21 Life Thoughts; Or, A Skippable Email

1. On June 30, my son, my second child, was born.

2. He’s growing so fast! I mean, not abnormally so—he’s not Clifford the Big Red Dog or anything—but he’s grown out of the newborn clothes and even the 3-6 month are getting small. He’s a champion of sleeping and eating, which is how a parent always hopes it will be for their children, but this amazes me.

3. I’ve been told that you can see the personality of your children very early on, and if that is the case, then my son will be a pretty laidback person. As far as babies go, he’s really chill.

4. My daughter asks lots of questions about time. How long will this take? Are we there yet? What day is it? What’s closer: my birthday or Christmas? This is normal, I’m sure, but I’m struck by how often this comes up, the question of time, what it is and how it works.

5. My time has been all consumed by parenting. I was on leave from my day job for seven weeks, and it both went by very fast and very slow, which is how time seems to work as a parent. The days are long, the years are short, and all that. Which makes no sense but I wonder if my daughter is experiencing this too, this sense of time not really making sense with her daily experience of moments. This never really gets clear, she’ll just develop a language to make sense of her limitations as a person.

6. Anyway, I’m back to work at my day job. Which is fine.

7. I have really struggled with my inability to find time to do anything creative.

8. Once, in an interview, Louise Erdrich said that she wrote in fifteen-minute intervals, as she was raising her five children. There was also her marriage and her bookstore and, you know, life. By contrast, the recently deceased Kevin McIlvoy went to his local coffee shop, somehow convinced them to let him in an hour early, and he wrote there (also when it was open) first thing in the morning, every morning.

Once, I used to write, or try to work on writing, in the way Mac did. It’s been a while since I’ve been that way, but still, I used to find time, steal time, to write fiction, and in the last three months that has wholly evaporated.

9. I even tried to step back from Story, and that I couldn’t fully do.

10. My brain pinballs so much and I want to be Erdrich but I just can’t. Or I haven’t figured out how. Or both. All. I don’t know.

11. Liz and I are extraordinarily lucky. We are healthy. We are financially sound. My in-laws live a mile away and are constantly coming by with food, taking our daughter to the swimming pool or just for a sleepover, helping us with the gardening, etc. We have a community of friends and parents who are wonderful to us.

And still: this is so hard. I think often about what my parents did and what my in-laws did and what people do every day: parenting without any support, without any financial cushion, or without any social cushion. It’s all too much.

Societies make choices all the time. America decided to spend 2.26 trillion dollars at war in Afghanistan—read that again, not billion, TRILLION—and, honestly, for what? A fraction of that money could have been used on health care in this country.

Remember: this was a choice.

12. In Lethal Weapon, Danny Glover’s character Roger Murtaugh is feeling old because he just turned 50. I am not 50 but I am very close to 50.

I’m just sayin…

(also: shoutout to 1980s bathroom design!)

13. I have sorta faded the news. Well, not really. But I’ve greatly reduced the amount of time I spend listening to podcasts about the state of the world. All it does is make me furiously angry and I can’t do anything about it.

14. So I’ve replaced that by amping up the baseball news and podcasts. I do feel a bit like I’m sticking my head in the sand. But my Cincinnati Reds have made the playoffs! LFG!!!!

15. If Twitter was still A Thing, I bet I would have had so many fun thoughts about parenting the last few weeks.

16. On the other hand, I want to live my life, not narrate my life.

17. Oh, and this happened: my story “In the Unlikely Event” was accepted for publication at Notre Dame Review. I don’t know the publication date yet, but if you’d like to read the story, and read great fiction and nonfiction and poetry in the future, you should subscribe!

I wrote about this particularly story a few months ago. For you writerly folks: I believe my total rejections on this story clocked in around 38-39 submissions. That’s not bad!

And, boy, it feels good to have a story done.

18. Along with my ever festering novel, I have had story ideas kicking around a lot. You never know if they have legs when it is just an idea or a one-sentence synopsis.

Once upon a time, my writing would be this: focus on a novel during the academic year and focus on short fiction during the summer. The idea was that I could write three stories over the summer—one per month—and the novel, whichever one it was, was easier to pick up and put down over the course of nine months. My writing time hasn’t worked this way for a long time (idk, call it, 2006-2015?) but I gravitate toward the idea of some sort of routine, schedule, and plan.

By not listening to so much news and staying off social media (mostly), my brain feels a bit clearer for thinking up stories. Recently, I read or heard “We used to read the newspaper, take in the news for about fifteen minutes, and that was it” which seems really obvious, doesn’t it?

19. I appreciate all you dog lovers who have asked “But how is Goldie doing?”

This is probably an entirely separate newsletter, but Goldie has been a challenge. She’s a perfectly normal Labrador puppy, one and a half years old, and not getting the same playtime and attention that Rémy received from me. Which, you know, understandable, yeah?

But today, she is sitting outside on the back deck, in the shade, taking it all in. Inside our home, the ceiling fans are spinning, A/C is off, dryer is running (lordy, I do so much laundry…), and I can hear my neighbor working on building a back deck for another neighbor because that’s how this neighborhood is.

Goldie gets her two walks per day and she is healthy and well fed and loved (if, sometimes, grudgingly). All things considered, that’s not bad. My friend Julia asked me, does that dog have any idea how lucky she is?

She does not. And that’s a nice thing.

20. On a different day, this newsletter is probably a bit grumpier. But when I can take a step back and look at the big picture, which we all certainly struggle to do, life here in Columbus is all right.

21. What are these twenty items (about to be twenty one…) about? At the core of all this, I am trying to figure out how to be a person. Or, how to be This Person. How to not just be present as a husband and father, but actually be good at it. How to have a creative life, how to write fiction and edit Story. How to chill. How, to use a cliche, be the person my dog thinks I am.

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Three Better Things to Read:

1. My friend Michael Croley has an excellent newsletter that drops every Wednesday. Don’t worry if you don’t like golf. It is about so much more than golf, which is why he’s an excellent writer.

2. I’ve been reading Andrew Boryga for months, and really have been meaning to drop him a line. But his beloved Mets just … well, they #LOLMets for my Reds, so I’d like to give him a little space. Anyway, you should read his work.

3. Laura Venita Green’s debut story collection SISTER CREATURES is out next month. I published her work not once but twice at Story. She’s a fantastic writer and an even better person. Preorder her book now.

Until the next time,

Michael