Raising Raffi Audiobook Libro.fm

Description

A wise mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene Dwight Garner The New York Times

An unsparing loving account of fatherhood and the surprising magical and maddening first five years of a sons life

I was not prepared to be a fatherthis much I knew

Keith Gessen was nearing forty and hadnt given much thought to the idea of being a father He assumed he would have kids but couldnt imagine what it would be like to be a parent or what kind of parent he would be Then one Tuesday night in early June the distant idea of fatherhood came careening into view Raffi was born a child as real and complex and demanding of his parents energy as he was singularly magical

Fatherhood is another country a place where the old concerns are swept away where the ordering of time is reconstituted where days unfold according to a childs needs Whatever rulebooks once existed for this sort of thing seem irrelevant or outdated Overnight Gessens perception of his neighborhood changes suddenly there are flocks of other parents and babies playgrounds and schools that span entire blocks Raffi is enchanting as well as terrifying and like all parents Gessen wants to do what is best for his child But he has no idea what that is

Written over the first five years of Raffis life Raising Raffi examines the profound overwhelming often maddening experience of being a dad Gessen traces how the practical decisions one must make each day intersect with some of the weightiest concerns of our age What does it mean to choose a school in a segregated city How do you instill in your child a sense of his heritage without passing on that historys darker sides Is parental anger normal possibly useful or is it inevitably authoritarian and destructive How do you get your kid to play sports And what do you do in a pandemic when the whole world seems to fall apart By turns hilarious and poignant Raising Raffi is a story of what it means to invent the world anew