It’s a trope that has served the (usually male) writers of the canon well. The idea that writers, artists, inspired and creative people make bad spouses, parents, homemakers, partners is nothing new. Why am I the only one who feels this way?” What’s the baby doing? Is the baby happy? Is it going to cry? Who’s holding the baby? Who wants to bounce the baby on his knee? It’s distracting. You bring a baby into a room of adults and suddenly everything is about the baby. “I don’t like it,” a male friend said to me after class. A few weeks later, she came to workshop cradling an infant who mewled and suckled at her breast as we talked of characterization and suspense. She arrived in Iowa pregnant and gave birth on the first day of her second semester. The second moment of doubt occurred a year later and involved a classmate, a woman in her 30s who entered the program a year behind me. I also knew I’d never see my teacher in quite the same way again.
I might have feigned incomprehension, but I knew well enough what I was seeing. The thing going on, of course, was Parenthood, in all its unliterary, unromantic glory. “Something’s wrong,” I whispered back to my friend. There was a child doing something on the floor, another calling from the bedroom above our heads. Our teacher came down the stairs, slumped forward like a defeated animal. His wife greeted us, beautiful and exhausted. Instead, the space we entered was cluttered with makeshift blanket forts, crayons, containers of half-eaten apple sauce, highchairs and cradles and strangely shaped pillows and other unrecognizable contraptions we could only assume related to the care of small children. We’d been expecting a home of books, music, spirited discussion, a salonlike extension of our teacher’s office. “It smells like milk,” one of my friends whispered. We saw him as a writer, a reader, a professor and man of letters - all other biographical information was background static - until, that is, the evening we stepped inside his house. Our time with him was devoted to issues of literature, the forms and functions of fiction, writing practice and craft. But we knew it in the way we knew he had a mother or that he came from California.
We knew that he had a wife who was pregnant and two children under the age of 6.
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