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to laugh and say, “Well, he just wanted to get in the house.”
    He helped my mom relax, too. She was a single parent trying to raise four kids. It’s hard enough for two parents to be sure of the decisions they make for their children. It’s even more difficult when you’re making all the parenting calls by yourself. My mom still admits she was harder on us at times than she would have liked because she was on her own. But when she was done doling out punishments or giving us a tongue-lashing, my grandfather would pull her aside and settle her down, asking her if she was being too harsh. He always respected her position, never challenged her in front of us, but most single mothers didn’t have this kind of support and sounding board.
    But plenty of times my grandfather did help raise the decibel level in the house, too. As you might have guessed by now, fighting, arguing, debating, cajoling, prodding, and any other form of confrontation was entertainment in our house. That’s just another way we were a traditional Irish household: If something was bothering us, we didn’t hold it in. And if we disagreed with someone, we were encouraged to share that with the family, too. My mom, especially, challenged us on everything. She’d use words we didn’t know in the middle of a sentence and make us tell her what they meant by figuring out the context in which they were used. When she and my grandparents talked about politics at the table, she wanted to hear our opinions. The more we disagreed with her, the happier she seemed to be. No one considered it disrespectful to talk back to our elders when we were having this kind of discussion, which often escalated into an argument. A loud argument. My mom was teaching us a lesson: You had to know your stuff, because if you accepted what your teachers or your parents or your grandparents or the newspapers were saying without thinking for yourself, you were going to have problems.
    And we all had plenty of those already.

CHAPTER 4
BE WILLING TO LEARN
    Laura, me, and Sean. Just goes to show you can play with stuffed animals and still be a badass.
    M Y MOM HAD DIFFERENT METHODS FOR PUNISHING each of her kids. Laura liked to be the center of attention, so when she was bad, my mom sent her to her room. It just killed her not to be in the middle of the action. Sean was a big eater, so to punish him my mom would take away his favorite foods—such as cheese—for a week. Danny, the baby of the bunch, well, he was so worried about disappointing my mom that all she had to do was give him a disapproving look and he’d start to cry. But for me, nothing was worse than talking. Any my mom knew it.
    Every time I got into trouble, we’d have to sit down and have a conversation about it. I couldn’t stand sitting still, evaluating what I had done, and trying to figure out why it was wrong. I knew the answers pretty well, usually before I did whatever I’d done. I didn’t have the patience for long talks. Finally, one day after an argument I asked, “Why can’t you just spank me? The talking takes so long.” She answered, “I’m not hitting you, Charlie, because you need a punishment that is painful. And I know the talking hurts you a lot more than the spanking.”
    A lot of times we’d take what my mom liked to call “peripatetic” walks. That meant we were going to take a stroll around the neighborhood and she was going to lecture me. But we were both so competitive that neither of us would walk even a step behind the other. She’d be trying to tell me what I’d done was wrong, while I would try to walk faster than she was. Then she’d catch up, take a two-step lead, and keep going faster. Back and forth it went. It was hard to learn my lesson when both of us were so fixated on walking faster than the other. Mostly, the punishment my mom doled out taught me two things about myself: I