My kid is a year old and I am still alive

don't sweat the bad stuff. but don't sweat the good stuff either.

I have this blue-blooded friend Cathy who lives in an Anglican seminary and reads even more than I do and always says interesting things. I used to write them down in my moleskines until she caught on and put a stop to that. And so I taught myself to commit them to memory, sometimes remembering dozens of Cathy-quotes in single night (which was tricky because we were all drinking quite a bit back then). And I remember it was one evening that we were drinking under a pink-spring sunset-sky and talking about our parents when Cathy said something like “the role of a parent is to prepare their children to outgrow them.”

I nodded along and didn’t say anything. I was repeating the line over-and-over in my head — which was how you committed Cathy-quotes to memory. We went on drinking under that cherry-blossom sky and I think I mentioned that Philip Larkin poem and then we probably started talking about the Desert Fathers. We were always talking about the Desert Fathers.

That particular evening was years ago, I remember the sky and the cocktails — the cocktails had gardenias in them. Eventually we both got over the Desert Fathers. Cathy is now engaged and as of January 2023, I’ve been a father for a whole year. So, things are different.

In the months before my kid came along, I tried to read a few books on dadhood — K, my partner, read all the books on motherhood. She read them obsessively. But the parenting books for dads all stink¹ — and in all of them, I never found anything as helpful as Cathy’s theory that the role of a parent is to prepare their children to outgrow them. It was simple and straightforward; you can disagree with it but only subjectively. I’ve been a parent for a year and I still don’t know if I agree with it.

The thing I like about Cathy’s theory is that it takes a great-big goal — preparing your child for your eventual death — and reduces it to something that can be chipped away at, one-day-at-a-time. Because the role of a parent is an active and daily role. It’s not like, say, the role of a flight attendant. It’s more like the role of Sisyphus. Or an alcoholic. Like alcoholism, this first year of parenthood has been a one-day-at-a-time affair. My life is now measured in plastic, brightly-colored baby spoons.

For several months — the pregnancy months — I was petrified of the baby spoons. I was petrified of the diapers, baby spoons, car seats, all of it. To keep myself sane, I gathered little pieces of solace. I was buoyed by the fact that plenty of shit-people become dads and I could be sure that I wasn’t going to be the worst at it. I wasn’t going to be a Hershel Walker level failure-of-a-dad. Donald Trump was off squishing his dick into a pornstar while his wife was at home with their 4-month-old son. I wasn’t going to be that bad.

So, I knew there was a bottom and that I was significantly above it. That made me feel a little better. And a lot of people told me that when the time came, my head would somehow rearrange everything. Biology would come along and shanghai me into fatherhood. They said I would begin thinking of myself, firstly, as a father. But that was difficult to believe, difficult even to imagine. Because an all-consuming unconditional love for a person who does-not-yet-exist is an absurd thing to demand of yourself. And yet, again, I had to demand it. Because Donald Trump may not be good for a hell of a lot but he’s good for looking at and saying “I want to live a better life and die a better person than this asshole.”

And if you’ve read this far, you may be catching onto the implied self-diagnosis — that fatherhood was really my first exercise in maturity. Sure, I’d held down jobs. I’d read the western canon. I’d fallen in love and out of it. I’d saved a few people from drowning in the ocean and I’d even worked on Capitol Hill. But I enjoyed all that. What I’m saying is that I lived like a wide-eyed child. And I was quite pleased with it. If I thought I’d find comfort within the boundaries of fatherhood, I wouldn’t have left the cornfields where I grew up — where all the kids I grew up with have been fathers for about a decade.

What if I couldn’t put away the childish things? What if I ended up like the ruined father from ‘Babylon Revisited’ — (a story so sad, I can’t read it anymore). Oh god — ohhh god, what if the baby came out ugly?

I asked everybody for advice. I once saw a happy-young father pushing a stroller down the fruit aisle in Walmart and I cornered him for twenty minutes, trying to pry away his tricks. But his tricks were all that shit about live-every-moment — the same Eat Pray Love wisdom you can get from ten minutes of listening to the country music station. It would never work for me but maybe it worked for him and if it did; honestly, good for him.

I asked my own dad what he thought of Cathy’s theory. And he thought it was alright but he put in something about giving your kid a better life than you had. And I thought, yeah, that sounds about right. I liked his addendum because A.) he was oiling a chainsaw when he said it and B.) like Cathy’s theory, it seemed instinctual. You knew when you heard it, that at some evolutionary level, it was true. It’s true that you want your kid to have an easier go of it than you did. If possible — if, somehow, you can swing it — you even want them to be able to trade on your name. Isn’t that the inherited currency of the nepo babies? Isn't that the reason that K and I announced the arrival of our kid (this kid who is now an entire-year-old) in Vanity Fair? Sure, we could have gone to People or maybe the Times . But we live in Hollywood and in Hollywood, they tell me that you always go to Vanity Fair.

If you’re an expectant father, I’d like to be able to give you some sound advice, I really would. But I can’t. Because Cathy’s advice is the only piece of wisdom that I’ve been able to trust and I’m only able to trust it because I know that if it’s proven wrong, I can discard it with no reservations. Cathy, I might remind you, is a blue-blood. Our lives have been so different that we can offer observational wisdom from our worlds and somehow, it bounces cleanly across. She has a trust-fund and at the end of her grandfather’s dock stood the actual green light from The Great Gatsby. Not from the movie — from the book. For her, preparing your children to outgrow you is as instinctual and evolutionary as anything you can suggest to me. It’s how Cathy’s people survived so well and I trust it because she didn’t have to think about it.

And that’s really what I realized — that the shining moments in the first year of fatherhood have been the moments I haven't wasted energy studying over. Sure, I could go on and on about how magical it’s all been. But the first year of fatherhood is both A.) the most concrete measurement of time I’ve ever encounted and B.) magical in strung-together moments. It is very-much-not-magical when my kid shits himself down to his shoes in a restaurant at brunch-time. But every single golden evening, when we’re sitting on the floor of his nursery surrounded by his toys, doing nothing in particular, it’s magical. Right then. Right then I look at my life and I think, this is what it’s about. The whole thing — this is what it’s about. And right then you realize that one-day-at-a-time might be one of the most beautiful sentences you will ever hear.

1. I have several problems with the dad-books. And you’ve clicked on the footnote so now you’ve got to hear about them.

1. The dad-books are filled with nothing but terrible writing and not a single sentence as audacious as my friend Cathy’s theory that the “role of a parent is to prepare their children to outlive them.” Even the philosophical-leaning dad-books are just podcast-friendly regurgitations of Marcus Aurelius’ tired old bullshit.

2. The dad-books were riddled useless bullet-point asides like DID YOU KNOW: a two-tailed sperm cell cannot swim straight?

3. The dad-books all approach their readers in the same spirit you’d expect a doctor to deliver a diagnosis to a diabetic; with a sort of this is what your life looks like now and it’s not so bad if you live it right vibe. And, really, how the fuck is it helpful to start on that foot?

4. Really, the dad-books were doomed from the outset — they’re trying to accomplish an unaccomplishable task. Like how-to books on rock climbing or surfing. Useless and — after you read them for a bit — annoying. You can’t pick up rock climbing from a book and you can’t pick up being-a-dad from a book either.

5. I would also like to note that the exception to the previous grievances is Tim O’Brien’s Dad’s Maybe Book, which I loved and which hit me in a gut I didn’t even know I had. But I was a fan of Tim O’Brien long before I became a father. And so maybe my opinion is stained. Also, somehow, I don’t think of Dad’s Maybe Book as a dad-book.