I am Kyle's self-indulgence

Erika bought me Michael Chabon's new book of personal essays, Manhood for Amateurs. The second essay in the book, "Wiliam and I," includes a story I heard Chabon tell on Fresh Air that made me want to read the book.

The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low. One day a few years back I took my youngest son to the market around the corner from our house in Berkeley, California, a town where, in my estimation, fathers generally do a passable job, with some fathers having been known to go a little overboard. I was holding my twenty-month-old in one arm and unloading the shopping cart onto the checkout counter with the other. I don't remember what I was thinking about at the time, but it is as likely to have been the original 1979 jingle for Honey Nut Cheerios or nothing at all as it was the needs, demands, or ineffable wonder of my son. I wasn't quite sure why the woman in line behind us—when I became aware of her—kept beaming so fondly in our direction. She had on rainbow leggings, and I thought she might be a little bit crazy and therefore fond of everyone.

"You are such a good dad," she said finally. "I can tell."

I looked at my son. He was chewing on the paper coating of a wire twist tie. A choking hazard, without a doubt; the wire could have pierced his lip or tongue. His hairstyle tended to the cartoonier pole of the Woodstock-Einstein continuum. His face was probably a tad on the smudgy side. Dirty, even. One might have been tempted to employ the word crust.

"Oh, this isn't my child," I told her. "I found him in the back."

Actually, I thanked her. I went off with my boy in one arm and a bag of groceries in the other, and when we got home I put a plastic bowl filled with Honey Nut Cheerios in front of him and checked my e-mail. I was a really good dad.

This is so very true. After Daniel was born I took him with me to the grocery store a few times and it seemed like people were constantly commenting on what an extraordinary dad I was just for being in public with my son and not doing him any visible harm.

Chabon goes on to talk about the double-standard for parents in a way that I'm sure all the moms out there will appreciate.

I don't know what a woman needs to do to impel a perfect stranger to inform her in the grocery store that she is a really good mom. Perhaps perform an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic pen on her eldest child while simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks' worth of healthy but appealing breaktime snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr. In a grocery store, no mother is good or bad; she is just a mother, shopping for her family. If she wipes her kid's nose or tear-stained cheeks, if she holds her kid tight, entertains her kid's nonsensical claims, buys her kid the organic non-GMO whole-grain version of Honey NutCheerios, it adds no useful data to our assessment of her. Such an act is statistically insignificant. Good mothering is not measurable in a discrete instant, in an hour spent rubbing a baby's gassy belly, in the braiding of a tangled mass of morning hair.Good mothering is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself. We do not judge mothers by snapshots but by years of images painstakingly accumulated from the orbiting satellite of memory. Once a year, maybe, and on certain fatal birthdays, and at our weddings or her funeral, we might collate all the available data, analyze it, and offer our irrefutable judgment: good mother.

I could quote the whole essay here, it's so good, but I probably shouldn't. Anyway, you can read it for yourself here.