I'm standing in that unused space between the kitchen and the raised dining room with the fake parquet floor. In front of me is a waist-high set of black wire shelves where my dad keeps the detritus of his day - wallet, plastic coin pouch that he squeezes to open, bits of paper with notes about Jesus being Lord and yesterday's lotto numbers. And he's yelling at me: "Extraneous details! I don't need extraneous details!" I'm 7 or 11 or 9, and he can't name my school teachers, my favorite cartoons, or the friend at whose house I just slept over. All those details I try to tell him about my days or my nights, in that winding and never-to-the-point way of children's stories, are cut off with a scolding that I am drowning him in a wash of tiny, impertinent minutiae. Points so fine you'd think he'd been stabbed.    I feel shrunken and unimportant, like a once-intricate wax figure melted down into a blob of generalities.  7-year-old me So when my s...

 "That Santa stuff isn't real," the boy from across the street told my kids.  Uh-oh.  I was upstairs folding laundry, but I still heard the boom that would likely lead to an avalanche of eye-opening revelations (and maybe some tears).  "Who do you think comes in your house at 3 in the morning and leaves you presents?" my 9-year-old son insisted. "He's real, I've seen him! At the mall!" my daughter, who had just turned 7, chimed in. "That's just a guy in a suit," the neighbor boy replied dismissively. Proof of life From the second floor, I called out, "Okay, that's enough!" to the kids arguing in my living room. Pretending we suddenly had to eat dinner, my husband asked the neighbor boy to leave. And we braced ourselves for what might be coming.  My son is a very young 9. He still loves playing dinosaur fights with his stuffies, snuggles with me at bedtime while I sing the same lullaby I've sung since he was a tod...