This past February I saw a beautiful theatre piece at the Geffen in LA produced by an old friend, Susan Rose Lafer. It was called In Mother’s Words: four electric actresses reading the words of playwrights who are also mothers, compelling words about different aspects of mothering from a purely personal point of view. So it set me to thinking: how about a few words from fathers which led me to remember a few words I’d already written when my kids were tiny and tinier. This essay was originally published in Newsweek and picked up internationally. It was years ago, like I said, tiny and tinier, but here comes Father’s Day, so I’m putting it out there again. Yo y'all!
ON BEING AN OLDER FATHER
Recently, at the wedding of the daughter of a close friend, a thought struck me: "My God," I said to my wife, "When our kid gets married, we're going to be so old we'll have to have it catered by Meals-On-Wheels!" My son, you see, is only two. When he is thirteen, I will be sixty, and the twenty-first century will be here. You can do the rest of the arithmetic yourself. I'll tell you this, however: it's a strange thing to suddenly find yourself reading the obituary section and Parents Magazine at the same time.
Sevi, my son, was a long time coming. I first began trying to have him one marriage and many lifetimes ago, and discovered myself infertile. It felt as if someone had died. That marriage died, too, but not before a harrowing assault by a battalion of fertility specialists. A man spends his entire life trying to protect his gonads then offers them up to a breed of medical practitioner equaled in cold-hearted arrogance only by Porsche mechanics. At least, a Porsche runs after a tuneup. No matter what those doctors did, my sperm count remained among the lowest on earth. So, I counterattacked with vengeance. I set about fashioning a life that took me anywhere I wanted to go. A child had no place in it. And I married a woman hell-bent as myself. She was also infertile. Children were out of the question. It was, we thought, the basis of our relationship until that night, years later, when the issue was suddenly, once again, as alive and insistent as an infant crying in the next room. I don't remember how it came up. We were driving home along rural roads in a rainstorm when my wife said, "You really do want a child, don't you?", and the thought came to me that not once in my entire life had I really felt that I would never be a father. The underlying assumption was simple: someday, somehow I would be.
"Yes," I answered, "Yes, yes, yes."
And, at that moment, I knew I would have one. It was overwhelming. My wife couldn't see or hear me in the utter darkness and driving rain, but I was crying.
The video taken when our adopted son was first handed to us shows a man with silver hair taking a baby into his arms. I don't think I look like a grandfather, yet most of my peers look like this, and their children are in college. But I'm fit and fairly certain of my powers. In some sense, I feel as if I've been in training for this all my life. What I've done is to reverse the time frame. My child rearing years will be the last third of my life instead of the middle third. I've been fortunate. While others my age were struggling with their careers and raising families, I was living a life of textbook adventure. My heroes had always been men like Gordon, explorer of the Nile, and Lawrence of Arabia. I don't mean to imply that I operated on their scale or with their skill; but, like these men, I was driven to pit myself against myself in exotic places. There is a photograph of me from this period that shows a man with a week's growth of beard leaning against a tree in a jungle. A cigarette dangles from his mouth. He wears a headband. His eyes look out at you with some amusement and more appraisal, the kind of guy, the sergeants say, you'd want beside you in a firefight. But I'm not sure I like him. The picture hides a lot. There is too much swagger. What I remember most vividly from those times, really, is the loneliness. I was attached to no one. I was building nothing to pass on. Nowadays everything I do has taken on a whole new dimension. Let me explain. Last Fall I put my son in a pack on my back and climbed the mountain behind our house to look for blackberries. Hank, our springer spaniel, who loves wild berries almost as much as he loves flushing pheasant, went with us. We saw deer and porcupine, the tracks of coon and coyote. Lightning had hit a tree I liked, and its roots had erupted from the ground, brown and tangled like a mass of wire. We found the blackberries, thousands of them, and I could not have been more happy and satisfied if the juicy berries had been the Holy Grail.
True, the adjustment to parenthood is not always easy, and, yes, being a father takes up an enormous amount of time. But who would I rather spend it with? I'm not a man who's interested in accumulating companies or commanding an army. I've served my time in the trenches of masculinity, and I don't have many illusions about these things. I fail to see where beating someone up is more satisfying than showing my son where to find the echo or suddenly hearing him speak a sentence where before he only dabbled in isolated words. He has enabled me to touch reserves of strength and love I never knew existed. Nothing is more basic. I will give my child a safe place to sleep. I will give him the food he needs. I will teach him to survive as best I can. And I will protect him with my life. There is a certain serenity in the simplicity of this formula. Sure, sometimes, it's a drag to get up so early in the morning; but, then again, I get to see his face at an hour when it is most innocent, when it is most open. To me he is a work of art, a creation as intense as the Sistine Chapel. The purity of his rage and joy astonishes me. If I can teach him to love, if I can put him into this world with the ability to handle it yet without the feeling that he must subjugate it, then, I believe, I will have done my job.
Am I a better father now than I would have been when I was younger? Yes. Would I recommend that every man wait to have children? Not necessarily. I believe it happened to me at the right time. I cannot speak for anyone else. I do worry about staying healthy and agile enough to be the parent I want to be, and I worry about what will happen when Sevi reaches his teens and begins pulling away at a time when, perhaps more than younger parents, I will want to hold him close. More than anything else, I am afraid that I might die when he needs me the most. However I have this feeling that I'm going to be around for a long time, that I might even get to be a grandfather, for God's sake. I wouldn't be surprised, but like the pitcher going into the fifth inning with a no hitter, I don't think I should talk about it.
Does there have to be more to life than this, I wonder? I guess so, because my wife and I just received word that our infant daughter is waiting for us to come and pick her up. We're told she has red hair, and I cannot wait to have her in my arms.
