Confessions of a Not-bad Dad

One kid was manageable. But when the second arrived, he changed everything I thought I knew about my career, my worldview, and myself.

- By Keith Gessen

IT'S NOT CLEAR WHY PARENTHOOD WAS SUCH A SURPRISE TO ME. BY THE TIME OUR SON RAFFI was born, I was 40 years old. I knew what a baby was and how one was made. Many of my friends had them. My wife, Emily, even gave me a book to read, The Birth Partner, to prepare me for the big event.

I didn't read it. And I didn't visit my friends who had kids. I thought they had entered a different world. I imagined them disapproving of me and my frivolous life. And I, in turn, found them boring. They were obsessed with their tiny little children, with what they ate and where they'd go to school. What did it matter? Though children were all around me, I avoided them.

Then our son was born. It was terrifying. He could die! That was the number-one fact about him: He was tiny and fragile. When he was an infant, I carried him like a football, his butt in my hand, his legs draped over my wrist, his head in the crook of my elbow. I was convinced that I would trip while holding him and his head would smash against the ground. There was nothing to prevent this from happening and a lot of things to encourage it. Yet it never happened. He fell down some stairs once and another time almost drowned in a small koi pond, but aside from that, more or less, he emerged from his infancy unscathed.

I was on the old side for a first-time father, even in New York. Immediately, with the wisdom of my years, I began to sort the dads. Some worked all the time and never hung out with their kids-they were suckers. Others stayed home while their spouses worked. They looked down on dads who didn't. I admired them but could not relate.