I love this Globe and Mail interview with Michael Chabon about fatherhood (via Ruhlman).
In particular, this quote, which is an excerpt from Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs:
The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.
That's just so good. I think Michael Chabon may win my prize for the author whose writing consistently makes me tear up the most.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.