Broken Glass

I used to care about the kind and quality of glasses I had in the cupboard. I wanted to have beer steins, wine glasses—both red and white—champagne flutes, tumblers for scotch, whiskey, and bourbon, and regular drinking glasses for juice and water. I never really cared to have any crystal. That was my parents’ thing and I didn’t understand why we kept the best-looking things locked in display cases that we rarely opened. Then again, trying to amass an array of glassware for company that would never come over made about just as much sense.

I stopped caring around our third child when it became apparent my kids had little regard for my glassware aspirations. It just made more sense to holdoff until the kids had a better understanding of gravity and how their limbs worked. Our cupboards are now stuffed with an assortment of mason jars and all manner of pickle jars stripped of their labels.

It used to be when a glass broke, I’d clean it up in anger, knowing the set was forever incomplete. Something about having an odd number of glasses made me irrationally upset. It was if the universe had tipped one broken glass closer to complete chaos. At some point, I just surrendered to the reality that my life was full of the most wonderful kind of chaos: the chaos of raising children. Glass would be broken.

Now, when a kid is invariably clumsy and breaks a glass, I don’t take it as a sign of the universe’s eventual collapse—which is inevitable—but instead clean it up with a smile on my face and think, Time to buy some pickles. Never thought pickle jars would make me a better dad.