Son

Was sitting in one of those meetings that deals with one of those afflictions of balance (too much is never enough, the disease of more, etc.). A piece of approved literature was passed around the circle and each person read a page or so before passing it on to the next.

I heard something read that I'd not noticed before; a rather simple and innocuous sentence, really. Something to the effect that everyone, regardless of race, creed, color, or class, had the desire to love, to achieve and to reproduce. Something along those lines.

At first I rejected this assertion. I said to myself that not everyone wanted to reproduce. I mean surely there were those who didn't want to have children, right? And then I thought about how this applied to me, and how, before my wife and I had young son, I'd been furiously trying to reproduce myself through my writing; that is, if you stopped looking at reproduction as a purely biological act and started looking at it as building a monument to one's life, as preserving something of one's essence for posterity, then, yes, I had indeed lived up to that assertion. I'd been trying like hell to reproduce for some time, and, frankly, it hadn't been working very well.

Then we had young champion. Slowly, almost without my noticing, my writing began to change. I didn't see it right away, but now, looking back at the 1 1/2 years since he was born, I see that at some point, without my knowledge, my writing had shifted from monument-building to storytelling. That is, I was no longer trying to preserve some of my essence in words. Instead I was just telling stories. Perhaps that's because I'd already reproduced and therefore no longer needed my writing to serve this function for me.

Is it possible? I think so. I know the writing is much more fun since my son has been born, much more fun and much less of a grind. So that's all I've got. Just a thought.