When my wife woke me up from a nap to tell me that she was pregnant, my first reaction was shock?after just trying for a month" My second response was joy?I was going to be a dad! Then came a sudden, mostly unexpected wave of disappointment and distress?my career, as I knew it, was over.
At the time, I was a freelance writer and my wife was a PhD student. We lived in a tiny apartment and had no car and few expenses. But now one of us had to get a job?the kind that pays every week. That meant that I had to put all of my grand, ambitious plans?some of which I?d actually started?on hold indefinitely.
I found full-time work and set aside my novel, a TV pilot and timely research for a non-fiction project that would quickly become irrelevant. The sacrifice I made is an age-old one: Forever, men have abandoned their poetry, bands and other preferred, lower-paying gigs to provide for their families. As I commuted to work each morning I felt proud of what I was doing, but the drive home was definitely dominated by frustration and despondency over everything I?d given up. The icing on the cake was the paltry amount of time that I actually spent with the 7½-pound reason I was doing all this. I was a father, but I wasn?t as much of a parent as I imagined. It made me wonder: Will men ever be able to have it all"
That?s a bit of a joke, of course. The late Helen Gurley Brown, former editor of Cosmopolitan, set off decades of debate and backlash when she suggested in 1982 that ...