On Parenthood

Next to the tediously common topics of love, death, loneliness, and perhaps sex, I think parenthood might fit rather snugly into the category of topics so overdone they become almost unreadable. Yet here I am, two weeks after the birth of my second child, all poised and ready for an attempt at something new, though I have no idea what that new thing might look like. All I have is what I know to be true today, and today’s account of what I used to be, however accurate that account may or may not be. What I am, and what I think I was – this is how we reflect, how we make sense of and take value from our short time.

So many of us look at parenthood like this, in the before and after sense; we long for the freedom we once had, and we brag about the new things we see every day. Those who listen to or read us think there is some kind of trade-off, that we give something up and get something else in return. This is true, of course, but it is also misleading in that it implies a kind of equality exists between that which is given and that which is received. While I am acutely aware of my own ability to be incorrect – I am reminded of this daily – I have to say that I find no balance between what I have lost (certain freedoms, social opportunities, even career goals, to name a few) and what I have gained. In fact, looking back at the life I left behind to become a daddy of two, I can only say that the man in that picture seems somehow incomplete. He is, pardon the cliché, less of a man.

And, like any event or series of events that lead to what we call true wisdom, only the actual experience of a phenomenon can lead to an understanding of it, and that experience, and therefore our understanding, is almost never complete. It grows and changes until we no longer exist to perceive it, and there is no observation from the other side of the glass that can give the observer anything that even approaches knowledge. Dive in, or don’t. There are no dry experts.

Which leads me to my point. I have friends of all kinds; single, married, somewhere in between, with kids, without. One of them said to me the other day “I don’t want kids. Too much work.” Then she went on to talk about how her social life would be hampered by a child. Her social life is very important to her. I grinned, considered her statement for a moment, and then dismissed it. I know I’m not supposed to do this, that her opinion should hold a certain kind of value, that I was being rude in my belief that she knew absolutely nothing about the subject, but that didn’t stop me. I smiled and gave the obligatory “Well, that’s your choice to make,” but I was thinking something else entirely, and I will share it with you and all my childless friends and acquaintances right now:

Have children. Don’t have children. It is completely up to you. However, please understand that the choice between the meager freedoms allowed to those without do not compare in any meaningful way to the pure joy I feel several hundred times a day. You may fear the responsibility, and well you should. You may fear the change, as it is in our natures to do so. You may even fear the work, trivial as that fear may be. Just don’t tell me that club-hopping and career advancement, or any of the other petty freedoms, belong anywhere near this discussion. Doing this is nothing short pure narcissism, and only in a time and place as off-kilter as this time and place could anyone make such a lame comparison. I am, right now and until the day I die, engaging in the most important expression of my humanity that I will ever have the opportunity to experience. You can go to a bar whenever you want.

I’m afraid I just don’t see the comparison. Speak of fear and I will listen. Speak of convenience and I will not.

Googling With Myself

First, let me say that I never do this. Well, almost never. Not sure if it's an aversion to the terminology, which makes it sound like something mildly dirty, or the fact that to do so in a way admits to a want of attention I claim not to possess.

Most of my friends google themselves all the time. They google their friends, co-workers, neighbors, and anyone else they find interesting. I only recently became aware of the fact that google has become a verb. Anyway, I've given in to the "free-information" age we now live in, an age when we no longer keep anything to ourselves and freely google the pants off each other without so much as a "may I" or any other kind of nicety. Oh well, to the point, I guess:

I write. Lately, that writing has all been of the scholarly variety, as I attend a grad program in Rhetoric. The sheer weight of my current studies has successfully pushed aside all other forms of writing. My fiction and poetry is now several years old, with the exception of a small bit of flash stuff I write when I just can't focus on the theoretical or pedagogical flavor-of-the-month. You see, I also teach a bit. Part of the grad-student gig. I consider myself at least moderately successful at both endeavors, teaching and learning.

But what I didn't realize until now is just how much of my, oh, let's just call it pre-scholarly stuff is still out there, several years after it was written, and just how much of it shows up simply by punching my name into pretty much any search engine. I mean, I am a seriously unimportant guy, and it appears I have an actual web presence (or is footprint the operative word?)

Not sure how I feel about this. Most of the stuff out there is pretty old by my standards (I toyed with the idea of becoming a writer for years before actually seeking any real training) and I'm not completely sure I want some of it to be found. As of today, I'm 35 years-old, but in career terms, I'm about five. My journey began on my thirtieth birthday, so while I consider work that is only four or five years old to be fledgling material, I can't exactly call it immature. Much of it is bad, but it comes from a grown writer, just one still teetering in his first steps. It's an odd set of circumstances to reconcile, since I like very much some of the things I've done, but feel that almost all of it is frightfully incomplete.

After going through what I now call the five stages of Google inevitability (surprise, curiosity, mild panic, full panic, and acceptance) I've decided to embrace my inner critic and claim full ownership of my early attempts at fiction and poetry, come what may. After all, some of it isn't bad (though some of it is) and all of it was fun. Without those early publications, I would never have thought it possible that I, the cubicle-monkey with delusions of authorhood, could become anything more than just another guy with a mortgage.

A bit of poetry - I call it "Snobs"

I try to com-
municate with
her, but she speaks
new Mercedes
and I speak used
Chevy. It’s frus-
trating, because
she will not learn
my tongue but ex-
pects me to know
hers. The arro-
gance of some peo-
ple. She looks down
her nose at me,
which must be dif-
ficult because
I’m much taller.
She takes out some
money and swats
the counter with
it, as if she
were killing an
ant. Then she leaves.
“Have a nice day,”
I say as I
wish for her death.
Then I clear the
bums out of the
parking lot. “Get
out of here,” I
say, and they look
at me, confused.

A bit of fiction - I call it "Rearview"

The tape winds in his head, spinning faster and faster, the whirring noise gaining in pitch, accelerating to the point of impact. Everything stops. The last sound he hears is a familiar, startling click.

He stands there for a moment. They haven’t noticed him yet, so he watches, hands in his coat pockets, one tapping the hilt of steak knife he took from the kitchen on the way in. He waits, watches, taps, decides what to do next. The picture on the nightstand is of their wedding day. The frame is etched - Nick and Samantha: Forever – and her wedding ring, the ring he sold his Camaro to get for her, lies on the floor next to the bed, on top of a pile of hastily removed clothing.

Nick takes a step back, then another, his feet falling exactly where they had just been, as if he were a child playing hide and seek in the snow. He reaches for the doorknob; it’s smooth, cold, the last feeling he remembers. He closes the bedroom door, hears the noise dampen, the noise of a betrayal near completion.

Nick walks down the hall to the kitchen, past the kids’ rooms and the guest bath, past the family pictures and accumulated history. The picture of Nick Jr., their oldest, is crooked, so Nick stops to straighten it before continuing on. He stays in his own steps, looking again at the bedroom door, always hearing the noise behind it. Nick backs into the kitchen, past the table where they ate the odd family dinner to the counter next to the stove, where he replaces the knife in the block with the others. Nick remembers that the block was a wedding gift, smiles a bit at the irony.

The noise persists. It’s words, or a single word over and over, slowing down a bit and lowering in volume and pitch. It’s a name, someone else’s name.

The front door is open, so Nick closes it on his way out. The voices are muffled, distant, almost unnoticeable. In a few steps, he will no longer hear them, will not yet have heard them. In the driveway, his wife’s van is accompanied by a shiny new Corvette. He knows the car, heard mention of it somewhere, but as he passes it, he becomes confused, cannot imagine where it might have come from. Nick moves on to his own car, a ten-year-old, four-door sedan, which he had to park in the street. There was simply no room for him.

He gets in, turns the key, and puts the car in drive. It obediently carries him away, taillights pointing the way back to the office. He thinks about recent events, about the trouble they had, the fights, the threats, the crumbling marriage, and decides to give it one more try. He thinks about going home for lunch, about forgiving, about working it all out.

Grad School - Again

As I'm filling out an application for a grad program at Ohio State, I get a phone call from a friend of mine.

"You're going to get another degree?"

Most of my friends are what the world would call "regular folk" and regular folk like their friends to be like them. Deviation from the norm is tolerated, but in a condescending, "I think that's just great" kind of way. Then come the egghead jokes and the other predictable means of othering, as if the horns on my head grow bigger with each class I take. I don't exactly come from a segment of the culture in which friends and family are familiar with graduate programs, yet all of my peers seem to. The people I go to school with seem to have been surrounded since birth by accomplished scholars who encourage them to keep going unconditionally. My people seem to wonder when I'm going to get a real job.

But that doesn't mean all scholastic achievement is forbidden. That achievement is just seen differently, defined in a different context. While a college degree was always expected of me, that expectation was followed by one that said I would go out into the world, get a good corporate job, get married, buy a nice house in a quiet suburb, raise some kids, get old and die. This expectation exists for all of us. I do not claim it for my own. It's called being an American. But how much we do or do not buy into this kind of life changes from culture to culture, class to class. I'm a middle class guy one generation away from the first college degree in my family's history. We're a blue collar bunch with blue collar worries, so our collective vision is rarely on a future more than a stone's throw away from today. We work. After thirty-five years or so, we retire. We don't understand much else.



So what happens when I defy this is simple: I get resistance from all sides. The resistance is subtle, and often gentle, but it's there, and the decision to keep up with my studies is a daily one, and sadly, one I typically make alone.

To be a little more specific, or perhaps a bit more vague, I believe that when it comes to breaking norms, there's support, and then there's support. Those who know nothing of just what kind of effort is involved in taking on an endeavor such as mine can't possibly be expected to really support it. Only my wife, who sees each day just how much time and agony goes into achieving what I hope to achieve, can really know or appreciate the size of the task, yet even her understanding is blunted by the fact that she never expected to marry a guy who would turn down a fair sum of money in favor of a paltry University stipend. I work, but I do it for much less money than what I used to make, and the strain this change in lifestyle puts on her is something I notice, even is she covers it well.

That being said, I also have my issues with the academy, which is just as dogmatic and restricted an environment as those outside its walls. There, I have to be that egghead my friends make fun of, yet do it without losing all sense of myself. It's a difficult balance that many of my peers do not have to deal with. Many of my peers simply are the eggheads through and through. They seem to live academia rather than visit it like I do. I still like to watch football and drink beer with the guys, and I simply refuse to take myself seriously any more than I have to. This kind of thing is tolerated in academic circles, but in a condescending, "I think that's just great" kind of way. Sometimes I think I'm doing myself a disservice by not completely buying in to the culture and forsaking "regular folk," who no longer seem to get me, anyway. But the academy doesn't seem to get me, either, so I guess it's better to walk the periphery of two worlds than allow myself to be compelled to dive into one or the other. Then I read this post and wonder if perhaps I am the most pretentious participant in this little story of mine. I mean, I have managed to label just about everyone but myself. Perhaps I am the problem?

I don't think I can answer that question right now, but I'll get to it when I have some kind of idea. Right now, I have to write a personal statement for a grad school application. I have to be both the egghead and the regular guy, both serious and talented, experienced and energetic, scholar and liar. How does one juggle such things in under a thousand words?

Taylor Mali saying what I wish I said first.

A bit of poetry - I call it "It"

Some say it’s like breathing,
that they need it like air.
This always makes
me groan. I breathe
just fine when I’m not doing
it, and so do they.
Catch phrases are counterfeit
secret handshakes.

Others say you must do
it every day, work
at it like a job.
This is also false.
Truth is, it comes
and it goes
as it pleases.
And differently for everyone.
Yet, "You must do
it everyday" is,
to this day,
a kind of Shibboleth.

Everyone asks me why I do it,
I never answer them.
Something tells
me they wouldn’t be
impressed with my reply.
There’s not much to it really.

To be
honest, I do
It for the same reason
my dog does it,
only I write,
and he wags his tail.