Dad Entry #80

I am reading the autobiography of Craig Ferguson. He's Scottish. I love the Scottish, their humor, their ridiculous accent. And their teeth aren't that bad. The weather sucks though; it's rainy and miserable in Scotland almost always. I had some great times in Edinburgh for work. In between F-bombs and jokes and spotty recollections of spectacular benders, Craig said some things about parenthood that are, well, worth plagiarizing here, except I already blew it and gave him credit. He wrote, “My son came into the world a sticky, angry, and slightly confused mess…. Anyone who has been present at a birth knows how weirdly adrenal the whole event is. Up to that moment my child had been an abstraction, then suddenly he was real and the world had changed beyond recognition. Now there was someone I would unthinkingly lay down my life for, and I felt a massive, uncontrollable, powerful, feral love.”

He also said – and this is coming from a celebrity, an actor, a Hollywood personality! – “When you become a parent, you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to becoming a supporting player in the movie of someone else's.”

My words now, sorry. There are lots of things I enjoy in life, but I’m not sure any match the moments when I walk into Michael’s or Megan’s room at night, and, thanks to their nightlights, I can see their faces, and I can lean in super close and listen to them breathe. I can kiss them. But mostly I stare, and just sort of admire them. They are asleep and in peaceful repose, of course, although they might stretch or turn, sigh loudly or smack their lips, and Megan is never the way you should be in bed, which is to say head on a pillow and feet pointing downward; she is usually lying across the bed, or awkwardly on a pile of stuffed animals, or contorted in some horrifying manner. I fix her. But I’m there just to admire; it’s the one time they aren’t playing with or watching something that I’d be interfering with by being all up in their grill, staring at them. Craig described parental love pretty well. The one thing I’d add is the gratitude I felt, and enormity of responsibility – two things – which were also massive and maybe sudden, the way I felt their impact, when I first met my two sticky, angry and confused messes.