Manual

There's no medium like the books to give us the pleasure of growing up (ah, yes, and growing down) as parents. While Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions gives mothers the solace they seek, Ben George's The Book of Dads lends gravity. After I borrowed the book last week, I've been reading this wonderful collection of essays bit by bit, some of them good, many of them precious.

Recognising that we aren't alone won't make bad days disappear, but it can help us weather the storms. I read Neal Pollack's essay about his son who made a big mess in the store, breaking a toy with horrible liquid leaking everywhere. A bad day. "We're going to pay for it anyway," he bent down to his son. "If you break something that's not your property, you have to buy it."

I won't lie. I am not an honest man who might have done exactly what Neal Pollack did. I might have looked around to see if anyone had noticed.

That admitted, I must further confess the shame I felt in a similar story. On that day almost one year ago, my daughter was reading in a bookstore in Taiwan. My daughter hadn't even noticed that her mouth was hanging open when she tore a page. Just as she started to wonder if she should cry after committing the faux pas, my wife came to her rescue. "I understand that you didn't mean to break it," she said. "But we have to buy it if it's broken. We will bring this book home and mend it together."

But could I really trust myself to do that? I don't know what I could have done (or not done) if I were the one next to my daughter at that moment.