About 20 million tons sit in storage, as this season’s harvest begins.
Approximately 20 million tons of grain sit in storage in Ukraine, with few ways out of the country. It is a slow-moving crisis that is choking Ukraine off from the global economy, and cutting the rest of the world off from Ukraine’s critical supply of grains.
Ukraine provides about 10 percent of the global share of wheat exports, and almost half of the world’s sunflower oil. Alongside Russia, Ukraine makes this region one of the world’s “breadbaskets.” But Moscow’s war in Ukraine and Western sanctions against Russia have squeezed agricultural exports from the entire Black Sea region. These products can be replaced on the global market, but at a cost. Food is harder to afford for poor countries, and for poor people in rich countries. It could deepen a worldwide hunger crisis. United Nations food agencies warn that a record 49 million people, in 46 countries, are at risk of falling into famine conditions this year.
Ukraine exported a lot of its 2021 crop before Russia’s invasion, including a lot of its wheat, but some of that, and products like corn, are still in storage. Exporters are struggling to get what’s left out, because Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, like the key city of Odesa, are under blockade. Russian fleets are blocking the route, and the area is heavily mined.
Now this season’s harvest is beginning, but with limited places to put the new crops. This backlog means that some crops could rot, and as long as they’re sitting there, they remain vulnerable to Russian attack or theft.
Ukraine is still shipping out its grains west, through Europe. But infrastructure challenges and a raging war mean it is only a fraction of what it would otherwise be. Rachid Bouda, the managing director of shipping company MSC Ukraine, typically shipped about 10,000 containers each month from Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, like Odesa and Chornomorsk. They were filled with all kinds of agricultural commodities: wheat, barley, corn, sunflower oil in flexitank containers. Now, it’s more like 1,000, maybe 1,500 containers — though none leave from Ukrainian ports.
One route is through Constanta, a port on the Black Sea, in Romania. But to get containers there, they must first travel overland, either by truck or by train. These routes are time-consuming, logistically complicated, congested, and costly. Most of all, these methods cannot deliver the volumes necessary to move this amount of grain.
“The only way to ship grain from Ukraine is to use the Ukrainian ports of the Black Sea,” Bouda said.
Ukraine ships the majority of its grain through ports on the Black Sea
Before the war, Ukraine exported about 5 million metric tons of grain each month, around 90 percent of it from Ukraine’s ports on the Black Sea, like Odesa, where massive silos store grain before it departs. “The whole infrastructure of the country was designed in this way, to export grains through these Black Sea ports,” said Paskal Zhelev, an associate professor of international economic relations at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Russia’s invasion interrupted all that. Russian forces have periodically attacked Odesa, although the port is still within Ukrainian control. (Russia controls ports in Ukraine’s southeast, like Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, though those are less critical for grain shipments.)
But Russian fleets largely control the waters off Ukraine, and their blockade has disconnected Ukraine from these sea routes. Ukraine also closed the port and mined the coastline off Odesa to defend against any Russian attempts to land there. Mines are also afloat in the sea. Ukraine blames Russia for stealing mines and setting them loose to block grain shipments; Russia claims they’re Ukrainian mines that broke free.
The blockade is extreme, but once Russia invaded, trading as usual couldn’t happen. Many commercial firms don’t want to send their ships to dock in a port that might become a target for a missile strike, and the dangers of doing business in a war zone dramatically increases insurance premiums, which increases the cost of transporting any cargo. That is, if firms want to take that risk at all.
A lot of grain, with places to go — but no easy way to get there
With Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea closed off, Ukraine is scrambling to find alternative routes, mostly through other countries’ ports on the Black Sea, Baltic Sea, or Adriatic Sea. But to reach any of those places, shipments of wheat or corn or barley have to travel overland, or from river ports on the Danube.
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Christina Animashaun/Vox
A lot of Ukrainian grain is bound for Constanta, on the Black Sea in Romania, with about 50 percent of current exports shipped from there, said Nikolay Gorbachov, the head of the Ukrainian Grain Association, an industry group for grain exporters and processors. About 30 percent of Ukrainian grain exports are leaving through Poland near Gdansk, on the Baltic Sea, and the rest are headed everywhere else — or wherever they can go.
Instead of 5 million tons of grain each month, Ukraine is only managing about 1 million to 1.5 million tons, though some experts said that may be over-representing what is physically moved.
Even that figure obscures the cost, delays, and logistical complications. “Finding alternative roads to neighboring countries exposes a longstanding problem of the Black Sea region,” Zhelev said. “This is the substandard infrastructure and the lack of proper interconnectivity between those countries.”
To get grain to Constanta, Bouda said he had two options: truck or train. At the beginning of the war, it was hard to get truck drivers, since Ukrainian men couldn’t leave the country. And Bouda wasn’t the only one trying to send cargo by truck; others had the same exact idea, which created heavy congestion on the roads to Romania, and a back-up at the border crossing, where customs didn’t have the technology or personnel to handle this kind of volume. The wait at the border, Bouda said, could take six or seven days. Once at the port, truckers also had to wait to unload cargo. The costs added up.
The train option presented its own challenges, and is one many Ukrainian exporters face, no matter what they’re shipping, because the railway gauge in Ukraine, as in other parts of the former Soviet Union, is about 10 centimeters wider than the ones typically used across Europe. That means once the Ukrainian train hits the border with, say, Poland, grain has to be reloaded onto different trains, or the freight wagons have to be placed onto a train with a narrower base. This, of course, is very complicated, very costly, and very time-intensive. Bouda said the backlogs make it hard to find available train cars.
“The volume, it cannot be processed just by sending grains by railway,” said Arthur Nitsevych, a partner at Interlegal Law Firm, a Ukrainian firm that works in shipping and maritime transport in the Black Sea region. “There are bottlenecks on the railway on the crossroads between Ukraine and the European countries, and there is a lack of infrastructure, lack of terminals, there is a lack of wagons, locomotives. So everybody is doing their best, but it seems it’s not possible. It’s not possible.”
Fighting in Ukraine is concentrated in the east and the south, but a lot of the nation’s infrastructure is mobilized for war and so already strained for capacity. Badly damaged infrastructure and detours further complicate overland travel. Ukrainian soldiers have blown up bridges to stop Russia’s advance. Train lines and stations are how Ukraine resupplies its weapons, and Russia has targeted those delivery points.
Ukraine’s river ports on the Danube remain open, but Gennadiy Ivanov, general manager of BPG Shipping, said that because these ports did almost zero grain exports before the war, they cannot handle the load. About 100 ships, he said, had built up to the entrance to the Sulina Canal, with a wait time of about 20 to 25 days to make berth.
When grain arrives at another European seaport, those places are not necessarily equipped to deal with the influx of cargo. “Constanta was not ready to handle Ukrainians’ volumes, and immediately it became congested,” Bouda said.
This is true for other ports in the region, like Varna, in Bulgaria, which has promised to help ship Ukrainian grain, but Zhelev said doesn’t really have the infrastructure to do so. Lithuania has also proposed sending out Ukrainian grain through its Baltic Sea ports, which sounds great on paper — a nice, deep harbor for big ships, silos to store grain, and a railroad with the same gauge width. There’s just one hiccup: to get there, Ukrainian wheat would transit through Belarus, a client state of Russia’s, which probably would not be on board with this idea. It’s more likely that the wheat would have to go through Poland first, requiring two train changes.
“Physically, you just cannot really get this grain out of the country by railway, by trucks, and by boats,” said Oleg Nivievskyi, the vice president for economics education at the Kyiv School of Economics, who specializes in agricultural economics. “It’s simply not possible.”
The only viable way to get Ukrainian grain out is by ending the Black Sea blockade. But how?
Ukraine’s peak grain export happens between July and December, experts said, once the harvest season is on — people want the freshest, best wheat, and then other crops that get harvested after that. The remaining grain is distributed through the next year, until the season picks up again in July.
That’s why the grain situation in Ukraine is becoming so urgent. Ukraine’s wheat is planted in winter, and was largely already in the ground when the war started. Other crops planted in the spring, like corn and sunflower, are down, but not extraordinarily so. “Farmers plant, that’s what they do,” said Mike Lee, director of Green Square Agro Consulting, which forecasts crop yields for the Black Sea region. “Even in the extreme situation of a war, they still went out and planted.” Ukrainian officials estimated earlier this year that grain harvest yields will be down about 20 percent.
Ukrainian farmers will still harvest, and they need a place to store it. But because last year’s grain is stuck, silos are in short supply. The EU may bring in some portable silos, and US President Joe Biden has suggested building silos along the Polish border to be more easily able to move grain overland. Some crops like wheat are a little easier to store, but still challenging as other crops start coming in later in the year. Storage is costly for farmers, especially if it’s not clear they can even sell their grain. “You have to spend money to keep the grain in good condition. If this is bad, that also means that the quality of grain is going to be lower, and the price is going to be lower,” Nivievskyi said.
All of these solutions — EU countries easing cross-border checks for overland wheat shipments, new silos — are Band-Aids on a gaping wound. There is only one solution, Gorbachov said, and it is “open the ports.”
Turkey is brokering talks with Russia on the ports, including a United Nations proposal that would create a kind of secure corridor for grain transport, potentially with Turkish naval escorts. Others have proposed using NATO or United Kingdom or United States fleets — something like the US did in the 1980s in the Persian Gulf. That plan would potentially put NATO ships uncomfortably close to Russian ones, and the United States has, for now, ruled it out.
Russia has also suggested it could ease the blockade, in exchange for relief from Western sanctions, a quid pro quo that plays to Russia’s strategy of trying to blame the United States and the West, not its unprovoked war, for the coming food crisis.
Even if some deal is reached, the region’s waters would still need to be de-mined, which experts said is technically possible, but will take time, perhaps months. Ukraine is worried that this would leave Odesa vulnerable to attack, especially since Russia has a track record of violating these deals. But as experts said, there has to be some sort of diplomatic breakthrough, because the Black Sea is the only viable way to get the grain out. “Otherwise,” Zhelev said, “the whole world suffers.”
Chores are everyone’s responsibility. Here’s how to get roommates, kids, or partners involved.
Living with someone (or someones) can require a fair amount of sharing: space, noise levels, appliances, bathroom time, you name it. Perhaps most crucially, though, is the sharing of chores. It can also be one of the most contentious parts of cohabitation.
Most of the time, the division of household labor isn’t equal, leading to loads of pent-up resentment. Research among heterosexual couples showed women tend to shoulder the brunt of housework. Even when wives make more money than their husbands, they still spend more hours a week on housework, per a recent study. Another study found that a common belief among roommates is that the housemate who’s most bothered by stacks of dirty dishes and piles of stinky laundry should be the one to handle the messes.
“When we’re conditioned to have assumptions take the place of structured decision-making, everything goes wrong,” says Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live), also adapted into a soon-to-be-released documentary.
While an even chores split (you take trash duty, I’ll take dishes) can seem like the easiest way to household bliss, sometimes such a breakdown isn’t the most equitable or realistic. Schedules change, people get sick, and the least-glamorous tasks can slip minds entirely.
Instead of stewing in silence while passive-aggressively scrubbing the toilet for the millionth consecutive week or blowing up at your partner for never sweeping, take a measured approach to splitting household duties, whether you live with kids and family members or roommates and romantic partners.
Time for a deep conversation
Everyone differs in what they consider “clean.” A study found that those with lower tolerance for messes will often complete housework quicker out of sheer discomfort. The more that same person tackles those chores — say, washes the dishes — the more likely they will forever be considered the designated dishwasher.
If you feel your fate being sealed as the forever tidier, you have to discuss boundaries and expectations with your housemates. First, begin the conversation as neutrally as possible by saying something along the lines of, “I really want to be a great housemate to you and one of the things I think would be helpful for our relationship is if we could come to an agreement on the expectations around the cleanliness and organization of the apartment. Are you open to a conversation like that?” suggests Tiffany Dufu, founder and CEO of The Cru, a platform connecting peer mentors, and author of Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less. “The conversation is not about the recycling,” she says. “The conversation is about the value of the relationship that you have with someone and aligning on expectations around household duties, responsibilities.”
As honestly as possible, share what’s important to you in terms of house upkeep, says professional organizer Elise Hay, founder of Organized Sanctuaries. Is having a clear sink absent any dirty dishes at the end of the day one of your priorities? A made bed every morning? No hair in the shower drain? Make your preferences known.
Then, after each party has outlined their priorities, leave space to talk through any challenges in meeting those goals, Hay says. Maybe your partner has hectic mornings getting the kids ready for school and doesn’t have time to make the bed and you’d be better suited for that chore. (More on delegating tasks later.) Or your roommate doesn’t know you prefer an empty kitchen countertop when you’re doing your meal prep. Expressing these goals and preferences can help those we live with understand why certain chores are so important to us.
Because division of labor is never just about to-do list items, Rodsky advises discussing your respective histories with chores. Ask your housemates what they remember about cleaning growing up. Maybe they weren’t responsible for much around the house, but your parents assigned you weekly jobs. Both of these experiences impact how you approach household tasks as an adult. “That’s what I recommend,” Rodsky says, “frequent high-cognition, low-emotion conversations where you tell each other stories. … These chores that we’re fighting about are actually our stories. They’re our humanity. I think when you can elevate it to that level, you can understand where someone’s coming from from such a better place.” These soul-searching conversations can help uncover why you hate washing windows or your partner prefers to be the one who folds the laundry.
Chores and mess can dredge up so many emotions, so you’ll need to actively avoid letting them influence how you discuss division of labor. Seeing jackets and shoes strewn about the common area can feel like a personal affront when the closet is right there. Regardless of what boundaries and expectations you’ve already set about chores, remember that a personal attack isn’t likely to get you far. “When it comes down to it, belongings deserve respect, and our homes deserve respect,” Hay says. “It’s definitely not a reason to attack someone. Explain, ‘It makes me feel so much better when our house is clean and [we’re] treating our space with respect. … Is that something that you can help me on?’”
When all housemates agree to specific conditions — like the kitchen is considered clean when the sink is empty, countertops are clear, and the microwave’s been scrubbed — it becomes much easier to gauge a deviation from baseline. Still, it’s important to remain flexible and have compassion for those we live with, Hay says. “Being able to be flexible enables us all to have a little bit more understanding of each other,” she says. “There could be reasons why one person’s chore is going to slip, and there’s [got] to be compassion from the roommate.”
Start small
Before totally overhauling the house-cleaning schedule and issuing job assignments, look at the household’s already established habits to see where small changes can be implemented, Hay says. Common areas like the kitchen and living room tend to see the most clutter and foot traffic but can be easily managed through minor tweaks. If your roommate is frustrated that you leave your dishes in the sink in the morning, you both need to come to a happy medium of when the dishes can reasonably be expected to be washed. This may mean you clean them during your lunch break (if you work from home) in order to have the sink cleared by the time your housemate gets home from work so they can prepare their dinner.
Instead of framing the conversation as “This is what needs to be done,” Hay suggests phrasing the discussion as “If this could be done in this timeframe, it would make my life so much less stressful.” “It might be that the other person doesn’t realize that the other partner needs to have a clear sink to drain hot pasta or needs a clear sink to be able to do their dinner prep,” Hay says.
Assign tasks based on ownership, not assumptions
When it comes to divvying up chores, do not make assumptions that a housemate or a partner will do certain tasks based on their income, job, or gender; women often end up responsible for most of the household chores simply based on biases. “My job is more flexible. My partner makes more money than me,” Rodsky says. “That’s a terrible assumption because even if women make more money than their partners, they still do more housework.”
The way to encourage everyone in the house to contribute to chores involves getting all parties to “own” their tasks, Rodsky says. Rodsky uses the example of buying mustard. Ownership of mustard purchase begins in the conceptualizing phase — understanding what’s necessary to complete a task — which is as simple as knowing your kid really loves yellow mustard. The next step of owning a task is the planning: realizing your supply of mustard is getting low and putting the condiment on your shopping list. Finally, executing the chore means picking up the mustard when you go to the grocery store — rinse, repeat. “When you can have someone else in your system — whether it’s a roommate, a sister, a child — hold the full planning, conception, and execution of a task, 50/50 goes out the window,” Rodsky says, “and that was the biggest, most beautiful breakthrough.” Rodsky developed a system for assigning tasks, also called Fair Play, in which everyone discusses their feelings around each chore before figuring out who’s going to take ownership over the task.
Dufu finds it helpful to create a spreadsheet of all of the household chores and to assign each person a task based on their talents and schedules. Dufu calls her spreadsheet MEL — Management Excel List — and each chore, from taking out the trash to washing the car, is listed. Every family member gets their own column where they claim their tasks. Sometimes, certain chores aren’t claimed, like washing the car, and that’s fine. “Our kids now have columns,” Dufu says, “and we would put an X in someone’s column next to the thing that they would do, not because they’ve always done it before but because that was the task that fit better with their schedule, or that was the task that did better with their personality.” For example, Dufu says she’s more introverted than her husband, so it made more sense for him to manage the kids’ social calendars since he gets much more enjoyment out of chatting with other parents.
Of course, a massive spreadsheet may introduce more stress into an already stressful situation. Rodsky’s Fair Play method involves each task being written down on a card and each member holding a deck of cards outlining their individual chores; instead of a list, each person has their cards to refer to. Roommate chore apps help divide household labor with the help of notifications, schedules, and progress trackers. A colorful chore chart on a dry-erase board with visible rewards like smiley face magnets can help keep kids engaged.
Even if you believe you may do certain chores “better” than your housemates, you need to value the time and effort the people you live with put into cleaning and tidying, and how that effort helps you. “That person committed to our family or committed to our relationship in a way that makes our home feel more valued,” Hay says.
Don’t forget the kids — or the beauty of renegotiation
For households with kids or older family members, there are age-appropriate tasks to get everyone involved in chores. Kids are usually able to contribute to chores much earlier than most parents think, Hay says, and assigning them easy chores — like cleaning up the crayons or helping rinse vegetables for salads — helps instill a sense of responsibility. The same can be said for older relatives, Hay continues. By centering the conversation on responsibility and respect for the home, house members of all ages can understand the importance of a chores system.
However, not every kid is going to be jazzed about helping out around the house. Parents can support kids who may not feel confident (or excited) about the chores they’re assigned by letting them know they can get themselves ready for school, for example, and you need them to take on that task to help you out.
The assignment of tasks shouldn’t be permanent, either. Dufu suggests revisiting chores every six months or so, especially if you have children who may be able to take on more responsibilities. Ultimately, the division of labor in the home should feel like an ever-evolving process meant to keep everyone as satisfied as possible.
“At the end of the day, my goal when I work with clients and share advice online is to make people’s homes easier to live in,” Hay says. “So what can we all do, individually and collectively, to make this a more enjoyable place to live?”
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Still sad, no longer young, kind of literary.
“There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” So wrote the English literary critic Cyril Connolly in his 1938 book Enemies of Promise, wherein he left no doubt about the identity of the No. 1 barrier to literary greatness: children. The burdens of domesticity, Connolly argued, would sap the promising writer of the time and oxygen they needed to achieve greatness at the only thing that really mattered, which was very much not their family. It’s an astringent line, one still regularly asked of authors to this day. Must they choose between the perfection of the life or the perfection of the work?
Sorry, did I say “they”? Writing in the 1930s, Connolly made it clear that the choice was only to be made by one category: men. Family life, he wrote, could only work for the writer if he had money and “a wife who is intelligent and unselfish enough to understand and respect the working of the unfriendly cycle of the creative imagination.” The pram in the hall was Mom’s problem, and it was her job to ensure that its occupant didn’t get in the way of Dad’s creative freedom.
So men got the chance to be Writers with a capital W, and they could also be fathers, provided there was someone else there to do the most if not all of the actual work of parenting. If literary merit was implicitly associated with freedom from familial responsibilities — if not necessarily freedom from a family — it gave male authors even more of a leg up than they already had. They could have it all, while female authors could not.
Despite that, however, many of those male authors didn’t seem to make the best fathers. About a third of the way through Keith Gessen’s new parenthood book Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, a memoir of the early years with his first child, I began to wonder: What would it look like if literary lions of the past had decided to try their hand at fatherhood books? How about four-time-married Ernest Hemingway, whose youngest child once wrote, “I felt profound relief when they lowered my father’s body into the ground”? Or F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote lovely if perhaps ill-advised letters to his only child Scottie, which probably didn’t quite make up for the years of alcoholism and mental illness that marked her childhood? Or William Faulkner, who put it bluntly when he told his daughter, “No one remembers Shakespeare’s children.”
Gessen, for those who weren’t physically or spiritually in Brooklyn during the first decade of this century, is in many ways the modern descendant of those literati. He is best known for co-founding n+1 in 2004, a left-wing print and digital literary magazine that resembled those finely crafted cocktails that became popular in New York around the same time. Take one part 21st century Marxism, one part high-end literature, one part, uh, Harvard, shake well, then toss out and serve beer and cheap wine at the parties. Gessen is a novelist twice over, a translator of Nobel Prize-winning authors, a Columbia University teacher, and a literary journalist who covers the war in Ukraine for the New Yorker. He is a very serious writer and a very serious guy. And in Raising Raffi, he makes it clear that he is very serious — if frequently confused and confounded — about what he calls the “simultaneously mundane and significant” act of fatherhood.
Simply by virtue of the fact that Gessen doesn’t treat the occupants of those prams — in addition to now 7-year-old Raffi, Gessen and his wife (the novelist, publisher, and blogger Emily Gould) have 3-year-old Ilya — as an obstacle to his writing career, he’s done something unique and valuable. In doing so, he’s demonstrated the enormous weight that “parenting” — a verb that only came into vogue in the 1970s — takes on for the highly educated, city-dwelling, and just somewhat neurotic members of his gender and class. (Notably, women have been pulling off this act for decades with less notice and fewer plaudits.) And as a fellow member of that class — the putting-words-in-a-computer, small-child-having in a too-small-Brooklyn-apartment class — I have to say: I feel seen.
Which isn’t to say that any of us have any idea what we’re doing, or what these children we’re so busy raising will become.
All the sad young(ish) literary dads
Gessen makes two remarks early in Raising Raffi that set the stage for the experiences that will follow. “I was part of the first generation of men who, for various reasons, were spending more time with their kids than previous generations,” he writes. “That seemed notable to me.” For many dads — especially the kind of fathers like Gessen and I might know — this is largely true. A 2016 study found that fathers on average were spending triple the time on child care than dads were 50 years ago. The bar has been raised, and we know it’s up to us to meet it.
A little later, though, Gessen says something else. Writing about his life before Raffi arrived, Gessen notes: “I had always assumed that I’d have kids, but I had spent zero minutes thinking about them. In short, though not young, I was stupid.” That tracks. Spend some time surfing through Gessen’s pre-Raffi writing, and you’ll find that children rarely if ever appear. And while not every Brooklyn dad is a writer — it just seems that way sometimes — the life path Gessen describes is common enough. His sibling, the journalist and critic Masha Gessen, put it this way in an interview with the Cut: “There’s a particular narrative to the maturation of an American male, urban, of a certain class, who just, like, doesn’t have to take care of anybody for a really, really long time,” they said. “You’re a fully formed human being by the time you have to take care of another person.”
The result for us dads is going from 0-60 in what feels like about three seconds. A new being, utterly defenseless and utterly incomprehensible, enters your world, and you have no preparation, no life experience, for how to deal with it. And unlike many of our own fathers, there’s no escaping to the office or the bar. We are in it, whatever it will turn out to be.
Presented with what he doesn’t know, Gessen falls back on what he does: books, interviews, and eventually — when he can spare the time — writing. (Though writing actually directed at dads he finds mostly useless: “In the few books out there, we were either stupid dad, who can’t do anything right, or superdad, a self-proclaimed feminist and caretaker.”) Some of the best parts of Raising Raffi are when Gessen applies the same deep reading he might have directed pre-child toward a work by the Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich to, like, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Reading Raising Raffi after having gone through the same experience is like meeting a guy and discovering you’re into many of the same bands. “Oh, you liked Michael Cohen’s The New Basics? I dug his early stuff, but now I’m really getting into Harvey Karp’s Happiest Baby on the Block.” Just, you know, much less cool.
Gessen is particularly good on the sheer bewilderment of the very earliest days of parenthood. Whether you have a home birth, as Gould did, or in a hospital, at some point the doulas or the doctors deliver the baby, hand it over to you … and, more or less, that’s it. Leaving the hospital with our son a day after he was born, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was going to stop us, ask us for our identification or our qualifications. But they didn’t. “They had left us with a little baby,” Gessen writes, “and we had no idea what to do with it.”
Nothing demonstrates that more than Gessen’s notion — which he is quickly disabused of — that he could balance writing and caring for a tiny, squalling being incapable of sleeping for more than two hours at a time. “As for rocking the baby to keep him from crying while you write emails or your novel, you can sort of do that, but the trick is that to keep the baby from crying you usually have to pick him up,” he writes. “That makes it harder to write your novel.” (At moments like this — and really throughout much of Raising Raffi, from which she is often absent — I wondered what Gould, who had her own vibrant writing career to keep up, thought of Gessen’s assumptions.)
Infancy passes in a blur of sleepless nights, breastfeeding for Gould, and “look[ing] up something online that was worrying me” for Gessen. To a father, it all feels very familiar, as well it should. The parenting experience is most universal when children are at their youngest. Infants, you quickly discover, don’t really have personalities; at best, they have traits. They might be a relatively good sleeper, as our baby was, or they might be restless, as Raffi was. Gessen describes being bombarded with advice “from our parents, our friends, from strangers, and then of course books and the internet.” There are endless routes to only one destination: keep them alive, which Gessen and Gould do manage.
But then Raffi begins to mature, and the act of parenting — and the book — gets more interesting, individual, and so much more difficult.
Bear Dad
As Raffi grows as an individual, so does Gessen as a dad, bringing his own life experience to bear as a parent and father. For Gessen, that doesn’t just mean writing, but his experience as a Russian-born immigrant who came with his family to the US at the age of 6. Some of the best parts of the book involve Gessen’s attempts to raise his child bilingual, speaking to him chiefly in Russian. Closely reading Amy Chua’s Tiger Mom, Gessen begins to imagine creating an ideal fusion of his Russian American upbringing: “Bear Dad,” as Gould nicknames him, though she cautions Gessen that it may make people think his book is “about being a cute, hairy gay guy.” (As the line suggests, “Bear Dad” isn’t quite a defined parenting style.)
It goes, as so much of the parenting does during Raffi’s often difficult toddler years, not all that great. Though at home he’s the stricter parent, when he takes Raffi to the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Gessen is chastised by his Russian relatives for being too lenient, and finds himself caught between cultures as a parent. (Maybe he should have listened to his sibling, who remarks in the book that “the chief distinguishing characteristic of Russian parenting was a hatred of children.”) Gessen retained his native Russian at some effort in the US as a way to remain linked to his own parents, especially his mother, who died of breast cancer when he was a teenager. But Raffi doesn’t have those links, and “his failure to learn it was hard not to take personally.” That frustrates Gessen, as does his “adorable little boy’s” habit of punching him on the nose. Which makes Gessen — understandably, I’d say — a little angry.
Anger is the shadowland of modern fatherhood. My earliest memories of my own father are shaded by his occasional bouts of anger; not just the eruptions, but the wondering when it would burst forth. Our relationship has largely been repaired since, but the memory of that fear colors my own parenting. I strive to be gentle, to be nice, to be easy with my son, even when it isn’t easy. (And I wonder: Was the anger always there and I’ve only noticed now that the occasional object is a small, helpless being?) Nothing can flood me with shame faster than when I fail — a feeling Gessen describes well:
“‘Dada’s not nice.’ The words cut me to the quick. If there was one thing I aspired to, it was nice. I wanted to be nice. I wanted my son to feel that I was a warm presence in his life. … I was finding it very hard.”
Did Hemingway worry about being nice to his children? Did Faulkner? (Based off the quotes at the start of the piece, I’m going to imagine no.) But we modern, involved, doting dads — we want to be nice. We need to be nice. And we don’t always succeed. “Instead of an articulate, ironic, permissive American father,” Gessen writes, “Raffi is getting a mushy, sometimes yelly Russian father with a limited vocabulary.” It’s a scouringly honest line, even if it explains why “Bear Dad” is unlikely to catch on as much as “Tiger Mom.”
The tragedy of parenthood
There’s more to Raising Raffi, like Gessen’s attempts to get his son interested in sports, which is opposed by both Gould (who believes organized sports “inculcated violence and were implicated in rape culture”) and by Raffi (who’d rather play with his Transformers and watch “Wild Kratts”). A writer who has always paid attention to the material realities of society, he’s particularly good on the way that “having a baby altered how I thought about money. Before Raffi, there was nothing that people with more money had that I actually wanted. Now they did.” And he is absolutely right about the single most important rule of parenting: “You should be as close as possible to your kids’ day care.” (Parenting in New York, like all else in the city, comes down to real estate.)
As Gessen himself acknowledges, many, many women have been down this road before, including literary authors like Louise Erdich and Anne Enright. There’s no single line in Raising Raffi as good as Gould’s description in the Cut profile of her husband as “the Christopher Columbus of mommy blogging.” Modern dads may be far more involved than many of their own fathers were — let alone Gessen’s male literary antecedents — but on average we still spend barely more than half the time mothers spend with their children. We desire some recognition that the act of modern fatherhood — a book we’re all in the process of writing — is worthy of close attention and effort, something Raising Raffi provides, but we’re also smart enough to know that our partners face even more pressure.
As for our children, we want far more, we fathers caught in what Gessen calls “the tragedy of parenthood.” We want them to be like ourselves, but “better, and freer, and happier,” as he writes, to maximize all our best qualities and minimize those parts of ourselves that we wish didn’t exist but do. It’s an impossible wish, as impossible as trying to write a great novel when the main character wants to take over the story halfway through. (Try that, Faulkner.) But at the very least, we want points for trying. Which, when all is said and done, is the most dad goal possible.