Becoming a Parent Changes How You Write… But Must It Change What You Write?

Ten years before I became a dad, I was at MacDowell, eating dinner at a communal table with two poets. They were a decade older, a man and a woman. They were talking about having kids.

“I don’t want to have kids,” the man said. “I don’t want to write dad poems.”

“I have a son,” the woman said, offended. “My poems wouldn’t be the same without him.”

I was silent, listening. The conversation moved on, but the moment stuck with me. For the time being, I was nowhere near having to make this kind of big life decision, and I was glad.

Around the same time, I read a book that had a lot to say on the topic of writing and parenthood. In Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, Sarah Manguso tells the story of her twenty-five years of diary keeping. She wanted to leave nothing out, to spare no detail, big or small: “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that happened.” After she became a mom, the entries shifted focus from her life to the life of her child. “The diary is now mostly about my son,” she writes.

Much like the poet, the mother, Manguso finds her writing fundamentally altered by her son’s birth, not destroyed by it. As I read the book, I thought again about the conversation I’d overheard. How was it possible to be a parent while still being the person and writer you were before? It seemed like only a matter of time before I had to face this question myself.

This year, in early March, I became a father too.

My wife had been awake for thirty-six hours when our baby was delivered by C-section. Most of the time at the hospital leading up to the surgery I sat quietly in a chair by her bed, trying to be helpful by refilling her pink plastic jug with water and ice and staying out of the doctors’ way. During the surgery, I sat on a low swivel stool and tried to distract my wife by talking cheerfully about any subject my mind could dredge up: what sushi place we would order from afterwards, the Knicks, the books we’d optimistically, unsuspectingly packed for our stay at the hospital. (Of course, after a four-day stay, neither of us would read a single page.) Meanwhile, behind a sky-blue curtain hovering above her waist, a team of doctors performed the Caesarean.

In the eight and a half months leading up to my daughter’s birth, I played a similarly passive role: affable, smiling, there. While my wife’s body changed, as she experienced physical pain and hormonal changes, I stayed more or less the same person I always was.

Inherent in paternity is a privilege of separateness. Since becoming a dad, the most challenging aspects of fatherhood for me have been psychological, existential, concerning my own shifting sense of self.

There is a heightened level of attentiveness that having a baby requires. In the ten weeks since our daughter was born, my wife and I have kept a shared note on our phones. It lists the day’s date, followed by the times our daughter eats, how many ounces of formula she drinks, if she peed or pooped or spat up. We measure the day’s stats against the day before and the day before that. We look at this week compared to last. We want progress and are wary of inconsistencies, however slight. When we change her diaper, we pay attention to texture, smell, dampness, weight. We know which bottles are best for afternoon and which bottles are best for night. We pray for dream feeds.

To care for a newborn is to exist in the moment. As a writer, this can be a challenge; I can’t disappear into another world while remaining present in this one. I often think about what Manguso’s diary must have looked like in the weeks after her son was born. I imagine lists like the one in my Notes app, the hours of diaper changes, feedings, and feeding attempts reduced to numbers and dates.

Because newborns feed every two or three hours, overnight my wife and I take shifts. She sleeps first while I stay up. When we first settled on this arrangement, I was hopeful that maybe I could take advantage of the quiet to write. In reality, by that point in the day I can’t manage much intellectually. Between feedings, I’m just grateful to watch basketball or part of a movie. Usually, by the end of a shift, I give up and sink into my phone.

One night I was scrolling Instagram’s explore page when a video caught my eye: “An Evening with a Young Dad After His 9-5 Office Job in Chicago.” A guy at a desk packs up his laptop, hops in his car, arrives home, greets his dog, wife, and baby, changes into sweats, eats dinner, does the dishes, makes dessert, and settles down on the couch to watch TV. The video has three million views.

The guy, Micah Hescott, posts daily variations of a simple, happy life. The videos are Rockwell-quaint: prayer before meals, Monday night pool parties with his extended family, an afternoon spent cleaning out the garage. Taken together, Hescott’s videos present a wholesome paternal fantasy free of darkness or edge. He is Young Dad as ideal, an archetype without blemish or flaw. His account isn’t about realism, but the performance of an identity.

Watching his videos was like watching a strange other version of myself. It wasn’t a good feeling, the idea that I could be so subsumed by fatherhood that the person I was no longer mattered.

I could see it happening. After all, having a kid eclipses one’s own needs and desires. In living my life for my baby, in the sustained effort of keeping her fed, bathed, and happy, how could there be any energy left to read or write?

One work about fatherhood that’s been on my mind a lot these days is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. Like Hescott, Knausgaard’s subject is dailiness and routine, but the aim of his project, as opposed to Hescott’s, is to show all of life, uncurated. There’s a quiet but poignant moment in one of the books that I keep thinking of when Knausgaard suggests that pushing a stroller makes him invisible to others.

I live in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, a neighborhood where strollers and newborns are common. When I’m outside with my baby, I blend in with the crowd. If people do seem to notice me, what they’re really seeing isn’t me at all, but the newborn strapped to my chest: the little legs and feet, the tiny toes.

Having lived a version of the experience Knausgaard describes, I think his larger point is really about the erasure of his former identity. His struggle is an existential, inward quest to understand himself as a father and son. Who is he, really, beyond his familial roles?

When my daughter was born, my identity changed and I’m still not sure how. As a writer, it’s too soon to know how being a dad will transform my art. Still, I think the raw uncertainty of this moment has great value. It’s been a time of constant change and development for both my baby and my wife and me. Every day offers new lessons. Every day, my understanding of my daughter and myself grows deeper.

Thinking back to the poets’ conversation at MacDowell, I wonder how I would respond as the person I am now. Maybe I would say that it seems true of life and writing and of all art generally that staying too long in a single mode is a kind of death, that existence without growth is contrary to the very laws that make life possible.

I don’t know how being a father will change who I am, but isn’t the beauty of parenthood the certainty that it will?