Monday, September 30, 2013
Saturday, September 28, 2013
typed while my wife watches Prozac Nation and our son is sleeping in her arms...
This is a venue for my life experiences as a stay-at-home dad.
When my wife and I decided that I would stay home with our six-month-old when she began her residency in psychiatry I thought it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a get-out-of-jail-free card, a chance to write the great American novel, something more involved than the thousands of pages of fragmented verse I had accumulated over the last twenty years as a poet/writer but, and this is no surprise to anyone who's been around children longer than five minutes during their adult life, it was not as realistic an endeavor as I had so idealistically plotted.
I remember very well the first day alone with my son. I had toiled through his entire infancy expecting his head to topple off his shoulders if I so much as moved at an awkward angle, or to accidentally bend a limb in the wrong direction, to feed him something that would turn him inside out, or any number of other improbable fates. I was terrified to bring him outside at the unlikely possibility of a fallen tree, an earthquake, the apocalypse. For whatever reason, I figured us destined for failure, being responsible for a completely helpless, extraordinary thing. Fortunately the diapers stayed on, didn't cut off circulation from his top to his bottom. He ate, played, and did what any child his age does, including falling asleep on my shoulder after a busy afternoon of rolling over from belly to back.
A year earlier I gave up on a PhD program to marry my wife and move to WV and take my chances. And now that we had a child, and she was chin deep in residency I knew that part of my life was postponed, if not completely gone. When you decide to drastically change your life you need to accept your decisions and move on, but it was difficult for me, coming from a traditional family, to accept being Mr. Mom, doing the laundry and cleaning, child care, and all the other seemingly mundane responsibilities of a homemaker.
And it goes without saying that there was no time to write, barely time to think. Perhaps a thought, a word, a line was collected on a receipt, or typed into the NOTES on my iPhone. So much for the great American novel. So much for coherent thought.
So these are the notes, the moments written between 5-6:30 a.m. when my son and my wife, and our five animals are asleep, when I sleepwalk through these words, reflecting on the ups, downs, and all arounds of life as a stay-at-home dad.
When my wife and I decided that I would stay home with our six-month-old when she began her residency in psychiatry I thought it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a get-out-of-jail-free card, a chance to write the great American novel, something more involved than the thousands of pages of fragmented verse I had accumulated over the last twenty years as a poet/writer but, and this is no surprise to anyone who's been around children longer than five minutes during their adult life, it was not as realistic an endeavor as I had so idealistically plotted.
I remember very well the first day alone with my son. I had toiled through his entire infancy expecting his head to topple off his shoulders if I so much as moved at an awkward angle, or to accidentally bend a limb in the wrong direction, to feed him something that would turn him inside out, or any number of other improbable fates. I was terrified to bring him outside at the unlikely possibility of a fallen tree, an earthquake, the apocalypse. For whatever reason, I figured us destined for failure, being responsible for a completely helpless, extraordinary thing. Fortunately the diapers stayed on, didn't cut off circulation from his top to his bottom. He ate, played, and did what any child his age does, including falling asleep on my shoulder after a busy afternoon of rolling over from belly to back.
A year earlier I gave up on a PhD program to marry my wife and move to WV and take my chances. And now that we had a child, and she was chin deep in residency I knew that part of my life was postponed, if not completely gone. When you decide to drastically change your life you need to accept your decisions and move on, but it was difficult for me, coming from a traditional family, to accept being Mr. Mom, doing the laundry and cleaning, child care, and all the other seemingly mundane responsibilities of a homemaker.
And it goes without saying that there was no time to write, barely time to think. Perhaps a thought, a word, a line was collected on a receipt, or typed into the NOTES on my iPhone. So much for the great American novel. So much for coherent thought.
So these are the notes, the moments written between 5-6:30 a.m. when my son and my wife, and our five animals are asleep, when I sleepwalk through these words, reflecting on the ups, downs, and all arounds of life as a stay-at-home dad.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)