprofit organization, it relies on client fees as well as donor support to do its work.

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support husband work children

Contemporary families can be made in many ways. You might step up when relatives or friends are unable to meet their obligation to their children. You might marry someone who is already a parent. Or you might, as in my case, yearn to create a family and decide to adopt.

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you friends family children

Form ossifies into genre through repetition.

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through repetition genre form

A writer cannot be judged for his project, only its execution.

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project cannot only execution

Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist.

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novelist confident fine

Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader.

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organizing exchange between useful

It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history's grave injustices, there were still great lives.

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great conscience remember history