Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien

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      As I mentioned earlier, Meredith and I had come within a whisker of calling it quits over our deadlock on the children question. She very much wanted kids. I very much did not. And so it happened that on a late night several years ago we exchanged heated words on the subject, each of us digging in, and eventually Meredith announced, wearily but bluntly, that there was no future for us. I was hurt by this. I asked her to leave, which she did, and for a couple of weeks we saw nothing of each other.

      Now, singing “Row, Row” in the dark, I recall only bits and pieces from that period of silence and separation—mainly the word “crocodile” slithering through my head. I was appalled that Meredith could love something that did not exist, in fact the idea of something that did not exist, more than she loved me. It seemed cold-blooded. It seemed heartlessly reproductive.

      In the end we met for drinks on neutral ground, in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bar, and for several hours we learned a great deal about each other, not only emotional things but also the contents of our personal histories, the biographical facts that had brought us to this bar and to this impasse. Meredith talked about her mother dying. She talked about her father, a good man but sometimes a distant man, a man who too often seemed absent from her life. She talked about her sisters, one of whom had been institutionalized for decades with severe schizophrenia, the other of whom had twice attempted suicide (and would later succeed). She talked about the dream she’d been cultivating since she was a little girl, the dream of a happy, normal family life. “Maybe it’s a fantasy,” she said, “but don’t I get to hope for something?”

      On my part, I opened up about pretty similar things. An alcoholic father. A father who often scared me and who sometimes didn’t seem to like me much. I talked about the tensions in our house, the late-night shouting matches between my mom and dad, the cruel words, the brittle silences that followed for weeks afterward. I also expressed, as best I could, my suspicion that I’d make a far less than ideal father. I was impatient, I told Meredith. I was stubborn. I was absent-minded. I was protective of my time. As a writer—a preposterously slow writer—I feared I’d come to resent the minutes and hours and days spent changing diapers and singing silly bedtime lullabies.

      Meredith and I managed to work it out.

      In that Cambridge bar, and in the weeks afterward, the realization began to stir in me that I too yearned for a happy, normal family life, even if I remained terrified of failing. There were no promises, exactly. But there was a prospect. Three years went by, and Meredith and I got married, and our son was conceived, and now I sit here in the dark, rocking my precious, life-hating Timmy to sleep, singing an unprintable new edition of “Row, Row.”