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In a college English course many years ago, I read some of the major literary works of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The professor taught us a lot about these writers, especially about Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s experience as expatriates in Paris in the early 1900s. Their books would become recognized as the beginning of modernist literature, a body of works whose themes incorporated disappointment, impotence and trauma, either directly or indirectly in response to the unfathomable bloodshed of the first World War.
I already knew I wanted to be a writer and it became clear that my personal path had to include throwing myself into the flow of life experience (as Hemingway had done). I hit the ground running after college. Following a miscalculated and shitty year working at Wal-mart, I went to Alaska to work for a summer to work in a salmon processing center off Bristol Bay. Two years later I was on the road again, this time to Sri Lanka to teach English. My assignment with the Peace Corps was supposed to be two years but because of the civil war at the time–a suicide bomber blew up himself and 17 other people less than two miles from my home–I was sent home a year only.
Over the years, I’ve worked as a mailman, watched someone fall off a cliff and die, served as a vice president for an accounting marketing association, earned my black belt in tae kwon do, gone skydiving twice, attended a friend’s wedding in Belgrade, Serbia, been accredited in public relations, partied at the James Joyce Center in Dublin, Ireland and have lived (in addition to the above-mentioned places) in New York (upstate AND New York City), Denver, southwestern Virginia and the area around Washington, DC.
For all intents and purposes, I have had a pretty diverse life. But a little over seven years ago, I also became a father and my sense of a life path changed…radically.
Mark Knopfler, the lead singer of the band Dire Straits, sings: “When you’re young and beautiful, your dreams are all ideal. Later on, it’s not the same, Lord, everything is real.” That lyric largely defines the past several years of my life, which I’ve viewed in some measure through the eyes of my son.
In the past ten years, I have also lost two jobs, been divorced and, through the lost marriage, suffered a significant financial setback. I have split custody with my ex (a good thing, since society typically deems men the lesser of the parents), which means my son has a significant opportunity to observe and make decisions about the path I have chosen not as a writer but as a man. His life experience, I know, will be influenced by my choices.
Although I will say the path I have taken into and through adulthood is one I chose, and if I were to speak about my past, I can do so as a storyteller (this happened…and then that happened), I also wonder what my son will take from my history and our current living circumstances.
Will he understand and respect the path I have chosen, even if that means we now live in a two-bedroom apartment rather than, as I’m sure he sees from some of his elementary school buddies, a large house with a white picket fence? Will he understand why I chose to be a marketer so I can still devote time to my writing?
Experience is neither good nor bad. It simply is; and I would argue I have pursued and had interesting life experiences, as I intended in that long-ago literature class. But as I’ve continued to grow into my role as parent, and as I grow older and have more of a chance to study my past with the same clinical eye I have long brought to literature, I question what my path will mean to him, what he will take from it and whether he will want to reject or embrace it.
If I were not a parent right now, I would be largely satisfied with the path I’ve traveled. Society’s judgment has never affected me. So those aspects of my personal life that might seem less than desirable–an apartment instead of a house, a used car instead of a new one–don’t bother me too much.
But my whole notion of a personal path has changed. I’ve become much more conservative in my living because I know someone is watching–someone I love more than anything in the world and whose success in living will be partly modeled on the tools I provide to help him learn to make good choices. As my son grows up, he will separate himself. He has already shown noticeable strains, as he should, of independence. But I will still be one of the most important models for living for more than a decade before he goes off and claims his stake in life.
I’d like to tell him to follow his own path, to do what brings him the greatest joy and to ignore the judgment of others. But I’d also like him to know he shouldn’t feel obligated to make my decisions. He is free to choose a career and life of his choosing, to be motivated by anything including financial and social success. I’d like him to know he’s free to love whomever he wishes.
The path parents set for their children incorporates the advice they give and their children’s interpretation of the lifestyles they have pursued. I can’t do anything about the latter, even if I have personally been satisfied by it.
In the end, I want to be a successful parent more than one who has successfully written and pursued life experience. In the end, too, I hope the path I have chosen, as a man and as a writer who adopted a certain lifestyle, will be good enough for my son.
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