Readers, fellow travelers in the long and largely unpaid profession of keeping a household running,
I want to say a word this month about smallness. The matters we handle at this Journal are, by any serious measure, small. A missing hoodie. A tank of gas. A container of pad thai marked, in permanent ink, with a name that proved to be no deterrent at all. Taken individually, each of these grievances is the kind of thing a reasonable person would shrug off before the coffee is cold. Taken together, they are the fabric of a shared life, and the wear patterns on that fabric tell you rather a lot about where the couch has been sat on and who has been sitting on it.
This is, I think, why I keep at it. Not because I believe any of these matters will, in the end, be resolved to anyone's satisfaction. They will not be. The pad thai is gone. The hoodie will be taken again. The thermostat, in some house somewhere tonight, is being adjusted downward by a teenager in socks, and no document drafted on card stock will change that. These are not cases. They are, as a frequent correspondent to these pages likes to say, conditions.
But the dignity of a dispute does not consist in the certainty of its remedy. It consists in the seriousness with which we name the thing that has happened. When we say, of a missing dessert, that it has been converted; when we say, of a broken curfew, that a covenant has been breached; when we say, of the fourth reminder to take out the trash in a single evening, that there has been a failure to perform — we are doing something that comedy often is not given credit for doing. We are insisting that these things count.
On Why the Formality Matters
A friend of mine, a real attorney at a real firm, once asked me — with what I took to be genuine curiosity — why we bother. Nothing, she observed, is actually being litigated. No filings are entered. No damages recovered. The whole enterprise, she said, has the feeling of an elaborate costume party held in an empty courthouse. She was not wrong. I told her so.
But I also told her this. The formality — the Roman numerals, the Latin mottos, the mock-solemnity of a "citation" that is nothing more than a parent's exasperation given a docket number — does not diminish the grievance it dresses up. It honors it. It says: yes, this small thing happened, and yes, it felt like something, and we will not pretend that it did not. The household is a jurisdiction. It has laws. They are unwritten, they are inconsistently enforced, they are almost entirely unfair, and we all, nevertheless, live under them. To mock those laws with affection is not to trivialize them. It is, in a small way, to put them on the record.
The household is a jurisdiction. Its laws are unwritten, its enforcement is haphazard, and its judges are the people most implicated in the outcomes. And yet it is the jurisdiction in which most of us spend most of our lives.
On the Question I Am Most Often Asked
The question I am most often asked, by friends who have encountered this Journal and regarded it with some bewilderment, is whether I am, in fact, very angry. The answer is no. The matters we litigate are, with very few exceptions, matters I love. I love the people on the other side of them. I love the hoodies they take and the pad thai they eat and the gasoline they squander. I love them in a way that is, itself, probably not a cognizable legal interest. But it is the interest from which every complaint we file, in our own small way, proceeds.
If I were really angry, I would stop writing these letters. I would hire a real attorney. I would not be caught, late at night, drafting "Articles of Household Organization" on card stock.
Instead I write to you, colleagues, from a house that is — as I write — 66°F, which is a compromise, and in which the refrigerator contains, I am given to understand, exactly one leftover thing that no one has yet claimed. I am, of course, watching it.
Yours in continued jurisdiction,
The Editor
Parent v. Child