Megan Stielstra's Blog

My dad is here visiting. I’ve written about him here and here and here but the short version is this: he lives on Kodiak Island in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska. He spent two years building a boat in a garage and “whacks” salmon all summer long. He and my Uncle Chuck spend an inordinate amount of time at “Moose Camp.” I have many photographs of him wearing camouflage on mountaintops with dead things. He brought three things with him on this particular trip to “The Lower Forty-Eight”:

1. His bow, for a month of deer hunting in Michigan.
2. One hundred pounds (!!!!!!!!) of red salmon for my refrigerator.
3. His dog, Sadie, an English Setter and impeccably-trained bird hunter. For example: yesterday, as she and Mojo and I walked down Lawrence Avenue, she pointed every pigeon (Mojo stopped and looked at her like, What the Hell are you doing?)

He is VERY excited about being a grandfather, and—this is so awesome—has saved many of the things he made for me in his woodshop back when I was a kid. The giant box of blocks, the dollhouse, the rocking llama (the man BUILT me a LIFE-SIZED ROCKING LLAMA. Why, you ask? Because, “Everybody’s got a horse.” Can we TALK BOUT HOW AWESOME THAT IS?). For years, he’s hung on to all this stuff for his someday-grandchild (never saying so, of course, ‘cause if he’d TOLD me he’d driven the llama from Michigan to Alaska, schlepped it on the ferry boat across the ocean, stored it in his basement for fifteen years until the much-anticipated day when I’d email him an ultrasound photo and he could drive that llama BACK across Canada and deliver it to his grandson—well, that’d be waaaay too much pressure for a girl like me, people).

Anyhow, in case I haven’t mentioned it, we have some serious space challenges at our place. It’s perfect for two, and, I think, can handle three quite well assuming we keep organized—but there’s this issue of STUFF.

People keep telling me this kid’s going to need STUFF. NEED, they say (and I’m like, Really? NEED? Bugaboo is basic necessity of life?), and when they say STUFF the word comes out in all caps. For the record, I don’t do well with STUFF, baby or otherwise. I’ve got a lot of books, sure, but for the most part, Christopher and I are pretty minimal. Before we moved to Prague, we sold most everything on Craig’s List (Dear Craig’s List, I love you) and then, before we bought this place in Uptown, we sold most everything else and now live comfortably and simply in our beautiful home. There’s no clutter—no random boxes of “What the Hell is in this random box?” There are books and art and balconies and a great kitchen and huge windows and high ceilings and I love, love, love it. Recently, though, someone told me, “You’re going to have to move. There’s no way you can bring up a child in this small a space.” I thought, Yeah, it’ll be tight, but it’s still a two bedroom. It’s still 1000 square feet. Plenty of people in the world bring kids into the world in small spaces without a magic singing Elmo baby swing that hangs from doorframes, dammit, I can, too!

HOWEVER: I AM sad that we can’t currently house the rocking llama because A. it’s supercool and B. my dad BUILT IT. Realistically, though, by the time my son can sit on his own (and understand the fairly complex concepts of “grandpa” and “llama” and “built it for your mother in 1977”), we’ll be living somewhere big enough for the rocking llama. Somewhere with a rocking llama STABLE. Like a huge mansion with servants quarters and a Scarlet O’Hara staircase. Or one of those minimalist super-designy modernizations of a welder’s loft. With built-ins. Like in Dwell Magazine. Dear Dwell Magazine I love you give me a house and also, Dwell Magazine, you should TOTALLY do a feature on us. With our rocking llama. As soon as we have space for it. Which, right now, we don’t.

This is what I told my dad.

“You hang on to the llama for now,” I told him. “And the blocks. But for sure I want them in a couple years.”

Because I really DO want them. They’re AWESOME. My dad is AWESOME. Not ONLY because he built a boat. Not ONLY because he hikes mountains everyday. Not ONLY because he’s fun, and has a woodshop, and made me a llama instead of a horse, and takes Christopher bow hunting, and comes to Chicago to hang out with me when I’m pregnant, and saves stuff in his basement for fifteen years, but also because he said this:

“What about the dollhouse?”

“What do you mean, What about the dollhouse?” I said.

“Don’t you want the dollhouse?”

“Well, we’ll see if our next kid is a girl,” I said. “If so, you bet I want the dollhouse—“ it’s SUPERCOOL, that dollhouse. Two stories with a shingled attic and working lights and a huge staircase. When I was a kid I made furniture for it out of Legos— “If I end up with another boy, maybe we see if Mary or Jen—” my sisters-in-law— “ever have girls and then we can—”

My dad cut me off. We were sitting in the Golden House diner, him drinking coffee and me eating toast. After breakfast, he’d be leaving for Michigan to hunt with his brothers, and he was already wearing a camouflage jacket and boots—a mountain man. He trails elk. He drives an argo into rock lands. He’s as tough as they get, my dad, and he looked at me—his supposedly liberal, progressive, citified daughter; the one who should’ve been saying, “My child will be free of gender stereotypes, free, I tell you, FREE!”—and he said, “I think it’d be great if my grandson had a dollhouse.”

My dad rocks.