Second day of kindergarten, after dinner, Alice is sitting on the couch with Silas going over the worksheet he brought home. Starting kindergarten is a huge deal and so far the kids are excited about all the changes.

We haven’t prioritized teaching our kids how to read and write, so now it’s happening, and it’s really exciting. The kids are learning in a mix of English and Spanish, but they are still learning the alphabet. So Alice is sitting there with our son , going over a worksheet he brought home from school, and she says: “What’ s that letter?” And in his sweet little 5 year old voice he says “C.” “Very good!” And what’s that next letter? “A” “Great!” And what’s the next letter?” And without missing a beat, he says “Sword.”

Do you ever just feel your heart swelling up with love while simultaneously cracking up? At our bests that is what life is like with 5 year olds. I hope you can vicariously live through the adorable hilariousness with us in this brief transmission. xo s

Share

The games we play with our kids have a way of evolving into elaborate rituals.

One of them is called “The Egg Game” and my daughter started it by putting a blanket over herself and then pretending it was a shell and that she was a baby chick cracking out of an egg. It’s the grown up’s job to sit on the egg and wait for it to hatch. My son thought it was cool so he started doing it too.

When it began, the creature in the egg was a “chick” - a baby chicken, but then the game evolved into the “chick” being other creatures, so it became part of the game that we wouldn’t know what kind of creature was emerging until it cracked out.

Was it a baby chicken?

A baby swan?

A baby bunny?

A baby hummingbird?

A baby cat?

A baby reindeer?

Now when we play “The Egg Game” part of the ritual is that whoever is sitting on the egg has to pretend to gather lots of different types of feed for the mystery creature. Grubs. Worms. A cup of nectar (for the baby hummingbird.) Carrots and greens. Bird seed. Cat food.

Try to remember being four and a half — still close to the mystery of birth, living inside constant transformation. Kids this age live right on that edge: old enough to sense that identity is not fixed, young enough to feel how vulnerable that makes them.

The Egg Game is like a practice in emergence.

If you don’t yet know who I’m becoming, will you still help me gather what I might need?

Because the mystery chick isn’t just asking what am I? It’s asking what do I need in order to become?

I don’t want transformation to just happen to me. I want to participate in it.

And then last weekend I was visiting friends in the Bay Area and got some more perspective on the Egg Game. I slept in the teenage room of my friend’s daughter who is currently 21 and living on the other side of the country. I hung out with a friend from high school who has a 11 year old and a 15 year old boys.

What are our kids going to grow into? Hummingbirds? Reindeer? It’s a big wide world out there. We’re just looking at elementary schools.

Sending love to friends and extended friends as we continue to revel in the mysteries We’re still gathering feed.
Still waiting for the shell to crack.
Still not sure what kind of creatures we’re raising.

But we’re here for it.

Sascha

Share

Leave a comment

Lilah’s wooden music box broke so the after dinner activity was to take the broken pieces and string them together and make fishing poles to fish for rainbow lobsters.

So that’s what we were doing. The kids were at ‘big kids camp’ today because preschool is on winter break and so they were playing in the woods all day with a bunch of 6 and 8 year olds. They had a blast.

Four and a half is so much, they just have a continual stream of action going on in their heads, like they are processing an incredible amount of new information and accumulated knowledge and constantly creating new combinations of things, bouncing them off each other, and creating more together.

We were sitting there and I was helping them tie knots and Lilah looks at me, somewhat mischievously, and starts singing the chorus of this song I sometimes sing to them:

“Death or Glory becomes just another story”

She looks at me to see my reaction and my eyes are wide. I’m looking at her with a mix of shock and pleasure. I love when they spontaneously start singing some old punk rock or blues song I’ve invoked to put them to bed. It’s been weeks since I sang or played this particular song and today just happens to be the anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death, the guy who wrote it back in the 70s. It’s kind of eerie actually. Lilah says: “See dada, I remember the songs you sing us.” And she sings it again:

“Death or glory becomes just another story.”

Silas joins in and they sing it together in their cute little sing song 4 year old voices. I’m just sitting there marveling at the beauty of it.

Then Silas says: “But dada, what’s ‘glory’?

“What’s glory?” I say, relishing this part of fatherhood.

“Glory is when there’s a big scary dragon that’s going to burn down the whole village, and you’re a knight with a sword and you slay the dragon by yourself and save everyone, and the whole village says “Yea, Silas saved us from the wicked dragon! Long live Silas the Great! That’s glory.”

Silas is grinning widely. He’s such a beautiful kid, his whole face lights up when he smiles.

Dada continues his speech, though it’s questionable how much the four and a half year old’s understand it:

“And that’s the meaning of the song: “Death or glory becomes just another story.” No matter how great you are, when you’re dead you’re not around anymore to enjoy it. You just become a story that other people tell. And that’s why when mama serves you pumpkin and rice and ground turkey for dinner, there’s no reason to get upset if you don’t like the pumpkin. Life is too short. You don’t have to throw a fit about it. We’re just supposed to enjoy life as much as possible while we’re here.

Leave a comment

There’s a lot of stuff that never really made sense to me until I became a father and got to watch it from the other side.

I don’t mean intellectually. I mean in my body. In my nervous system. In the small, repetitive moments that don’t feel historic while you’re in them—lighting candles, telling the same story again, singing songs that are older than any of us and not entirely sure why we’re singing them, except that we are.

Having children has a way of stripping away abstraction. You start to see how little of who we are is actually “individual” in the way we like to imagine, and how much of us is shaped—formed, carried, handed down—through relationship, ritual, culture, and shared practice. Not ideology. Not slogans. Practice.

Tradition, I’m realizing, isn’t about preservation for its own sake. It’s about transmission. It’s about what survives because it’s useful, because it holds people together, because it gives shape to belonging in a world that is constantly pulling us apart. When you watch a child learn something simply because it’s what the people they love are doing, you understand how old traditions actually live. They don’t live in books or institutions. They live in bodies. In repetition. In warmth. In memory layered over memory.

And it becomes very clear, very fast, that no state gets to claim ownership over that.

Jewish identity—our stories, our practices, our arguments, our stubbornness, our tenderness—does not belong to borders or governments or flags. We were here long before modern states existed, and we will still be here long after today’s borders fall away, as all borders eventually do. What carries us isn’t power. It’s relationship. It’s community. It’s the small, defiant act of continuing to gather, to remember, to light the lights even when the world feels unsteady.

Watching my kids take this in—clumsily, joyfully, with questions and resistance and curiosity—has made me feel both smaller and more connected. Smaller because I’m just one link in a long, imperfect chain. More connected because that chain is real, and it’s alive, and it doesn’t depend on permission from anyone.

So tonight, and this week, and in all the quiet moments that follow: mad love. For our people in all their diversity and contradiction. For the practices that shaped us and keep shaping us. For the possibility that what we pass on can be wiser, gentler, and more just than what we inherited.

Happy Hanukkah.

Last week me and the kids were walking back to our apartment from the library down the street. My backpack was full of new books to read about dragons and seeds and fairies and foxes. There were two ways to go home. Silas wanted to take the quieter street with the big trees and Lilah wanted to take the big, noisy street with all the cars. I broke the tie and said “Let’s take the quiet street.” Lilah immediately burst into tears and gestured to the big street: “NOOOOOO!!! Let’s go this wayyyy!!!”

If I’ve learned anything in being a parent I’ve learned to choose my battles. The noisy street it was. But Lilah kept on crying in this intense way she’s been doing lately. It feels like a new phase, a new aspect of her personality emerging. It’s a loud cry, often mixed with hyperventilating and gasping for breath between wails. It’s very dramatic. It usually doesn’t last too long but it’s pretty intense when we’re in the swirl of it. I often feel all kinds of emotions myself when she’s crying like that, from concern and protectiveness to frustration and annoyance.

So my kid kept kept crying as we walked down the big, loud street, and this is what slipped out of my mouth:

“Lilah, did you know that there’s a little girl inside of you who’s really upset? She wants you to pay attention to her. She wants you to take care of her. Can you feel her in there?”

Lilah’s eyes got really wide through the tears. She immediately stopped crying and she stared at me. “I can feel her, dada. How do I take care of her?”

“She wants you to pay attention to her. First, just notice her. See that she’s upset. Then tell her you can see her and you know she’s having a hard time, and then tell her everything is going to be okay. You can look out for her. You can take care of her.”

Lilah is a natural caretaker of many, many stuffed animals, and also our dog. She has little bunnies and sheep and frogs and teddy bears that she wraps up in blankets and sings little songs to. Support comes really naturally to her. And that suggestion about looking inside was the end of the tears. It was a powerful redirection. I didn’t follow up with her and ask about the “little girl”. I didn’t pry. I also didn’t try and use the same strategy on the multiple times this week she burst into dramatic tears. I’ve learned when I discover something cool like that it’s best to be sparing with it, lest it lose it’s magic.

I don’t know if I can truly convey to you just how terrified I was to become a father. I’ve been in a lot of intense intimate relationships that ended badly. I was raised by really wonderful people who hated each other and, despite their desires to make me a happy, healthy person, really did not teach me good self regulation skills when I was the age my children are now. I’m pretty sure I had crying fits very similar to Lilah, and no one was around to help me feel into my body and notice my emotions. I can only imagine that it was because they were having a hard enough time dealing with their own. Life is hard, we all know it. We try our best not to pass on the old pain.

This morning Lilah was having one of her meltdowns as we were trying to put her shoes on, and I was late getting them out the door to preschool. I ended up holding her down and getting the shoes on her feet while she screamed at the top of her lungs right in my face and attempted to twist out of my grasp. It was ugly, but it was literally also over moments after it began and everything was fine.

But while I was getting that little pink sneaker on her left foot I had this sudden flash of memory: an old girlfriend who was genuinely traumatized by her hard-ass Israeli military father who, as far as I could tell, didn’t have the ability to attune to his very sensitive, and generally emotionally intense, daughter. I never met the man in person, but it sure felt like he was still around in our relationship and we were in our 30s. Putting on Lilah’s sneakers I had this flash of feeling: what I imagined to be the rigid intolerance of the dad of my old girlfriend, and it felt awful to embody it.

Tonight, after swim class at the high school pool, both kids splashing with new confidence (they’re learning how to swim and it’s so exciting!), we came home hungry and happy. Dinner was simple and perfect: scrambled eggs from the neighbor’s chickens, quesadillas crisp from the pan, frozen peas and the first really sweet pomegranate of the season, seeds bursting everywhere like tiny rubies.

Afterward, we changed into night clothes, though it was a struggle cause they were jumping around like hyper monkeys. I corralled them into the bathroom, trying my best to convince the hyper monkeys to brush their teeth, like we do every night, but they were still jumping around and laughing at me, teasing me, knowing that they have this power because they have to cooperate to open their mouths. It’s a way of dragging out the night time experience. I have yet to figure out how to make this part of the evening reliably smooth.

I guess I was tired, and looking at the clock, and the anger rose up in me. Maybe the ghost of my own rigid father speaking through my mouth says something like: “Come on! Enough already! It’s time to brush teeth! I’m losing my patience with you!”

Lilah, totally deadpan, looks me right in the eyes and says:

“Dada. Do you know that you have a little girl inside of you that wants your attention?”

It just stops me dead in my tracks. My eyes get wide. Thinking about it now, as I’m typing these words, I feel like bursting out laughing. It was so perfect. But in that moment I do the U-Turn I’ve learned from being an Internal Family Systems therapist, I focus inside, and I very much can feel this young part of me that’s so frustrated and overwhelmed, and feels disrespected by my kids. I notice it, and acknowledge it, and I feel some warmth for it. I feel this sense of forgiveness for myself that I lost my temper. This all happens very quickly, and I say to Lilah:

“I feel her in there. And I’m taking care of her. Thanks for reminding me I can do that.”

She says: “How do you take care of her, Dada?” She’s so curious, so genuinely curious.

“Well, I went in and noticed she was there, just like you said, and I paid attention to her. Then I realized she was just one part one of me, and there was a kind, warm part that was paying attention, and I unblended from her so I could take care of her.”

And with that, Lilah gave me a hug, and I brushed the kids’ teeth and read them stories and put them to bed.

I’m sitting here, in our quiet apartment, marveling to myself about how incredible it is to raise children, to see them both become their own people, but also reflect back, in the most intense ways, aspects of ourselves, for better or for worse.

Stop and think about it for a second: the reason I have the ability to look inside and touch my young parts has a lot to do with being a father because I spend so much time taking care of little kids. The kids have been teaching me how to nurture and love, and then I get to teach it back to them, and then they teach it back to me!

I’m an only child, and I have spent a lot of time feeling alone, and I have literally dedicated my life to bringing intense, lonely people together to build community. But all the experiences of coming together with groups, and learning lessons about mutual aid and boundaries and identity, it hasn’t prepared me for the wildness of having children and growing together. The closeness is incomparable. It’s simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.

Alice is out of town this week, which is why I have time to sit here and write stuff like this. I am so grateful that she is such a grounded and loving mother and that we get along well enough to build a nurturing nest for these little people. I hope you get to hang out with them sometime.

Also, I just have to say, as long as I seemingly have your attention, that having a family with young children, in this time and place in history, is also a different kind of alienating and lonely experience. We need in person community and it’s really hard to build when we work all the time. The world is really scary right now and I hope if you are reading this that you have good people around you and that you are safe and warm. Please remember we are out here and stay in touch.

Mad love from the City of Angels, Sascha

Leave a comment

Share Dad of Lilah and Silas

Now that the kids are old enough that we can have deep existential conversations at night in the dark, some of the song lyrics that they know by heart (because I’ve been singing them since before they could talk), are getting questioned. Tonight Silas asked me with his little sing song earnest 4 year old voice: “Dada, what does ‘He soothed the souls of psychos and the men who had the horn’ mean? I told him that it’s about someone who had a kind of healing power, not in a hospital way, but in a soul way. “Psychos” here doesn’t mean something bad; it means people whose minds had gone to wild and difficult places, people who felt too much, or who couldn’t find their way back from the edge. And “the men who had the horn,” that’s old slang for the blues, or for longing. So it’s saying he could bring peace to people who were lost in madness and longing, just by playing his music. That’s what great musicians do — they make beauty out of suffering.

Then he asked, what does he mean when he says “Some people they are scared to croak but Jimmy drank until he choked and took the road for Heaven in the morning?” That was a little trickier. I told him it’s about death, but also about how some people live too hard, too fast, too much. “Croak” just means die, and some people are afraid to face it — they cling to life. But Jimmy, whoever the song’s talking about, didn’t hold back. He drank, he burned bright, and his life ended early. “The road for Heaven in the morning” is a poetic way of saying he died, maybe after a night of drinking, but the song makes it sound like he was headed somewhere peaceful, like the music carried him there.

Then I said, “You know, Silas, sometimes songs say really sad things in beautiful ways, because that’s how people make sense of pain. We sing it so we can feel it, and still keep living.”

Leave a comment

Alice made a calendar for the kid’s room and they are learning the days of the week. Watching them figure it out is pretty amazing. They go to preschool four our of seven days and we’ve had a regular routine for awhile now, but suddenly they are understanding what it means to have a weekend and what it means to divide up time.

I brought the kids home tonight for dinner and our neighbors across the alley were having a party, grilling meat, blasting Bad Bunny, a gaggle of Oaxacan kids running around playing ball. Before I had children I used to talk to all my neighbors, but now I’m just a tired dad and I barely say hello. Tonight it was our neighbor’s birthday party and her kids and her neice’s and nephews were visiting from around the city. Meanwhile our kids were so not interested in dinner and way more interested in the other kids and they ran out the door and joined them in a game of tag. It made me so happy to see our four year old twins shamelessly running around laughing with these kids and speaking the universal language of play. When I was a kid it was the 80s in Manhattan and I was middle class which meant that I was alone in an apartment building watching TV cause my folks were too scared to let me play out on the street. My strange only childhood, raised by people who were really disconnected from their bodies, left me socially awkward and I’ve been trying to catch up ever since. Seriously, I think I’d be a much happier person if I’d just been able to play when I was a kid. Seems like my kids are gonna be just fine. I’ll probably end up following their lead.

We have a little patch of ground outside in the alley by our apartment complex and we’re growing a plot of beans. We went to the Mexican market down the street and got black and red and yellow beans and the kids water them and check on them everyday.

If you look closely at the bottom photo you will see Lilah is giving her brother a hug while they admire the bean patch together. Have a good week and take good care of each other.

Leave a comment

I was putting Silas to sleep. Lilah was already gone in the bunk above, curled into her dreamworld, and it was the second round with him—the late-night drift where sometimes he resists and sometimes he softens. For some reason, in the dark, I decided to sing him a Bob Dylan song. I pulled out my phone and looked up Blood on the Tracks and landed on Tangled Up in Blue.

I sang the whole thing. My voice low in the shadows, his small body shifting under the blanket. And something cracked open in me while I was singing. That younger version of myself—the wandering one, the one who slept on strangers’ couches and hopped trains back and forth across the country,, always on the move, chasing something—was suddenly right there in the room with me. Dylan’s words weaving archetypes of love and loss, of people who disappear and reappear, of the eternal cycle of connection and separation. I could feel all of it—glowing like burning coal, what it means to be alive, tangled in time and memory.

When I finished, Silas whispered:
“Tangled up in blue. What does that mean?”

I told him, “Well, blue is a color, but it also means sad. There’s a kind of music called the blues, and it’s music about sadness. So when Dylan says tangled up in blue, he means caught inside sadness, all twisted in it.”

And right there in the dark, talking to my four-year-old son, I burst into tears. Not the kind that feel bad, but the kind that come like a storm you know is necessary. I told him, “Sometimes I feel strong emotions just like you. And it’s okay.” And I hoped that was the right thing—that it’s okay to let him hear me cry, okay for him to know that being alive means sometimes drowning in feelings.

Then, just as quickly, he said:
“Sing me another song.”

I asked what he wanted and he said, “The bank robber song.” So I sang Bankrobber by The Clash, another kind of lullaby. It’s not exactly a soft song—more of a rebel’s prayer—but in the dark, with my son, it worked.

The song begins: “My daddy was a bank robber, but he never hurt nobody. He just loved to live that way, and he loved to steal your money.” It’s Joe Strummer’s voice, channeling a whole working-class history of people who refuse to be crushed by labor and poverty.

Now that Silas is older, he wants to know what the words mean.

“What does it mean to jazz it up?” he asked.

I explained how jazzing it up means making things exciting, bringing joy, energy, sparkle into life—even when times are hard.

And then came the harder one. “What does it mean, we never loved the shovel?”

So I told him: “Well, some people have to work really hard, doing jobs they don’t like, using shovels in the fields. You and I enjoy using shovels for gardening, but for many people it’s backbreaking labor they didn’t choose.”

I told him about Eliseo, his abulea’s husband, who he knows as a grandfather figure on the other side of town. “When he was just a little older than you, he worked in the grape fields all day, for someone else’s farm. His whole family did.”

In the song, Strummer sings: “So we came to jazz it up, we never loved a shovel. Break your back to earn your pay, an’ don’t forget to grovel.”

And I told Silas: “When he says that, he’s talking about people who are forced to work like slaves, without dignity. He’s saying: I don’t want to live like that. I want joy, freedom, dignity.”

Silas thought about it for a moment and then said, “I love my shovel.”

And I laughed in the dark. “Yeah, man. Exactly. That’s the point. You should love your shovel. You should love your life. You should enjoy digging and making piles of soil and growing food. And nobody should have to break their back just to survive.”

And I could feel it then, what was happening in that tiny room: Dylan and Strummer, my son and me, threads of grief and hope and resistance weaving together. Archetypal stories in bedtime songs. A lineage of rebellion and tenderness, passed down in whispers. Who knows what the fuck this kid is going to have to live through in his life, but I hope all the love I have for him helps carry him through—because maybe that’s what it means to be tangled up in blue: not just caught in sadness, but learning how to sing inside it, how to pass the song on.

Leave a comment

With all the rough news out there I would just like to share with you that this morning we looked out in our little garden box outside the apartment and there were a bunch of acorns the kids planted that had spouted amidst the arugula and lacinado kale! The only movie our kids have watched is My Neighbor Totoro, they’ve watched it about a dozen times, and when the kids saw the sprouting acorns in the garden box they both spontaneous started doing the Totoro acorn dance. That is all. Sending love from our family to yours.

There’s this yearly confluence of historical forces that bums me out this time of year. It can make me self-involved, like I’m thinking about my inner world when it would be more appropriate to be thinking about the other people around me. It can make me a less than generous person when I really want to be more generous.

Alice brought home a Christmas tree yesterday and we decorated it with the kids and they are so excited about it all. She went out for the night and we played in the living room and I fed them dinner and put them to bed.

I have about two dozen songs that I rotate around every night, and I’ve been getting pretty sick of singing the same ones over and over. I’m a reluctant Spotify user but I like that they make a top 100 playlist for me every December of what’s I’ve been listening to and tonight I laid with the kids in the dark and I used the top 100 and pulled up lyrics to a bunch of songs I’d never sung and I sat there singing with them curled up next to me. It was cathartic and kind of silly and sweet.

I’d finish one song and they’d say “One more song, dada.” And by the time we got done ,I’d sung them ten new songs. Silas was asleep in my lap. “Okay that’s it, Lilah, time to get into bed.” Lilah gets up, and as she’s climbing up the ladder of the bunk bed in the dark she says: “That was very generous of you, to sing us all those new songs, dada.”

Lilah is 3. I didn’t even know she knew the word generous.

“How did you get so sweet, Lilah? I love singing to you.”

They can tell I’m sad, even if they don’d understand the feelings they are like emotional sponges and they pick up everything.

I’m just gonna keep singing and doing my best to be a loving dad and partner. If you are reading this and you also get the holiday blues I salute you in solidarity from the other side of the screen.

Here are the new songs I sang tonight:

Don’t Dream it’s Over - Crowded House

Monkey Man - Rolling Stones

Rudy Can’t Fail - The Clash

Satellite of Love - Lou Reed

The Broad Majestic Shannon - The Pogues

Ticket to Ride - The Beatles

Hungry Heart - Bruce Springsteen

Just Like Heaven - The Cure

It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue - Bob Dylan

I love the hell out of our 3 year old twins but they've been waking us up at 630 in the morning by jumping in our bed and by the time 830pm rolls around and they're doing anything they can to stall to keep me in their room I'm so tired and I just have to let go of anything else I want to be doing with my life if I want to be present and engaged with them. And I do want to be present and engaged with them, I fucking love the hell out of these adorable little talking monkeys. Just now I figured out this hilarious trick that's only going to work for so long: the little girl takes off her pajamas and stands up in the top bunk naked and declares she's not going to go to sleep (after an hour of reading stories and singing songs and lights out speaking in soft voices etc) so I shake off my exasperation and say: "Lilah, you can't put these PJ's back on and you're not allowed to go to sleep." "What do you mean?? I want those PJ's back on! I want to go to sleep!" "Sorry, you can't have them, and you're not allowed to go to sleep tonight. You're going to have to stay awake all night." "NOOOO!! Let me go to sleep! Please let me put on those PJ's." (Me, amazed that this is actually working): "Well, I suppose I'll let you put the PJ's back on, but I don't know about this sleep thing..."

Anyway, it's a couple minutes later and they both fell right to sleep. Little monkeys! What is my life?? I swear I have this little writing project I really want to get done. Maybe next year.

There’s a little black fish who’s different than the others. He’s faster than the rest of his crew, and when a big fish comes along, it eats up all the other little red fish, leaving him all alone. His name is Swimmy, and though he’s scared and sad, he swims on, exploring the ocean. Along the way, he sees amazing creatures—a jellyfish that’s rainbow-colored, a lobster that walks like it’s dancing, and more—until he finally finds a new school of little red fish just like his old friends. They’re too scared to go out in the big ocean, so Swimmy has an idea: they can swim together in the shape of a giant fish, with Swimmy as the eye, making them look big and strong enough to scare away any predators. By coming together, Swimmy and his new friends discover they can stay safe, explore the world, and find courage in unity.

My mom read me Swimmy when I was a kids. It’s a powerful transmission about how people can organize to resist the forces that threaten them. Swimmy shows kids that even when you feel small or outnumbered, coming together with others can make you strong. Growing up, I had a lot of people in my life who believed deeply in the ability of groups to stand up against those in power. My parents were shaped by the civil rights movement, and my grandparents were blacklisted as communists during the McCarthy era. I rebelled and became an anarchist. I don’t know what the hell my children are going to end up doing in this crazy world, but these values run deep, and in times like these, stories like Swimmy become even more essential as we try to pass on the importance of collective power to our kids.

We read it in Spanish, it’s called “Nadarín.” The kids hear their grandparents and our neighbors speaking Spanish and now they’re suddenly interested in it, like the little sponges they are. They’re so excited about this little book about a marigold seed and a pumpkin seed having a conversation in the soil as they grow and discover the kind of plants they’re turning into.

We talk about our dreams all the time. Their fantasy worlds are so rich I have no idea what they’re actually dreaming but they get really creative with the stories. They’ve started asking me about my dreams.

Lilah says: “Dada, what are you going to dream about tonight?”

And I reply: “I’m going to dream about a bunch of my old friends getting together and forming something really big that can fight off the big fish, like Swimmy.

“I like that dream” she says.

It’s the night after the election, and I’m reading my kids books about mermaids and drag queens. They’re nuzzled up against me, saying the words with me because we’ve read these books so many times. Julián Is a Mermaid is one of their favorites. It’s about a little boy who dresses up like a mermaid and goes to the mermaid parade with his abuela. It’s a magical book, full of gender bending and sea creatures.

As we turn the pages, I think about the relationship between the underground and the mainstream, and how much the stories we share reflect the world we want to create. We don’t know how the coming years are going to play out, but reading these books feels like a small, quiet act of resistance — a way to hold space for joy and difference, no matter what’s happening outside.

I think about how much love I have for my queer and trans friends and how one of the ways we show our love is by passing these stories to our kids, letting them grow up knowing that a little boy can wear a mermaid tail and sparkle as much as he wants. Reading Julián to my children reminds me that even if the world feels uncertain, we carry forward the legacies of those who came before us. In times of resistance, we thrive by telling each other’s stories, by reminding ourselves — and our children — of all the ways we belong to each other.

The relationship between the underground and the mainstream is one of constant tension and exchange. The underground is a comfortable place for some of us, a refuge where ideas can ferment and grow in ways they often can’t in the public eye. It’s a place for experimentation, where new forms of expression and resistance take root, nurtured by the safety of community and the freedom from scrutiny. In these quieter, hidden spaces, ideas are given time to take shape, deepen, and gain strength until they’re ready to emerge and affect the larger culture.

Sometimes, though, the pressures of the world push us even deeper underground, forcing us to hold our truths closer, to protect them as they evolve. But this retreat isn’t defeat; it can be a recalibration. It’s in these moments of going further underground that movements become more radical, more powerful. Protected from the pressures of assimilation or acceptance, ideas have room to become more authentic, more aligned with their original intentions. From here, they can come back stronger, reshaped to challenge the status quo more deeply.

Just remember to keep watering those seedlings. Love to everyone out there, from our family to yours.

Years ago, when we were first staring The Icarus Project and doing our best to try and change the language and culture around what gets called “mental health” and “mental illness,” I was introduced to this term “Extreme States” which was a less pathologizing way of talking about being in a psychotic” or “manic” or even severely “depressed” state. It came from the creative world of Process Oriented Psychology which is definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in these things.

(here’s an example of how the phrase gets used in my world.)

I got back last night after being at an ISPS conference for much of last week, the longest I’ve been away from Alice and the kids since they were born. I got up early and at some point SIlas open the door and when he saw me his eyes got all wide and how threw his arms around me “Dada! I missed you!” Lilah heard the commotion and sat up in bed. “Dada! Hug! Hug! I missed you!” And then it was just a love fest. The three of us all curled up together on the couch, me hearing stories about Halloween and all the wild things in their heads. So much nuzzling, two adoring young children climbing all over me. “We missed you Dada!” I had no idea that this kind of love was possible and available in the world.

Flash forward 30 minutes and it’s time to get ready for preschool and Lilah doesn’t want to change her pants, in fact, she wants to get back into bed. There is breakfast and clothes all over the place and I end up having to put her pants and shoes on against her will and she’s screaming bloody murder and crying with anguish and by the time I get them in the car they’re both screaming and crying with tears and snot pouring down their little faces.

“MAMA!!! MAMA!!! Why isn’t mama driving us to preschool?? Turn around!! Turn around!! We need to go home!! MAAAAAMAAAAAAA! Dada turn around and go hoooooooome!”

I put the music on shuffle and at first it’s “Raw Power” by Iggy. and the Stooges just to drown out the screaming. And then I tell my phone to play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones and maybe it’s my imagination but the choral voices at the beginning seem to sooth them.

By the time we get to preschool the tears have dried and are seemingly forgotten and they’re ready to go play with their friends. Big squeezes and kisses. Lilah looks at me with her intense brown eyes and through her mane of blond hair. “I love you, Dada.”

I just feel my heart swelling to capacity, and as I’m driving away I get this phrase in my head: “Extreme States.” The irony is not lost on me that I just came from a conference about working with people diagnosed with psychosis and it’s so clear that the human condition is filled with all these “extreme states.” We all have gone through them and many of us forget by the time we’re older, but it’s back in our consciousness somewhere. At one time we were all crazy wild little animals. “Rapid cycling” “bipolar” crazy little animals full of love and rage. Let’s own it and revel in it!

My kids are 3 and they are spectacular right now, their little imaginations run wild and everything is alive and everything is like a fractal of questions, never ending and self similar all the way down.

Tonight my daughter was especially clingy at bedtime, doing anything she could to convince me to stay and ideally climb into bed and sleep with her in the top bunk. "I don't wanna sleep, dada. Come sleep in my bed with me" with her little arms wrapped tightly around me.

I said to her: "Lilah, do you know that there's a little baby inside of you that's having a hard time sleeping? Do you know she's there?" Lilah got a funny look on her face.

"Can you feel her? She wants your attention."

"I can feel her, dada."

"Okay, I want you to pay attention to that little baby and put her to bed, help her fall asleep. Can you do that?"

"I can do that, dada."

"Okay, I'm going to turn the lights down and talk to your brother. I'll be back to check on you in a couple minutes."

I went down below and curled up with Silas who had built himself a nest of pillows and stuffed animals and blankets.

I sang the Rainbow Connection song and came back up.

She was curled up in bed.

"Did you put your baby to sleep?"

"I did, dada. I rocked her to sleep."

"I'm so proud of you. If she wakes up just tell her you love her and rock her back to sleep. She's lucky to have you. I love you baby. Good night."

I slipped out and they both fell asleep. I wish that trick worked for me!

My kids are at the age where they are becoming incredibly expressive, which means that they are both very affectionate and ever more articulate about the complexities of the world around them, and also they are regularly wildly emotional and screamy.

Our kids have both of their parents around and they have each other, and we all coexist together in what very much feels like a supporting and loving environment. Currently, like as I’m dictating these words as I clean their room, the kids are cooking chicken soup with their mom in the kitchen and they just made carrot cake muffins. Right before that they planted cilantro seeds in our little garden in the backyard with me, seed by seed with their cute little fingers. Their grandma gave us the seeds from her garden a mile down the road.

There is this incredible amount of curiosity and playfulness and exuberance that Alice and I have to keep a strong container for, but they are powerful forces if harnessed well. We’re all having a good time. Lilah just ran up to me and put her arms around my leg and said “meow!” really loud and ran back to the kitchen. She mostly identifies as a cat these days.

There are periodic screaming fits when the kids fight with each other about very small things, usually about sharing a toy or getting in each other’s space. And then the fighting stops and it goes back to sweet and loving. It can shift within a few seconds.

OK, so when I try to imagine my childhood I know my parents were doing the best they could, but they were fighting all the time and then they were just divorced and I was with each of them solo, back and forth each week. I didn’t have siblings. I had a next door neighbor friend who I watched a lot of TV with. I spent a lot of time alone, and I grew into a loving and kind, but pretty emotionally avoidant and self absorbed person.

Specifically, what I’m thinking about now, as I’m cleaning the kid’s room (gathering a small army of stuffed animals, changing the sheets, vacuuming the floor, throwing the clothes in the laundry), is how hard it was for me to deal with the kids screaming and fighting when I was a new dad. How unsettling the screaming was for me, how it stirred up my own inner screamy feelings, and I would emotionally shut down. It’s not like that never happens anymore, but it’s pretty rare.

What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t naturally drop into the calm parent role the way it seemed so natural for Alice. She just seems to know what to do and does it. She’s my biggest teacher as a parent. I do the best I can with the cards I was dealt and I’m just really grateful I ended up with someone who’s so solid. There are times where it feels like I’m the third kid in the house.

One of the things it makes me think about is all the different ways I played a part in messing up intimate relationships with women when I was a young man. Watching the kids go at it with each other makes me think of some of the conflicts I got it in with lovers in my 20s and 30s where I would piss someone off and they would scream at me, and instead of me being able to see through the screaming I would just shut down and push them away. No one ever taught me how to fight and make up well.

There were many times I broke up with a surprised person who told me they thought things were pretty good between us. I just took it as a sign that the people I was attracted to had way lower standards than me. But all this time later I think I was because I was raised to be emotionally shut down and conflict avoidant. It’s definitely never too late to learn new ways to be in the world.

*

Anyway, I wrote that this morning. Alice is off hanging out with friends and I took the kids on the electric bike over to the hipster pizza place down the street and we ate slices of pizza around a bunch of other families and young people drinking fancy beer. I just put the kids to bed. I was blasting music on shuffle biking down the street and “Bankrobber” by The Clash came on, little Lilah’s voice singing “Some is rich/some id poor/and that the way the world is/but I don’t believe in lying back/saying how back your luck is…” God it’s so sweet. I don’t know how old they’re going to be when they realize the meanings behind all these songs I play for them, but I love getting to share my music with the kiddos.

I was putting them to sleep and the lights were off and I was running out of songs to sing tonight and Silas was insisting I sing him another song and seemingly out of nowhere I just started belting out that old Violent Femmes song “Prove My Love” word by word:

Just last night
I was reminded of
Just how bad
It had gotten and
Just how sick
I had become
But it could change
With this relationship
De-de range
We've all been through some shit
And if were a thing
I think this things begun
Tell me now
What do I have to do What do I have to do What do I have to do
To prove my love to you??

It’s a silly, incredibly sweet and catchy,juvenile song, like most of their songs. He’s singing to a girl, some girl he likes. It’s sweet and uncomplicated, it’s just the intensity of young love and lust.

In my other life as a therapist I’m always thinking about people’s “parts”, about how all of us have these different aspects of our internal world that make up a whole internal family, and how the different parts relate to each other. I see how Lilah and Silas related to each other all the time and I think of them as “parts” in my family system and I’m the “Self” that has to be the wise leader. Amidst it all, I feel all this healing going on inside myself these days, the kind of healing I’ve spent years longing for. It was hard to be a young, loving person who really wanted to be able to genuinely love other people well but didn’t have the skills for it. He knew how to do things really intense for a little while, but then the coldness would always arrive, and he’d be left out in the cold, hurting someone, and then trying to start over again with someone else. It got really old.

So here I am with a broken pattern, with new tendrils growing out of it, getting ready to turn 50 with 3-year-old boy/girl twins and a really wonderful partner, feeling like I’m finally learning how to love and be loved in a way that’s grounded, steady, and full of the kind of connection I’ve been searching for all my life. It’s not perfect, we’re still figuring it out, but it feels like the healing I so badly wanted has actually been unfolding all along, and our kids are fucking awesome little humans. I hope you get to hang out with them sometime.

.

.1. we went on an adventure today to the big public library in downtown Los Angeles. We rode our bikes to the train and took the train straight there. Our kids are just a little sponges right now, everything goes in, all the wild people on the street and all the murals on the walls and the watermelon and mango chunks in the fruit cup the Guatemalan woman sold us, a nap in our arms on the train ride home. we read a bunch of books and sang a bunch of songs and i thought they were asleep but as i left the dark room Silas called out “Dada, hug and kiss!” and Lilah followed “Hug and kiss, Dada!”

I hear them in the next room, talking in the dark, having a very active conversation with and about their stuffed animals. And that is the end of my report

2. “what’s all this noise in here? It’s time to go to sleep!” So much clanging and crashing, so many stuffed animals and sticks and things all over the floor. “ we are making music for the turtles, Dada. They want us to sing for them before bed.”

This is three-year-old twins. Today I was walking down the alley with Lilah and someone was blasting Led Zeppelin out of their truck. I was singing along.” been a long time. Been a long time been a long, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time!” then it occurred to me:

“Lilah, do you know what lonely means?”

The little blond girl holding my hand shook her head.

“ lonely is when you’re all alone, no one else is around, and you’re really sad about it.”

Lilah has never been alone in her whole life.

come to think of it, I’m not too lonely much these days either. As an only child I spent a lot of time alone when I was a kid. By the time I was her age I was already watching a lot of television Lilah and her brother have barely ever seen a screen, other than when they see their dad pulling his phone out all the time to fiddle with it.

There is no time to be lonely in this version of my life. If I’m lucky, I get a few minutes to write down my dreams in the morning before I’m covered in children, wiping butts and putting on clothes and feeding and answering a million fucking questions.

They’re making music for the frogs again in the next room. It’s time to go in there and sing them some songs.

I’ve had this story in my head all day, but I’ve been working on. In my head it’s really good. We’ll see what happens by the time I sit down to train and ride it. I might just pass out and start again tomorrow.

3. Overtired child purple faced screaming for her mama at 10pm and I just wanna let her tired mama watch the trashy queer vampire show in the other room and I rocking overtired child in the rocking chair while she screams with the lights dim and she doesn’t want to hear any of the songs I try to sing so I’m fishing for a new song rocking and rocking, with her brother trying to crawl up my leg and sit in an occupied lap and it’s so hot, the hottest its been all summer and finally I pull up a song from the tattered memory banks and I softly sing:
   
   Blackbird singing in the dead of night
   Take these broken wings and learn to fly
   All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arrive.
   
   It’s like magic, she relaxes against my body. The boy child crawls into his bottom bunk bed. I sing the second verse. I sing the chorus and then go back to the beginning. The screaming feels like it never happened. This old song is suddenly repurposed as a prayer for sleep.
   I sing it 5 or 6 times all the way through. I’m daydreaming in the rocking chair. I have this vivid memory from when I was 20 years old. It’s the summertime and I’m traveling with a whole pack of people and we’re in the desert with two school buses. I’m on top of this big black schoolboy with my friend Sturgeon and he’s teaching me how to play Blackbird on the acoustic guitar. I’ve never played such a complicated song but he’s patient with me and I figure it out and I’m playing the complicated chord progression over and over again. I open my eyes and I’m 49 years old on a Sunday night before preschool in a dark room and my kids are falling asleep.
   
   All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arrive.
   
   Lilah whispers in my ear: “Dada, put me in my bed.” My heart swells with joy and relief, I lift her up and put her in the top bunk. She nuzzles up next to her sheep and bunny rabbit and I kiss her good night.

   Thanks for reading Dad of Lilah and Silas! This post is public so feel free to share it.

   Share

I was just trying to think of a new song to sing tonight, rocking in the rocking chair with the two kids, and it just came out of my mouth…

Chewing out a rhythm on my bubble gum
The sun is out and I want some
It's not hard, not far to reach, we can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach
Up on the roof, out on the street
Down in the playground, the hot concrete
Bus ride is too slow, they blast out the disco on the radio

Rock-rock, Rockaway Beach
Rock-rock, Rockaway Beach
Rock-rock, Rockaway Beach
We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach

I stopped, to see how it was received, and Lilah and Silas both said in unison:

“Again.”

So I sang it again. And then a third time. While I was singing I thought about how culture gets transmitted through music in unlikely ways. I didn’t hang out at Rockaway Beach when I was a kid, but my mom’s whole Greek Jewish working class clan would leave the Bronx in the Summertime and rent bungalows there to escape the heat. The Ramones song captures this particular moment in Queens in the 1970s that always sounded good to me as a teenager in Manhattan in the 80s and 90s. And here I am on the other side of the country in a whole other era, building some cultural bridge to the past with a catch punk song that my kids will know and associate with their dad, and maybe some place their people came from back in the day.

(Cultural Transmission: the Joey Ramone Place sign on the Bowery where CBGBs used to be before NYU swallowed up the whole neighborhood.)

The cultural transmissions from the past are unrelenting, that’s just what we humans do with each other. We are always reading stories to our kids about little boys picking blueberries with their moms in Maine and canning them by the wood stove, or packs of school children playing in the summertime streets of Brooklyn in the 1970s, or revisioned biblical stories that people have been telling their kids for thousands of years like the Noah’s Ark PJ Library books that our kids love.

It’s all a bunch of old stories. If you think about it, (like I do all the time these days), the entirety of the languages we speak to each other are like piles and piles of dead people’s bones transmitting into sounds that we use to communicate everything we communicate with each other. We’re only here for a little while but we leave little marks for the future in language and culture. We mix and remix and come up with new combinations, and hopefully have some sense of where we come from to pass onto our kids.

Meanwhile I take it for granted that my children just speak to me now in full sentences and explain complex ideas, but a year ago they were barely speaking. They used to get so frustrated trying to explain to us and they’d say “this this this, that that that” with lots of pointing. Now Lilah sits at the table in the morning and says: “Dada, I’m still hungry. Please bring me a piece of toast with butter and apricot jam.” I don’t think twice, I just do it.

I’ll leave with this pure joy video that the YouTube bestowed unto me:

When you spend a lot of time with toddlers there’s a lot of fantasy and tangential thinking going on. Then these days when you tune back into consensus reality and listen to the radio it seems like the adult world is just as fantastical and tangential. Between the Trump spectacle and those ads for “hallucination free AI” on the radio as we’re making breakfast, In recent months it’s felt like we’ve been on some kind of cyberpunk dystopic death race to the bottom. And then, suddenly, there are signs that maybe it’s not going to be quite as catastrophic as quickly. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt such extreme political despair and then suddenly had a sense of hope from the news. It’s as dramatic as my children. I’m not kidding myself that I think things are really going to get better, I just don’t want them to get so bad so quickly.

(The image on the left is from Maurice Sendak’s “We’re all in the dumps with Jack and Guy which our kids love.)

Frank Zappa famously said: “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.” That guy was pretty smart. Today when Kamala Harris picked her Vice Presidential running mate I had never heard of the guy, but within 30 minutes I was educated by a flurry of memes, including the one below:

There are times to be cynical and then there are times to just join the party and do what we can to get these fascists away from the halls of power. Give me some seemingly decent people and some fucking spectacle that’s actually going to push back on the republicans. Let’s put this chapter of Trump history into history where it belongs and have some reasonable people to fight against. I’ve been listening to Prince in the background all day in my office and it’s been really good.

Meanwhile I picked the kids up after work and we went shopping and to the car wash and then came home and we stood in the kitchen together and they actually helped me unload ALL the groceries and the ENTIRE dishwasher and while we did that I cooked them quesadillas with pinto beans and green salsa and then we all sat down and ate dinner together. The entire time I was playing Prince’s album “Dirty Mind” and reminiscing about the days I lived in a punk house in North Oakland and how we listened to that album every night and danced around the kitchen cooking dinner. I was pretty much eating the same meal with my kids that I used to eat with my punk friends 25 years ago. Back then I never could have imagined having children, I barely could imagine living to 30.

I sent a text message to Alice, who was finishing her shift at NPR in the bedroom. It said:

Love from our house to yours.

Sascha