It takes a few months to settle in and get to know and understand a new daughter, work at which I have been diligent since, oh, before her arrival. And now that it’s been a tad over three months I feel confident in stating that I will keep her. That said, there are some parts of The New Daughter that I have felt to be challenging. There’s no question that The New Daughter brings with…
Previously, from the same author. When my employer called me into his office and granted me paternity leave on the birth of my first child, I had no idea what I was in for. Most of my male coworkers had already left the office at this point, having impregnated willing strangers in order to take twelve weeks' paid time off in exchange for eighteen years of financial and personal responsibility. "It's twelve weeks' time off,"…
My father must have bought the cheapest Santa costume he could find. He’s frugal, never cheap, but this getup broke the rule. Maybe the Santa costumes with luxuriant white whiskers curling halfway to the floor and plush red jackets cinched by real leather belts were just way out of his price range. The original beard wasn’t so bad, but my father loaned it to another Santa in need, and a rogue Rudolph, unfortunately, ate it.
Hayley Krischer's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
I traveled across country just before cell phones were widely available. My cousin in Baltimore had a cell phone, so my father instructed me to drive there from my house in New Jersey on the first leg of the trip to get it. The phone was the size of my current laptop and was wrapped in a leather bag.
Jessie Guy-Ryan's previous work for The Toast can be found here. It was snowing. They told him when he took the gig--taking care of the resort during the winter season--that it'd be a lot of snow. A hell of a lot of snow. "I don't mind," he chuckled, "Don't gotta mow the lawn at least!" Shoveling the front walk was a bitch, though. At least it just had to be cleared for him and…
Emily L. Stephens' previous work for The Toast can be found here.
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” - Casaubon, narrator of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum
It’s a common trope: the father as a teller of tall tales, spinner of stories, a larger-than-life figure who molds our…
My father calls the tooth fairy the tooth bunny, because my grandparents didn’t know how to say “fairy” when he was a little boy. He jumped off the roof of their house once, using a towel as a cape, because his parents explained to him that a man named S-u-p-e-r could fly. They spread their arms out wide, to emphasize how he flew, but no one knew how to tell him Superman wasn’t
