A New Day

It's hard already, and we haven't hardly gotten started. I was never one for the nine to fiver - a ski bum and NOLS instructor, a kayaking guide and sometimes substitute teacher. These were not choices I made to celebrate my early twenties; I was proclaiming and celebrating each day a lifestyle I believed in. I began believing in it in high school English class, having my eyes opened by the pages of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Fall, hearing a story from my cherished teacher about a father, unhappy with the choices he had made in his dreary life, that while driving constantly considered steering into oncoming traffic. I did not infer at the time that he must have been talking about himself, but I did get the point - don't let life get away from you. Take it and make it your own. And reflect on it, damn it, or it's empty.

So here I am, in the spirit of reflection and in an attempt to be true to myself, admitting that it's been hard transitioning to fatherhood, and now especially as I get back to my seven-thirty to fiver. I was for a week without Milo - which though people like to joke must have meant a welcome return to blissful nights of uninterrupted slumber - I missed him and the new me like crazy. I'm not whole without my little one even at this early juncture, and to work through the day as an emotionally partial human being makes me short with incompetent colleagues, less willing to put up with my boss's transparent attempts to make employees work much more than they are paid for, and bitter when I get home that my wife has spent the whole day with Milo. And there you have it, the sad tale of every working parent in the history of modern America.

So I'm not asking you to feel bad for me, but letting you know that the same me that resisted the nine to fiver in the first place does not buy in or accept this shopworn model of work and parenting. I plan on carving out a new path (or is it an old one?) that avoids the high-speed superhighway of drivers compelled by their self-loathing to steer into oncoming traffic, the one with speed limits and obnoxious tailgaters, the one where pulling over and taking a break puts a traveller in grave danger of being trampled. I seek a foot path, one that meanders and whose nebulous nature makes it sometimes hard to follow. It's surrounded by untamed wilderness, and thunderstorms will rain down in all their beautiful intensity. But it never misses the best vistas, I can always set my own human pace, and every place is a good one to stop and take a break.