Children aren’t the enemy of the writer

The wife is upstairs packing. I can vaguely recall hearing a child say, “she has a marker” as the sliding door closed, but my cigarette is already lit. One of the nice things about having five daughters is that the older children can be counted on to police the household. Two weeks earlier my wife and I were laid up with whatever bug ripped through the girls’ school. The sixth-grader and the third-grader traded off making meals for the weekend, even managing to clean up the debris from all the quesadillas and grilled cheeses, scrambled eggs and pancakes that sustained the household. Parents are understandably upset about the steep drop in reading comprehension and mathematics children experienced during the Covid lockdowns. We took advantage of remote learning by giving the girls free range in the kitchen. It’s paying dividends. I extinguish the butt confident that the marker situation has resolved itself, and it has: our baby sports the combover familiar to any insomniac who watched the Nineties-era infomercials advertising spray paint as a cure for baldness. Mrs. McMorris has never been an insomniac. She is not amused.

Journalism was once the province of working-class drinkers with a knack for language and no qualms with the sin of gossip, but its ranks are now filled with idealists and activists with a credential from Columbia. Many observers blame Woodward and Bernstein’s takedown of Nixon on behalf of a disgruntled FBI agent for the transition, but there is a more obvious answer: disappointing LSAT scores. The coverage of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action case has not disappointed anyone with “white supremacy” on their media bingo cards, but I wonder if a change is coming. In the wake of oral arguments, the American Bar Association announced plans to drop the LSAT requirement and elite law schools began downplaying ranking systems that privilege such test scores. Given the progress of artificial intelligence in newswriting, any working journalist must have a backup plan; perhaps the underpaid twenty-somethings in media may get a leg-up from their ideological enemies.

I am too busy paying for Catholic education and a mortgage to consider the staple fallback of law school. The Marine Corps wouldn’t take me at the height of the Iraq War, which doubtless saved many lives. My Plan B these days is Care.com. My hypothetical profile would be much more impressive to the market than anything on my LinkedIn: oldest of nine children; twenty-six years of diaper changing experience; rejected by the Marine Corps. I’d be a shoo-in for any au pair gig, which is to say it’d give me a great shot at a settlement in a gender discrimination lawsuit. That would pay for the kids’ tuition or at least pave the way for journalists with really, really disappointing LSAT scores.

I am not afraid of flying because I never board a flight without a scapular, a rosary, a thorough confession and a blood-alcohol level just short of comatose. I am deathly afraid of my wife flying. She only uses three of those things. The chief reason, however, dates back to a conversation I had with my eldest daughter about a year and a half ago. I shouldn’t say “about” — I know exactly when it happened. It was July 8, 2021. The Mets were rained out. Mrs. McMorris was at the nail salon when the eleven-year-old decided she must know about menstruation. For the next thirteen minutes I delivered a soliloquy on nature and God’s gift of the body and could see by her expression that my message resonated: a girl needs her mother.

Back in 2018 Michael Chabon recalled a conversation with a famous author who advised him that children are the enemy of the writer. Writing requires travel and time, and children hamper both, according to the author. Sound reasoning as far as it goes and while it did not convince Chabon — his Care.com bio would say, “four children, Pulitzer” — it has caught on among the writers I’ve encountered in recent years. They all have freedom to travel and plenty of time. Which is why our childless literary set sounds so repetitive and monolithic these days. Every recent literary project seems to impose the mores of MFA-haunted Brooklyn on some exotic locale or historical era or is an overwrought treatise on hook-up culture and its barren fruits, all told through the perspective of a precocious, petulant child. Moralists used to attack literature for its escapism, but the voice of modern literature bears a striking resemblance to the cries from the back seat when I load up the minivan for school and discover that the battery — the one my wife has spent weeks urging me to replace — is dead. There is no escape.

Having children has never interfered with my literary aspirations. I always hated travel and never did make good use of my time. But I have always needed money, and children are a great motivator. The last time Mrs. McMorris trusted me alone with the children, #2 ended up with a pencil in her eye. I did not think to ask the doctor if he was in-network before he whisked her into the OR for emergency surgery. My byline was everywhere that year. Chabon’s antagonist mentioned all the great writers who died childless to prove that “the more you wrote, the better a writer you became.” He never did reflect on all the would-be artists who enjoyed so much time and travel they never found time for the pen. I reflect on what became of a former classmate whose byline I expected to see in every prestige publication this country has to offer. I don’t have to look hard. She is an Instagram influencer married to an investment banker. The puppy in the photos no doubt requires attention, but I doubt anxiety about Catholic-school tuition, canine puberty or the peril of writing implements ever crosses her mind.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2023 World edition.