My Son Zachary

I GO BACK to that beginning again because I have to, back to that time and place 16 years ago when it was never supposed to be like this, before the dream of fatherhood became that dead man’s walk and a marriage crumbled away. Was there any way to have stopped it? Maybe, if the dynamic between Debra and me had been different, if I had been different, if the plunge into tumult had not become a free fall. I was so unprepared and unknowing. I was so tied up in making it big, making my parents and their Manhattan friends proud. I could give, and I could give wonderfully, but I needed almost constant replenishment as the enemies—success, failure, self-worth, self-doubt—waged their relentless assault.

I forged ahead blindly, supremely convinced of my charisma and complexity. I saw the continued settling-in of a marriage, house and home and hearth and furniture from IKEA, and when I found out that Debra was pregnant with twins, I thrilled to the news. I wrote a story about it in the Inquirer, where I was working at the time as a reporter. I have never gone back to look at it, because I could not bear to. But as I read it now, I am touched by the goofy sweetness of it, the excited and gushing outpouring of what I thought would happen. I knew there would be change with the advent of children, and at the age of 28, I embraced and welcomed that as a way at last to rid myself of my enemies.

I am scared, yes, and awestruck, yes, but I am wonderfully excited. I want children, and I relish the role of being a father, of feeling, for the first time, those tiny hands wrapping around my fingers.

For most of my life, I have been consistently interested in only one person: myself I have been obsessed with my career, with getting ahead, with being on top of the mountain and walling to all those who started out with me and then fell into an unexpected sliver between the rocks.

I lost some of that self-absorbed selfishness when I got married. And with the birth of my children, I will lose all of it. The challenges of a career will always be there, and I will go after them. But the real challenge will become the raising of a family. Everything will change: my relationship to my job, my relationship to myself, my relationship to my wife.

I was right, of course.

Everything did change.

But never in the way I imagined or expected.