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Rand, Lark and the Sports Car

I found myself the other day — I mean my self, the person who has gotten a little bit lost since Larkin was born.

I was going through the 3 feet high stack of folders in the corner of my office. This nightmare pile contains things I've been intending to sort out and file since before Larkin was born, always saying "I'll get to it." But I never do. Now I needed to find car documents. A year and a half ago I sold a car and then "forgot" to de-register it, and as far as the city taxman was concerned, I still owned it. Can you say "collection agency?" So I steeled myself and went digging.

The car in question was a flashy little sports car, a secondhand black BMW Z-3 convertible I bought one year before Larkin was born. I had never splurged on a car before — I'd owned a used VW Jetta for sixteen years — and I loved the roadster and the snug way it cruised country roads on a sunny day. But then Larkin came along, and there was no place in my sports car for an infant seat. So I sold it. Oh well, I reminded myself, what can a guy expect when he insists on having his midlife-crisis car before he has children? Still, every time I'd see "my" car around town, I felt a little heartbreak. Not just missing it, but mourning it.

I finally found the registration and bill of sale, buried deep in the stack. The other folders contained notes I'd taken for stories and essays I once intended to write, and I went through them, these projects from my pre-Larkin days. The extent of what I'd been thinking about back then stunned me. Half the ideas were ones I had forgotten about completely. And they were good ideas, too. It was as if someone else had written them down — someone more energetic and passionate, more ambitious, and smarter than I. And with a lot more time.

Who was this person? Where had he gone? Sitting there with the husks of my ambition lying all around me, I felt like a farmer whose crop has been destroyed by savage weather or an unexpected freeze. What a forlorn moment.

Yes, I know, just last time I was writing about the joys of fatherhood. And now I'm oscillating to the other extreme. How many new parents feel like they're living the famous line from Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"? In my case, it's true that Larkin has brought immense joy into my life. Yet it's also true that energy, achievement and confidence have taken a hit. Sometimes it seems like a big one.

Being an older first-time dad doesn't always help. The changes brought by Larkin come at the same time as a whole host of other midlife changes and challenges. My mother died of cancer, even as I myself had a scary brush with it. My body keeps breaking down: my knee is sore, my hip is sore; I gobble ibuprofen like raisins; I have intermittent dizziness that no doctor can do anything about, and on top of all that, somehow I managed to injure my rotator cuff while sleeping. For three days it's been a challenge simply to get my arm into a sleeve.

All this is funny, except when it's not. Sometimes it's as if I see my former self standing on a far shore, in the sunlight. As if in a dream I try to swim toward him. But I can never get there. "I'm losing sight of myself," I said to Molly recently. "I don't know where I am any more."

A young friend of mine, newly married, emailed me about this topic. "One of the things that scares me the most about having a kid," he wrote, "is that my life as an individual would take a very serious hit." He believed that giving yourself to your child is the definition of being a good parent, he said. "But finding that fragile balance of keeping your own life and devoting yourself to your kid has to be tough."

I'll say it is. Your own life? What's that? There are panicky, depressing moments when you're afraid you'll never be you again. That's when it's easy to be tempted, even taunted, by the recollection of your former self — mourning that carefree guy in the convertible, that dynamo who wrote down the brilliant ideas in those folders. I have come to understand that it isn't that guy's brilliance I envy, but his confident illusion of control, his clear and leisurely view from above the chaos. I keep thinking there will come a day when I'll get back on top of my life and survey it like a mountain climber. Isn't that what I had before?

It's a futile wish, this longing to "get back" to some idea of yourself. Because you can't get back. To paraphrase Robert Frost's famous poem, you can't be two travelers in your own life; you can only be one. I remember an illustrated woodcut our mother kept on her kitchen wall, showing a wanderer in the woods, a vagabond carrying knapsack and walking stick. He has just passed a fork in the path, with signs pointing in both directions. There's the path he has taken, labeled "Your Life," and the other path: "No Longer an Option." It's true, there is no going back; and in fact, once the trees and brush get in the way, there's hardly any looking back.

As I was writing that sentence, Larkin woke from her nap. Yesterday I went in to find her sitting up in her crib and talking through her pacifier — she does this so expertly, like a guy palavering away while chomping on a cigar. She was reciting the opening lines of one of her favorite books, Madeline:

Ah, Life lived neatly, in a straight line. Only in a children's book.