When you have a child, you think about your personal history and what you offer them as a larger narrative, and I realised I knew nothing about my father's circumstances other than what he'd told me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Being a parent gives you historical perspective. You have thoughts about how you fit into a larger generational drama - those who came before and those who will come after.
The thing is that my father's story helps to communicate what was at stake with my mother, and my mother and father had so much a partnership that his story is integral to her story, as her story is to his - really, her story can't be told without his story.
I speak with my father about everything in my life.
Before I had a son, I used to look at my father's example: he left me, he left my mother. When I had a son, I got caught in the same situation that his mother don't want me to see him. I started looking at my father in a different light.
And in that time, I lost my dad and had kids of my own. It was like, OK, I get it now. I know what fatherhood is all about. And you look at your parents differently.
I've found it easier to write, to coalesce my thoughts, since having children. It brings you back to what you experienced yourself as a child, and you empathize with what your parents went through.
When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.
My father seemed always to know not only what I was doing, but what I was being.
A lot of things you see as a child remain with you... you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.
When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.