If I had a child I would just go in at night and sit there. I would listen to my child breathing. If I had a child I wouldn’t care about reality.
I’ve been thinking about this phrase daily since I read it in January 2023 in the book Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy. I’ve also emulated what the phrase says. When I have a moment with my children, I look at their eyes, caress their cheeks, inhale the scent of their heads, wrap my arms around them. I listen to them talk and sing and smile and breathe and love to see them while they rest and dream.
When I found my wife was pregnant for the first time, one of the first things that came to mind was a song by Arcade Fire called the Suburbs that was playing at the time. It goes: So can you understand why I want a daughter while I’m still young? I wanna hold her hand and show her some beauty before this damage is done, but if it’s too much to ask, then send me a son.
And God was kind enough to send me more than one. I felt I had wished her into being. I’ve had plenty of happy moments in this life, but seeing my first daughter come into the world from her mother’s womb after two days of labor is like nothing my body and my soul had experienced before.
Having children has transformed me. I am sure, because I can feel it, that I am not the same person before I had children. It might sound vague, we always feel different after a grand life event, but this is different. It’s not about feeling changed but about becoming and then being someone else. Just to illustrate, I loved to travel abroad as a young man. I had this list of all the countries and places I wished to one day visit. I packed my bags whenever I could and left, mostly by myself, to explore different destinations. Nowadays my favorite place is a park or a pool or a restaurant or a videogame arcade or anywhere one or more of the children I was tasked to father are. They are my home and I need not look for the world outside.
Some of my favorite books, and I only came to think about this when I thought about writing this essay, are about parenting and children. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, talks about summer 6-year-old Sophia spends with her grandmother on a tiny Finnish island. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald is about a man named Jacques Austerlitz sent by his parents on one of the kindertransport from Czechoslovaquia to Britain during the Nazi invasion of Europe. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is the journey of a father trying to protect his son after the apocalypse.
Two of my favorites short stories are Últimos Atardeceres en la Tierra by Roberto Bolaño, a father-teenage son road-trip across Mexico, and Teddy by J.D. Salinger, the last trip of a ten-year-old boy messiah. The list goes on.
No wonder why, though. Seeing a little human grow from an act of love, from two cells into a body, a brain, a heart, and a soul, to see them grow and learn and laugh and question the world around them, to see your face, your mannerisms, yourself in more than a way in another human is the most amazing magic trick and perhaps the most rarely mentioned.
When any childless friend asks me about having children I am fully biased and somewhat akin to a cult member, as described by Paul Graham in his essay on Having Kids. I cannot recommend having children enough. Yes, it will be tough and worrisome and costly but it is all worth it. My sister, for example, didn’t want to have children. Until she did. Now that her boy Romeo is here, she’s the happiest person in the world.
At the end of the day, how else will we perpetuate the miracle of the human race if not?
