Directors Notes: 218 - The Sitter Cancelled

Childcare is a luxury and a guilt trip.

In order to provide for our family, Meg and I need to work. And we cannot work while caring for our daughter, so we need childcare. And yet you feel every hour you're not with child. To be a parent is careful management of guilt. You're going to mess some things up, you just try to minimize which ones.

Having a daughter has also meant revisiting some picture books I had not read since being a child myself, and also discovering new ones that have been written since. Some of them are barely coherent, or simple to the point of tedium. But some of them are beautiful pieces of literature. Here are a few that have stood out to me recently.

Big Red Barn - Margaret Wise Brown, better known for the classic Goodnight Moon, here delivers one of the best poems of the 20th century. I'm not kidding or doing a bit. In clean, clear language, she describes the passage of time through a day on a farm, in which the people are curiously absent. (The only explanation given is one line that just says they "are not here today.") The writing is beautiful, and most impressively, is beautiful using the most simple of sentences. 

Little Blue Truck - There's a pattern in titles here, but this is just another very nice poem. One thing that a good children's book can remind you is that a) sometimes it is nice when poems rhyme and b) a poem does not have to be complicated to be complex.

In the Night Kitchen - Maurice Sendak is an absolute master of his form. A gay Jewish man who taught generations of children how to deal with the strangeness and wildness they felt within them. This is a book I had never heard of, and it includes more drawings of penises than you might expect from a children's book, but it also explores the magical depths of dreams, teaching children to become ok with the irrational parts of themselves. It also is the reason that my daughter asks for breakfast by screaming "cake! cake!". 

And of course there is The Runaway Bunny, a very sweet book that carries poison in its sweetness. Margaret Wise Brown wrote it while in a relationship with a very possessive girlfriend, and it did not take much tweaking from me to find darkness in the story of someone who is trying desperately to get away from a loved one who will not let them go, no matter what. 

I can't think of anything else important that happened this episode, but it was nice to talk about picture books with you all, as I have certainly been reading many.

-Joseph Fink