Who am I with kids?

I’d like to keep my family together and raise my boys into adults who are “publicly useful and privately happy.” Anything else is gravy.

I could, however, identify with Knausgaard’s feeling of being rendered soft and harmless, of having to forget that there were such things as potency or masculine dignity. The fact that we were helping our wives take care of our children on the weekend was not the problem: this was a responsibility we had all signed up for, approved of and—at least ... See more

I think it’s less about the specifics and more about understanding what it means to assert—but not baby—yourself, given who you are and what you need.