The Tech Refugee

A few years ago I watched a TED talk by Andrew Solomon. I do not remember much of the talk anymore, but one phrase stayed with me. He described parenthood as the joy of unbearable responsibility.

I wrote it down somewhere and forgot about it. Then every now and then it would come back to me. Usually not during the big moments. Usually while driving home from practice, or watching one of my kids do something that made me unexpectedly proud, or unexpectedly worried.

A couple of weekends ago my son scored a goal in a soccer tournament. He is nine years old and approaches most things with more enthusiasm than caution. This has occasionally been hard on our furniture. On this particular afternoon, it was hard on his ankle.

The goal itself was beautiful. He got the ball outside the box on the left side of the pitch and bent it into the corner of the net. For a second there was a strange sound from the parents on the sideline, the kind of collective reaction people make when they have all just seen something they were not expecting. I remember looking around and seeing adults grinning at each other.

I was proud of him. More proud than I should probably admit.

Then, maybe ten minutes later, he collided with the goalkeeper and went down. I do not remember deciding to run onto the field. I was already moving before I had consciously processed what had happened. When I picked him up, one of his shin guards fell out. I stuck it in my pocket without thinking. Later that evening I found it while emptying my jeans pockets and it brought the whole thing back.

He ended up being fine. Sprained ankle, a cast for a few weeks to protect the growth plates, and then back to running around as if none of it had happened.

What stayed with me was how quickly it all shifted. One moment I was thinking about the goal. The next I was carrying him off the pitch, the happiness sharing space with something that had no name, some compound of fear and tenderness and the awareness of how much I stood to lose on an ordinary Saturday morning.

Nobody really prepares you for how often parenthood feels like that. The distance between joy and worry is sometimes only a few minutes long.

My daughter gave me a different version of the same feeling.

She wrote something recently and let me read it. At one point she described me as poetry. Not poetic. Not like poetry. Poetry, as if that were simply what I was, a plain fact about her father that required no further explanation or defense.

I laughed the first time I read it because it seemed absurdly generous. Then I read it again and felt something else entirely. There is a particular kind of responsibility that comes from being loved by someone who sees the best version of you. She is sixteen. She knows I am not perfect, she has seen me frustrated and distracted and wrong, and yet she still sees things in me that I often struggle to see in myself. Part of me felt honored. Another part immediately wondered whether I deserved it.

I doubt myself as a parent more than my children probably realize. I carry unresolved things, my own version of what Solomon was describing, and I am aware of the gap between the parent I intend to be and the one I actually manage. I think about the choices I made when I was younger, the drift and the default, the years when I was not yet intentional about my own life, and I watch my children with half an eye out for signs that any of it is passing forward in ways I cannot see or control.

I do not dwell on this because it is not especially productive. But it is there.

The parents I trust most are usually not the ones who seem certain, they are the ones still asking questions, still paying attention, still trying to get it right. The rest of us are just showing up, imperfect and devoted in roughly equal measure, falling in love with each new version of our children as it arrives and wondering if we are doing right by it, and there have been so many.

The newborn who grabbed my finger in the hospital room within hours of being born, with the certainty of someone who had been expecting me. The toddler who appeared at my bedside every morning and took my hand and pulled, not asked, pulled, because we were going to play with the animal figurines and this was not a discussion. The girl who curled up with mythology books and then handed me a reading list because she had decided there were gaps in my education. The boy who broke the dining room chairs and then grew up to quietly shift his seat between a vulnerable friend and the kids who were giggling and staring, without saying a word about it to anyone.

The details change. The versions change. What does not change is how attached you become to every single one of them.

Before I became a father I had no idea it was possible to love people this much. If someone had tried to explain it to me I do not think I would have understood.

These days I make a berry chantilly cake that both my children love. The fact that a teenager and a nine year old agree on anything feels noteworthy enough on its own.

I make it because they enjoy it. I make it because I enjoy making it. And if I am honest I make it because there are not many parts of parenting where the result is so immediate. You spend an afternoon in the kitchen, you put the cake on the table, and people smile. I also want them to have something to remember years from now, and I want to show them something I came to late, that making something physical and real with your hands, something you can share with people you love, is not a lesser thing. It is not what you do when the more serious ambitions have not worked out. It is its own serious thing with its own rewards, available to anyone willing to pay attention and not rush the parts that cannot be rushed.

Most of my parenting experience does not work like that. Most of it is planting things and hoping they grow, having conversations whose impact you may not see for years, trying your best with incomplete information and finding out later whether you got it right.

The cake is simpler. You follow the process. You pay attention. At the end there is something tangible to share with the people you love.

They eat it. Their faces change. I feel as though I was an ok parent today.

Maybe that is why I keep making it. Or maybe I just like seeing their faces when they take the first bite.

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Berry Chantilly Cake

Serves 12. This is the cake they both love, which in a household containing a teenager and a nine year old represents a diplomatic achievement I do not take lightly. It takes more time than most cakes and rewards every minute. Start the day before if you can, because several components need to be completely cold before they will work properly together.

For the vanilla cake layers

• 370g bleached cake flour
• 300g granulated sugar
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 225g unsalted butter, softened
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp almond extract
• 285g whole milk, room temperature
• 85g vegetable oil
• 3 large eggs, room temperature

For the chantilly cream

• 450g cream cheese, softened
• 100g unsalted butter, softened
• 225g mascarpone, softened
• 350g powdered sugar, sifted
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp almond extract
• 450g cold heavy whipping cream

For the berry filling

• 2 cups fresh or frozen berries
• 70g sugar
• 30g water
• 30g cornstarch
• 2 tsp lemon juice

To finish

• 2 cups fresh berries

Method

1. Make the berry filling first, the day before if possible, because it needs to be fully cold before it goes anywhere near the chantilly cream. Combine berries and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat and bring to a gentle simmer. Whisk cornstarch and cold water together until smooth, pour into the simmering berries with the lemon juice, and stir continuously for a minute or two until thick and glossy. Cool completely, then refrigerate.
2. For the cake layers, preheat to 350F and line three 8-inch round pans. Three pans, not two. Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt briefly on low. Add the softened butter in small pieces on the lowest speed until the mixture looks like coarse wet sand.
3. Mix half the milk and the oil in one bowl. Whisk the remaining milk, both extracts and the eggs in another. Add the milk-and-oil mixture to the dry all at once, increase to medium, and mix a full two minutes without stopping. Add the egg mixture in three additions on low, scraping between each, until just combined.
4. Divide between the three pans and bake 25 to 35 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. Tap each pan once on the counter, cool 20 minutes in the pan, turn out, wrap tightly and freeze at least an hour.
5. For the chantilly cream, beat softened butter, cream cheese and mascarpone until completely smooth. Add the sifted powdered sugar and mix until creamy. Separately whip the cold cream with both extracts to firm peaks, then fold into the cream cheese mixture gently, just until combined.
6. To assemble, trim any doming so the layers sit flat. Layer cake, berry filling, chantilly cream and fresh berries, repeating for three layers. Apply a thin crumb coat, chill 15 minutes, then a final coat smoothed with a scraper. Pile the remaining berries on top and refrigerate at least 30 minutes. Take it out 15 minutes before cutting.

A note on the almond extract: it is in both the cake and the cream and it is not negotiable, in my opinion. It is the thing people taste and cannot identify, the note underneath everything else that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.