…our first child Alex, who could not be pried from Michele’s womb with a crowbar on Friday, finally came out on Monday.
There’s a paradigm shift that comes with your first child. You are now not living for yourself; you cannot. And it’s very different than a married couple living for each other, because the expectation there — however poorly realized — is that if you are living entirely for her, she is also living entirely for you. But with a baby, you must devote yourself to an individual (and later, to a whole brood of individuals) who cannot reciprocate. At least not until years later, when they’ve guessed right at a vocation that suddenly becomes the flavor of the month and they can fund your comfortable retirement.
Anyway. It’s now twenty years later,and it feels strange that Alex is so much closer to the age I was at the time than I am now. As I’ve said before, “I don’t feel as old as my dad when he was my age.”
All of which is about me, not about him. But this is: Happy birthday, Alex.