My son starts day-care on Monday.
An insane sentence. He is one, and from the first day, he has been our world; little source of agonies, of unbearable exhaustion, of a love we were incapable of imagining never mind experiencing; little wonder, little future encapsulated; a blood and a body that utterly refuses even the possibility of apathy in us. We must love and we must care and we must hope and we must try, always, to do better and be better.
I cannot begin to tell you how many times I feel I have failed as a father. And not only feel that way, but have done so in truth. I don’t believe there’s any other way to experience being a parent. Every hour of the day you are charged with the care and survival and learning of an extremely sensitive, fragile life, who knows nothing outside of you, and it is so unbelievably terrifying, and you make mistakes all the time, even at your best. And I’m not at my best. I am as far from it as I have ever been. I want nothing more than to spend every hour with my baby, and I’m unable to, because I have to work, and I’m unable to work as much I need, because I have to care for my son while my wife works, and so I’m torn between two responsibilities and failing both.
It’s breathtaking to think, this is how the system was designed. To simultaneously constantly require more children, and to be utterly opposed to allowing those children to be cared for by their parents. Six months parental leave for the mother, two weeks for the father. And then you are expected to work again, to abandon the new life you made. I keep trying to think how I might have done things differently, if I could have avoided ending up so broken. Perhaps if the baby hadn’t been born so close after my novel was released, perhaps if I hadn’t turned down so many opportunities in the months that followed, so as to be with him and my wife, perhaps if there hadn’t been health complications for her and then for me, perhaps if we hadn’t been hospitalised twice, or Babbanne hadn’t had a stroke and spent the next three months dying—