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I was between shifts at the restaurant where I worked, having dinner in the kitchen with Ken, another waiter whom I’d known for years. Ken was a bachelor, and I believed probably always would be. Unlike the other waiters and wine stewards and bartenders and cooks I knew who might get married but would absolutely never have kids, I sensed that given the opportunity, Ken would have happily been a father. We were talking about this and that when he brought up my boys. “Do you just love being a father? Is it just the greatest thing?”
He was beaming at me in a way that I felt he had already answered this question for himself. People who don’t have kids often have a lot of misperceptions about what is to be a parent. How could they not? The day I learned Jen, my wife, was pregnant, I knew both that my life was about to change, and that there was no way to know how it would change until that child arrived. There is no other relationship in the world like a parent’s relationship to a child–except, perhaps, our relationship to ourselves.
“It is great,” I said. “Sometimes. But mostly it’s just what I kind of have to do. I can’t even imagine anymore what it would be like to not be a father. It’s almost like I always have been.”
He nodded, vaguely disappointed, and I scolded myself for not just telling him what I figured he wanted to hear. You don’t have to be such a writer all the time, Bill, I thought. I just didn’t want him thinking his life would be better if he had a kid. As much as being a parent meant to me, as formative and meaningful as it was, I didn’t believe it was any more necessary to having a valuable life than being a writer.
When I think of that conversation with Ken, I’m reminded of the advice most published authors offer to unpublished writers: Getting published won’t actually change your life. It’s true, by the way. The best part of being a writer is and always will be the writing itself. However, I can say from experience that it’s much easier to give this advice than to receive it. In those formative years, when the portals to sharing your work seem opaque and impossibly distant, it’s easy to live with the quiet and constant belief that life could and must be better than what you’ve known it to be. You may not know what the future holds, or if your stuff is any good, or how to get a good agent, but you know you are not happy as often as you would like to be, which, if you had your way, would be always. Maybe publishing would solve this happiness-problem. Or maybe having a kid. Maybe both.
When you do publish something it’s a lot like having a child. This story you grew in the privacy of your imagination goes out into the world without you, goes out and meets people who form their own private relationships with it. Whether someone loves or hates your story has far more to do with them than you. I know I had some role in the reader’s experience, but the more I’ve published, the less certain I am where my author’s influence ends and their preferences and imaginations begin.
It’s the same with actual children. You spend an awful lot of time just watching them figure stuff out on their own. I know I had some influence over what they learned and how they grew, but what exactly that was, I’ll never know. And anyway, it’s what the child learned for themselves that’s always the most important to them, always what will be most meaningful and what they will take forward to offer the world.
But with both books and children, what I learned writing one and raising the other will always belong to me. In fact, it’s the same as what I learned talking to Ken that night, and what I learned playing football with my family when I was a boy, and what I learned studying Aikido, and playing the flute, and writing songs at the piano. Life itself is non-discriminatory, it will teach and teach and teach and teach, in every job and relationship, in every success and failure, teaching you, again and again, you were never intended to be anything but happy.
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