Stories I haven’t told yet

I feel like my perspective has shifted over the past seven-and-a-bit weeks, and for that I wholeheartedly blame my son, Jack,  and Michael Chabon.

I’ve fallen into a routine – as new parents tend to do, apparently – and at about 11.30 every night, I give Jack his last bottle before he goes down for his sleep. I know that this won’t last that long as pretty soon he should be sleeping from 7pm or so – but right now, it’s probably the highlight of my day.

After he’s had his bottle, I burp him, change him, swaddle him, then hold him until he falls asleep – and while I do this, I read. Sometimes I read out loud, sometimes I read silently, depending on how sleepy he is. I’ve been getting through a few books this way, and the latest one is Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs.

As is par for the course for Chabon, his first collection on non-fiction i’s exquisitely written. Some of the stories are aimed at his children. Some, such as the one about his teenage sexual experience with his mother’s friend, you kind of hope aren’t.

But as I read them and look at my dozing son, I realize that I want to make sure I tell him my own stories. I want him to be able to learn from my mistakes and know that it’s okay to make his own. I want to tell him about the time I did this, and that, and maybe even the other.

And I want to tell him story-stories. Not just true stories but stories. I’ve become acutely aware over the past two months that time has passed right on by while I haven’t been paying attention. I’m thirty-five years old and I have exactly one piece of published writing, and I think I’m being generous counting even that piece as ‘published’.

So it’s time to change that. It’s time to gird my loins, refocus, giddy up, pick myself up by the bootstraps, and whatever the hell else I need to do to get myself together.

I need to make sure that the stories I haven’t told yet are told by the time my son needs to hear them.

Tags: blogging, writing

This entry was posted on January 19, 2010 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Archive, For Jack-Archived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.