I feel bad for displacing Jamie’s excellent (funny/insightful/etc.) post on the wearying humorlessness of the pro-feminist male crusaders, but I haven’t been much present on MAID in the last week or two (I’m writing a long article on some very cool but pretty complex science, and it’s draining all my brain juice), so I wanted to pop in to draw attention to a nice little passage from journalist and web maestro Josh Marshall (who will, I have no doubt, someday be written about in the history books as one of the journalistic visionaries of our time).
It’s Marshall’s birthday today (also, coincidentally, my brother Jonathan’s birthday — Happy B’Day, Jonny!), and he pauses to reflect on the most important aspect of his life over the past year:
I find fatherhood simply a mystery, a very concrete one I find sitting in my bed in front of me each morning, but one that hits me in some suddenly brand new way several times a day and has wrapped me into a kind of love and devotion completely different from anything I’ve ever experienced before and something I really wasn’t able to imagine or get close to beforehand.
I don’t like it when people project their own experiences into a template for other peoples lives. But speaking for myself I do not think I could feel complete as a person, fully accept this boundedness as a person, or fully know what it was to be one without the turned-upside-down experience I’m having as a father.
I should admit that I’m displacing this perspective on to Marshall because, like him, I’m aware of how obnoxious it can sound to people who don’t have children when I start going on about how amazing and mysterious and wonderful parenthood is, and how you can’t really be a complete person until you’ve experienced, etc., etc. It sounds pretty self-satisfied.
It is, nonetheless, basically what I feel, but maybe a way to frame it that doesn’t make it so exclusive is to say you haven’t really lived a full life if you die without having an experience that’s like parenthood in that it gives you a way to love someone or something else with such intensity and joy and selflessness. Maybe for some people the love object is all of humanity, or an animal, or a friend, or perhaps most often a spouse. For me it’s my daughter, and presumable the child or children to follow. My wife and I love each other, but not in the way we love Jolie.
