At first it was purely minute-by-minute. Towards the end of the second week I made it up to hour-by-hour. Eventually I reached the point where I woke up one morning and did not immediately feel as if my chest was being caved-in by a 50-pound bag of grief.
My goal now is to make it up to one day at a time. If I can make it through one entire day without once collapsing into a sobbing wreck, I'll feel as if I've turned some kind of corner. It's amazing how little provocation it takes, really: how many tiny bits and things and fragments of memories you collect in a lifetime and how they're all just jumbled together in the recall box now and bouncing around completely out of control. Simply being in the breakfast cereal aisle in the grocery store is enough to do it, when you suddenly see a box on the shelves that you've probably walked past a hundred times before, but this time you remember it was her favorite brand when she was four years old.
Night is the worst time. Lately I've taken to staying up far too late, reading or watching television, just so that when I finally do go to bed I'm too tired to do anything but fall asleep. By about four a.m. my body apparently has had the minimum amount of sleep it absolutely requires, though, because that's when the floodgates of my subconscious open wide, and I wake up, to lie there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, replaying every decision I've made in the past thirty years and cataloging my failures as a father.
Ironically, about four weeks ago I was considering starting up a new series and calling it, "Family Matters." For my entire career I have struggled, usually unsuccessfully, to find the proper balance between my desire to write and the needs of my family. I am no authority on how to do it right, but since I've never been able to find much knowledgeable and useful help with the matter, I was thinking it was perhaps time to reopen the discussion and at least help others find ways to avoid doing some of the things I've done wrong.
Why does this seem necessary? Remember, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I served two terms on the SFWA Board of Directors. In that capacity I got to know literally hundreds of professional writers on a first-name basis, and to learn far more about their personal lives than I'd ever really wanted.
By the end of my tenure on the Board, two things had really begun to disturb me: how toxic the writing life seemed to be to marriage and family, and how casually most writers seemed to accept this toxicity. It was almost as if it was an occupational requirement, or even a milestone on the road to success. "Okay, you've just sold your fifth novel. Time now for your first divorce. Ha ha, we put the fun in dysfunctional." Worse, I began to realize that I could count on the fingers of two hands all the writers I knew with intact families, and that most of the really successful male writers I knew were perfectly content to let their children be raised by their ex-wife's next man. Or woman. Or whatever.
I don't know all the right answers, or even that there are right answers. But I do know a problem when I see it.
People ask why so much of the fiction being published these days is at best family-neutral, if not downright family-hostile. Perhaps the problem isn't the fiction itself, or the editors who buy it, or the publishers who print it. Perhaps it's the writers.
Let's talk.
FAMILY MATTERS posts at 7 a.m. each Sunday and is dedicated to serious discussions of marriage, family, children, human sexuality, and all the other things that writers ignore when they cocoon in their offices and try to create fiction. This series will run until we either run out of things to talk about, solve all the problems in the world, or you tell me to shut up and go get some professional therapy. If you have a question you'd like to ask or a topic you'd like to expound upon, send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com and we'll work it into the queue.
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