Guest Post: On Fatherhood and Writing
[Roxane Gay / September 9th, 2009 / Random Meandering Thoughts & Shiny & Young Bright Things ]Last week, we heard from three mothers about how motherhood affects and influences their writing. In many ways, we felt the natural progression would be to also hear from fathers about writing and fatherhood. We were fascinated by the differences between what fathers say about parenthood and writing and what mothers say about parenthood and writing. We hope this encourages some really interesting discussion. This week, we warmly welcome Ryan Bradley and David Erlewine. (Note: If you would like to write a guest post on most any subject, please do inquire within, where to inquire within is to send us an e-mail.)
Ryan Bradley
I’ll be honest. Hearing that my wife was pregnant put me in a state of shock. For two months I didn’t write (which played havoc with the first semester of my MFA program), and mostly spent my days watching reruns of Home Improvement (I was a full-time student) becoming increasingly certain that if Tim Taylor was the portrait of fatherhood I was doomed to fall short.
Flash forward to the present. My son is fourteen months old, I have switched places with my wife and am now the primary breadwinner. I still watch Tim Taylor’s exploits in the morning before work, partially because no one else in the house wants to watch ESPN News, and also because somewhere along the course of my wife’s pregnancy my stepson got hooked on the show as well, though I imagine for different reasons than my own.
I’m still no Tim the Tool Man. Sure, until I took over my wife’s job running her mother’s independent children’s bookstore all my work experience came in the form of manual labor, but I’ve always had trouble identifying myself as that “kind” of man. In fact, I have a hard time identifying myself as any kind of person. Meaning, if I was asked to categorize myself the only way I would know how would be to say “unknown.” Or perhaps, “superhero of yet unidentified, though likely mundane, powers.”
I have begun to feel at home identifying myself as a father, but am still stumbling my way through the act of fatherhood, as I’m sure all first-timers do. That’s actually the best lesson I’ve learned, that there is no perfect father, no right or wrong way to do it. That, much like writing, one has to find your personal style, and once you do, run with it. In both cases I’m still feeling out my style, but as a writer whose biggest concern is to explore the complexities of human relationships, fatherhood provides about the best case study I could imagine.
As far as maintaining my “life” as a writer, while doing my best to be an active and engaged father, that balance is still undetermined. I do my best to fulfill my role as a dad as soon as I get home from work. Whether it’s helping our older son with math homework, or occupying the baby while my wife gobbles dinner before he can start trying to swing from the hem of her shirt. For now I’m lucky enough to have a job where I am able to write between customers (which, in this economy, is sometimes a long stretch.) In fact, this entire article has been written while at work, as is most everything I write. But when this job ends and another comes, a whole new balance will have to be found. I imagine it will include my latest practice of staying up late on the weekends after my wife and baby have gone to bed. But, I’m more than happy to put in whatever effort is needed. As a father and as a writer.
Ryan W. Bradley will one day write a memoir/practical guide to parenthood called What to Expect When You Weren’t Expecting, for those of us who didn’t expect it. Until that day you can read his blog at ryanwbradley.blogspot.com or the smattering of his fiction and poetry that can be found in print and online.
David Erlewine
If I didn’t have children, I probably wouldn’t be writing. Before I had them, I used to write bloated stories about single guys who loved/loathed their girlfriends and themselves. I was writing about what I knew. I got sick of writing, especially trying to balance writing stories that didn’t pay me anything while working as a lawyer. Having children has been a boon to my writing. In addition to one other thing, which I’ll address later, I stay up late and write on the train (instead of watching old eps of Mad Men, Arrested Development, The Office, The Shield, The Wire, Deadwood, etc.) because I’m a father.
I have a five-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter. I am not the first father/parent to be terrified/convinced that my doing something/failing to do something will lead to one of them getting injured. Over the years, I have imagined a number of scenarios where my negligence/action/inaction costs them (or other children). My stories closely reflect many such fears, including: (1) leaving one in car seat as I head off to catch the train (2) watching TV as one of dies a freaky death several rooms over (3) failing to fix a loose gate latch blocking the stairs (4) and injuring, indirectly or directly, other children who are mean to my children.
Usually, I don’t “intend” to write these stories. I didn’t just sit down and think, “I’m so terrified of leaving my son in his car seat. Let me write about that.” That brings me to the “one other thing” I so subtly mentioned above that keeps me writing: Zoetrope’s “Flash Factory”. Every week, there is a writing prompt and “contest” where fantastic, generous, funny writers submit stories and review each other’s stories/pick the top three best stories. The first weekly contest I submitted to was in November 2008, shortly after I’d started writing again (after about five years of writing next to nothing). The first prompt was to write a flash involving balloons. At the time, I’d been playing a game with my son where we batted balloons to each other, trying not to let them hit the floor. When I saw the prompt, I knew I’d work that game into the story. Of course, as only I can do, the story ended up being about a father leaving his son in the car seat, nearly killing him, putting the brakes on their balloon-batting games.
The prompts bring up another point, one alluded to in last week’s posts about motherhood and writing – making time/having time to write. As Teresa, Ethel and Angi so eloquently discussed, being a writing parent is, ah, interesting and challenging. I love the prompts/Flash Factory because often I write stories very quickly and capture some deep-rooted fear I hadn’t actively been trying to work into a story. Often, the prompts help me work my horrific fatherhood fears into my stories, without straining to do so.
In some ways, writing a lot helps me exorcise a lot of fears, hopefully making me a calmer, “better” parent. In other ways, I end up staying up late to write, instead of sleeping, and writing on the train (instead of watching shows or sleeping on the train). Thankfully, I don’t need much sleep, but still I worry a lot that my little stories sometimes occupy too much of my brain.
As it stands now, I pick up the kids around 5:00 every night (from daycare and kindergarten, respectively). For the next three-four hours, my wife and I are helping my son with homework, making them dinner, hanging out with them, mediating their arguments, giving them baths and reading to them, and doing the other things that parents do. Usually, they’re asleep by 9:00, and my wife is usually asleep shortly thereafter. I tend to creep downstairs then to check e-mail and write. Sometimes I stay up until 1 or 2 a.m., getting a few hours of sleep before the 5:00 a.m. alarm blasts me up.
As someone with a slight “covert” stutter (that I think about far too much because I can “hide” it from most people), I’m of course terrified I’ll pass it along to my kids. That has also influenced my writing, as a number of stories involve parents and kids and stuttering. Before I had kids, I wrote a couple of stories about stuttering, all from the POV of single guys (or kids) who stutter. They were pretty simple, dealing with the obvious issues of not being able to speak. Having kids and dealing with the obvious fears that I’ll hand my stutter to them, has led me to write a number of upsetting, cathartic stories about the subject. I do feel sort of bad for my dad, as a lot of the fathers in my stories don’t stutter and have no idea how to deal with their sons that do. Often, they deal by being assholes to their sons, making them do push-ups or hit the heavy bag to work the stutter out of them. I’ve had a few readers/writers privately ask me if my father was/is a real asshole to me when I was a kid. I take that as a compliment in some ways, I guess, as maybe the writing feels “real” enough for them to assume it has to be somewhat autobiographical. But of course I always feel compelled to say my dad (and mom) couldn’t have been more supportive of my speech problems growing up, driving me to therapy, practicing word lists with me, telling me it was okay to cry when kids, parents, and teachers made fun of my speech.
I suspect a lot of my friends/family think I’m a horrible father after reading my stories. It’s true that fathers in my stories are often assholes, bullying their kids, being jerks to their wives, etc. I don’t think I’d have tried writing these stories without actually being a father. The fathers in my stories often represent the kind of father I’m terrified of becoming – unfeeling, unrepentant, nasty. Being able to write (indirectly through such asshole fathers) hopefully lets me yell a little less at my own kids when I’m annoyed, get them that glass of milk when I’m so damn comfortable on the couch, and hang out with them while they watch “Max and Ruby” instead of running off to check Yahoo for rejections.
I learned a lot from the movie “American History X,” particularly that “It’s always good to end a paper with a quote. Someone else has already said it best. So if you can’t top it, steal from them and go out strong.” To that end, I’m going to end this post by quoting Angi Becker Stevens’ motherhood/writing post last week: “At the end of the day, what it comes down to is that I was just plain miserable in a lot of ways when I wasn’t writing, and I think and hope I’m a better parent when I’m actually personally fulfilled. But the balance is still damn tricky.”
David Erlewine writes like he shaves, quickly and unevenly. For an attorney, he considers himself a pretty okay guy. Many of his stories can be seen at http://www.whizbyfiction.blogspot.com/
Thanks for this, guys (and to the mothers who posted last week). David, I really identify with helplessly making up “what if?” disaster scenarios in your head. I’ve tried writing from a few of those myself, but they don’t seem to go anywhere. I think because I’m really, really slow to process inklings of ideas into actual stories – I’ll be writing stories about my daughter’s infancy when she’s twenty. She’ll be two in a couple of weeks, and so far hasn’t changed what I write in any noticeable way, though WHEN I write, and how often, has been impacted immensely, especially during the four months of the year when I’m home as primary caregiver. Lots of fun, but less writing than I used to do in those months.
But where I HAVE felt an impact of fatherhood is in how I think about writing. In a way, I think I’m more interested in storytelling as a cultural force than I am in “literature,” maybe because I’ve never studied literature, per se, but came to writing via anthropology and folkloristics. So I find myself wondering if I’m asking questions about the world that might help my daughter understand it as she grows up. That doesn’t mean happy endings and cheerful stories (ha!), but it’s important to me that as a writer I try to make sense of the world rather than reflect it back as it is. I was trying to do that before she was born, but I feel it much more keenly now.
Goodness, that’s a long, rambling comment. So here’s something that might actually be useful, a call for parenting-relating submissions: .
Looks like my link got dropped. Trying again: http://cityworkspress.org/submit.html
It’s great to see that mothers and father aren’t really all that different in a lot of ways. I’ve used writing to work through many/most of my parenting anxieties. Better than any therapy, if you ask me.
I totally know what David means when he says that he probably wouldn’t be writing if he weren’t a father. I feel much the same. It’s as if becoming a parent forces you to focus on what is truly important to you instead of just drifting around in ‘whatever’ land.
Great insights guys. Speaking of parents…where ARE Max and Ruby’s anyway? Those two should be arrested for gross negligence.
Teresa, thanks so much. Great q re Max and Ruby’s parents. I’m trying to figure that out, too.
I love the line: “It’s as if becoming a parent forces you to focus on what is truly important to you instead of just drifting around in ‘whatever’ land.”
Couldn’t say it better than that.
Steve, thanks a lot for your insightful comments. I have to also quote:
“That doesn’t mean happy endings and cheerful stories (ha!), but it’s important to me that as a writer I try to make sense of the world rather than reflect it back as it is. I was trying to do that before she was born, but I feel it much more keenly now.” I really love that. I think about this from time to time, as well. Sometimes, in my own writing, I feel like I’m doing too much of the reflecting. I really want to keep striving to make sense of the world. Randall Brown’s great chapbook exhibited a wonderful amount of making sense of the world, particularly b/w fathers and sons. It really opened my eyes to the kind of stories I want to write.
And, I laughed about you writing about your daughter’s infancy when she’s 20. I can really envision myself writing about little traumas my kids (and I) suffer now … when I’m 75 or 80.
Great stuff, guys! You make all fathers proud (to be fathers).
I concur with David: The Flash Factory is a great place to get some work done. The prompts are as unique and creative as the writers who respond to them (and of course, who come up with them).
I played a little in the Flash Factory but have fallen out of practice with them. Thanks for the reminder, David and Richard.
Teresa, do you use an alias on Zoe? I couldn’t find your name on the Factory list or anywhere on Zoe. Let me know and we’ll get you back in the factory (unless of course you’re already there under a different name–heehee).
Holy Smokes!!! It’s been almost a year since I have logged on there! I’m there under my maiden name and appear to have been rightfully booted from the flash factory. Fair enough. I have sent a request to change my name to Houle. I’ll wait for the change before becoming active again. I’m weird that way.
Thanks, Ryan and David, for your great guest post. I’m sitting at my desk reading this, thinking about all of your comments in relation to the mother/writer post from a few day ago, and in relation to all of our children-don’t-exist-posts, and I’m wondering…
One, speaking as a father/writer/editor/teacher, I’m always struck by the impression that whenever I’m even just a marginally good, vaguely participating dad, I’m rewarded for it disproportionately, even if it’s to the detriment of my other functions. Meanwhile, my wife, the mother/writer/researcher/teacher, seems to always be at the ass end of public opinion, though she’s continually SUPER at all of the above. I don’t know if there’s a question in there worth asking or not, but it’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the last six years (my daughter is six, my son is two).
Two, I’m continually struck by the very subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) game of breeders vs. nonbreeders. Breeders get the big picture while the childless are self-centered, arrested adolescents who don’t (I know I’ve played that card before, though I try to be a better person)… Or, while myopic pollyannas are busy spawning ill-mannered brats, the childless are the noble free who get on with the work that really matters (i.e. children get in the way, and I may have once played that card, too, once upon a time)… Stay at home mothers are certainly one victim of this. Most professional parents must keep a foot awkwardly in both camps. The childless are endlessly condescended to. Etc. Or no? Maybe I’m just crazy.
MBS, i think was definitely guilty of being that kind of childless person, the kind who thinks only negative things come with having kids. and to be honest that scared the shit out of me first when i became a step-parent, although he was 8, so i found that more manageable, but when my wife told me she was pregnant and we stayed up all night talking something clicked inside of me and it had to do with the transformative love i already felt for my wife, things slowly started coming into focus: musicians who made childrens’ albums weren’t sell-outs or lame-asses, nor were actors who made kids movies, they were people with kids who wanted to do something their kids could enjoy, etc. i may still have struggles with myself as a father (and frankly, at times, as an adult), but when i see the way my son smiles when i get home from work i know i’ll never do anything more important than that. And maybe that’s exactly what you are saying about getting a handle on the big picture.
“I’m always struck by the impression that whenever I’m even just a marginally good, vaguely participating dad, I’m rewarded for it disproportionately, even if it’s to the detriment of my other functions. Meanwhile, my wife, the mother/writer/researcher/teacher, seems to always be at the ass end of public opinion, though she’s continually SUPER at all of the above.”
I think this is *so* true. There’s this very condescending “oh, isn’t it nice to see a dad at the park with the kids!” attitude, but no one ever commends a mother for things like that, it’s just a given that she will be doing that sort of thing at all times, and she is subject to criticism for being absent far less than what might be perfectly average and acceptable for the man. Perhaps that’s a sweeping generalization and obviously there are people who don’t view it that way, but I notice that divide a lot. I know my husband’s co-workers have referred to it as “babysitting” if he’s staying home with our daughter while I have a night out, which to me is insane. It isn’t babysitting when I’m home and he’s at work all day.
i call it babysitting when my wife is home with the baby all day! i don’t think people always mean it in a demonstrative way (though sometimes they do, even if it’s subconsciously), but for me it’s the quickest description that comes to mind when taking care of a child, not to mention it’s a playful spin to put on it.
I can see where it could be said in a playful way, but this is co-workers hassling him about it, ie. “You have to babysit?!” (insert incredulous tone).
his co-workers sound lovely and evolved! that sucks for him.
that’s unfortunate that your husband’s coworkers have that attitude, my wife has a friend whose partner has that sort of attitude about being a parent and i constantly have to bite my tongue around him because i feel like telling him to shape up.
david fantastic piece. you really put mine to shame there, but in the best way possible! i’m grateful to have my piece next to yours. i really liked hearing your stark honesty about your fears, that kind of stuff really helps me as a new father… my fears tend to be along different lines… i worry about being a horrible dad but in more abstract ways, i guess, as in i worry about messing up my kids heads or that we’ll end up having a tenuous relationship like the one i have with my own father where some visits are great and others are horrible train wrecks of screaming matches. my dad wasn’t around much when i was a kid, and i try to be present with my little one, but i think the most important thing is that we are both aware of our fears, i think that kind of consciousness as parents helps you from making the mistakes you dread making.
i also meant to say, that i totally agree, the types of stories i wrote changed when i became a parent, but i think they changed just as much when i got married, i became a very different writer when that happened, and i’ll never be able to fully thank my wife for that bonus
nice point, ryan, my writing certainly changed as a result of finding a good woman and settling down. i say that despite the fact that my wife really doesn’t enjoy anything i write. scratch that, she’s liked two stories, perhaps the “darkest” things i’ve ever written.
my wife loved my writing before she loved me, so i feel lucky about that. but like your wife, she thinks the more fucked up the story is that i write the better. when i write something dark i’m always excited to show it to her because of that!
sounds, obviously, like you have yourself a great wife, ryan.
i like to think so!
My wife is great despite the fact she rarely likes my writing. She’s still mad at me for writing a story where a pregnant woman, “with barely a bump to her name, was “milking the pregnancy.” She’s sure every reader will assume it’s her. That’s laughable b/c my wife is the opposite of that. She was packing boxes the day she gave birth (we were moving and she was a few weeks early). She wouldn’t stop packing, despite the contractions. SHE drove us to the hospital, stopping to get gas, sure the hospital was going to send us home immediately.
my wife teases me about the women in my stories sometimes. i just go “phhhhhhhhhh” because i’m mature like that. my wife was the same way when she was pregnant, didn’t want to stop doing anything that she would do normally.
Rich O, thanks for the kind words. You are a huge reason the Flash Factory keeps churning out great stories.
Teresa, I hope you can just back in to the FF. We’d love to have you!
Ryan, thanks for the compliment about my post. I really enjoyed yours and am really happy to have mine next to it. I think we’re both coming at the parenting/writing thing from similar vantage points, which is really cool. I really like your line about the consciousness helping from making the mistakes you dread making. To be honest, I was terrified (phobic?) that I would sometime leave my child in the carseat while I ran off to work at 6 a.m. and spend the rest of my life a shell of myself. After writing the story about that fear, I know I will never leave either child like that. Of course, that doesn’t stop me from checking both car seats every morning at the train station (even though my wife handles them in the morning), but that’s another whole set of issues.
Mr. Siegel, you raise some very interesting theories/comments. I’ll have to stew on them a bit more! I just took my son to the doctor’s office and am going to sneak down to the basement and watch Fantastic 4 with him before I get my daughter from daycare (and we’re eating healthy stuff from Mickey D’s).
those stories about people leaving their kids in the car are absolutely chilling. i remember watching an interview with a woman who had lost her child that way and it was so wrenching i thought i was going to throw up. i think i am so worried about psychologically traumatizing my kids that i rarely worry about physical harm. if we make it to their adult years and they are relatively normal psychologically, and show no physical signs of our incompetence we should get together for a beer.
hell yeah on the beer, ryan.
and, oh yeah, those real stories about such tragedies nearly make me pass out.
That was awesome, both of you. And David, thank you for sharing how fatherhood has changed the writing itself as well as the act of writing. It’s funny, it seems like the milestones of our lives can’t help but influence the kind of writing we do, either by changing what we know or changing what inspires/frightens us.
I just got married, and my wife sometimes reads my writing now. Going from essentially anonymous to having her or my family read has led to interesting changes. In addition to the usual being wary about writing totally crazy [expletive], I’m also somehow more drawn to giving other characters a fair chance instead of caricaturing them. I can only imagine what a profound effect having children will have on me, assuming I’m still writing in that future.
thanks, ben.
letting loved ones read what you write is always a scary thing. i still feel nervous letting my wife read my stories, but she always assures me that she wants me to write anything and everything, and i know that she means it which really helps me feel uninhibited. i think more than anything the way you see things changes when you’re married or have kids and that inherently works its way into your writing.
the other thing i noticed with having kids was that, while most of what i write is wildly inappropriate for younger people to be reading, i really wanted to let my kids read something, which led me to writing a novel for my stepson, which i gave him for his birthday last year, and i have some ideas floating around for stories for the little one, too. which is my way of saying even if you’re not generally writing for a certain audience, people like wives and children inspire us to want to share what we do with them and there are a thousand ways we can do so. whether its poems to our wives or silly stories for the kids.
Thanks so much, Ben. You raise some interesting points, particularly about the subject matter of your stories now. I have a slew of stories coming out later this year or early next year that are beyond the pale of “crazy ****”. Some are erotic, some are erotic/horror, etc. One, for example, is called “lead pipes” and I know my dad will have a lot of interesting comments. There is one aspect of the story that is “true”, namely that when I was younger (and a real meathead) my dad once warned me that if i kept working out someone was going to come up behind me and cave in the back of my head with a lead pipe. In his defense, he was tired and driving late at night. And there was some back and forth before he dropped the lead pipes thing on me. The real kicker of course is that the story is really, uh, “erotic” and he’ll love being associated with that aspect (since my whole family still gives him shit about the lead pipes scenario).
Bottom line for me is that I’ve sort of “embraced” the fact that my writing is effed up and most people I know therefore think I’m effed up. Sure, I worry a bit down the road that kids will read it online (okay maybe one “kid” who wants to be a writer) and tell my son his dad is messed up, etc. My son will probably laugh or shrug, since he’s heard plenty of relatives (including his mom) say that a bunch of times.
Excellent posts, Ryan and David. Thank you for writing and sharing your experiences.
Thanks, Ethel. You, Teresa, and Angi set the bar high! I never would have written some of the stuff I did without reading/internalizing all of your great posts.
couldn’t have said it better! thanks for reading, Ethel!
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