I Couldn’t Answer a Simple Question on my Son’s Birth Certificate

Becoming a father meant confronting what I hadn’t become

After the postpartum nurses issued a fourth reminder, I finally walked to the other side of Cedars Sinai and entered the little office where I was forced to face my failure. Four clerks shared a space too small for one, crammed behind an old wooden desk and a plastic partition that reminded me of a pawn shop’s security shield. One of the clerks, an elderly woman, slid me a form called a “Birth Worksheet,” which to my surprise spanned five or six pages.

The first page was what I expected: full name, sex, parents, date and time of birth. Information to be entered into the public record. Then, for several pages, the form proceeded to ask a series of increasingly specific questions about Allison and me. Our education level. Ethnicity. The number of previous children we’ve had. The number of miscarriages or terminations. Allison’s weight, before and after pregnancy. Our dates of prenatal care.

An early question, mundane by the standards of this form, was the only one that froze me:

Occupation: ___________

For Allison, I scribbled “Writer.” Beneath my own name, I hesitated. It felt wrong to say “Writer.” Writer might still be a deep-seated identity, but it was no longer how I predominately earned money. Since my screenwriting career effectively ended, I’ve gone back to graduate school, where I’m working toward a PhD in policy analysis. I wondered if I should say student? No, too embarrassing. Podcaster? Vomit. I wanted to just say writer but panicked that Parker would one day see this form and pity me.

A memory came to me—years earlier while visiting Rwanda on vacation. Upon entering the country I had to fill out an immigration form and impulsively put “Writer.” I was still working for the Federal Government, but I fantasized about a day when I could fill all my forms like this. The thrill to say on my taxes: I earned this income writing.

With a glance toward the door the elderly woman reminded me there was a line of other new-dads waiting outside and that I better move things along. I wrote “Researcher” down (my day job), skipped some questions I didn’t know the answers to offhand—surely some of these questions must be optional—and slid the packet across the desk. The lady inspected my work and looked at me like I was an idiot. “You left all these blank.”

“The form was activating a deep-seated pain about abandoning my dreams,” I wanted to say. But instead I dissembled, idiotically: “Oh, did I?”

She grabbed a dull pencil from a Dodgers mug, deciding I could not be trusted to fill this out myself. She asked the questions and recorded my responses. Under my name, she saw what I wrote and decided to double check: “You’re a researcher?”

The Able-Bodied Man

At 36 years old, I feel juvenile when my wife or I tell friends that I’ve been “busy with school,” but the truth is, I’m thriving there. I finished the first part of my degree at the top of my class. I am a valued member of my research team, where I am doing interesting and impactful work. I am intellectually stimulated and have done things I never thought I could possibly do: last month I designed a synthetic control model to measure the economic impacts of an export control policy. Don’t know what that last sentence means? Neither did I back when my world was only writing. Now I stay up late, holding Parker, reading books and papers on advanced statistical methods out of a genuine interest and desire to be better.

Still, I watch all of my earnings go right back into tuition. Yesterday, we were surprised with an $8,000 hospital bill from my emergency appendectomy last year, the burden of which falls on my wife whose earnings support us. Before Parker’s birth, I might have told myself to resist these traditional framings: a man need not be judged by the size of his paycheck. But becoming a father has only supercharged this feeling. I see my wife, exhausted from an interrupted night of sleep, pumping milk and checking her client schedule. I see my infant son stretched out in his bassinet. Their bodies are so vulnerable. Here I am, an able-bodied man. I feel this primal urge to provide for them.

I don’t want economic pressures born of my own failures to alter the trajectory of Parker’s life. I want my wife to be able to buy herself jewelry and go see the good, expensive doctor so that her knees cease their daily torture. I am responsible for these two.

The type of writing I do these days. An excerpt from my paper last term.

Judgment

This past summer, there was one day where I thought I’d write a novel. Before deciding this was an inefficient and likely quixotic use of my time, I wrote about five hundred words. Here was the opening paragraph:

It’s a tricky thing, guiding a boy into daylight. This one arrived three weeks early, impatient for oxygen, all twisted cord and purple skin. They placed him on my chest: slick, trembling, unimaginably fragile. The hospital lights seemed dim around us. For a moment I couldn’t reconcile his weight with his consequence. Five pounds, eight ounces of absolute judgment.

Strange how this ill-fated opening, written months before Parker’s birth, resonates now. How did I know my son would be born three weeks early? Sent to the NICU to help him with his oxygen. At the time, I wasn’t sure why I wrote the word judgement. The point of the book was to reflect on a week of my life spent with my high school best friend—an alcoholic—and how that week of debauchery tore apart our friendship and left me worrying about the perils of raising a boy.

Now I read that sentence less worried about my adolescent failings than about the universe’s judgement of my ability to fulfill my duty as Parker’s father.

Sky’s the limit

“You are the worst paid number two in Hollywood,” my showrunner said to me late at night in a writers room several years ago. I was just a staff writer—the lowest ranking writer in the room—but in a period of a few months I had been put in charge of writing every outline that went to the network and writers at the co-executive producer level were asked to submit their drafts to me for notes. One of those Co-eps, instead of feeling resentful, patted me on the back and said, “this is how big careers begin.”

That night I looked out the window of our Hollywood offices at Griffith Observatory lit up in the hills. An offer had been made to promote me and send me to set in Paris for the year. I was making really good money. I remember thinking: finally, I’m happy.

Despite doing well at school, I’m guarded now. I know that forces outside of my control can set my life down unexpected paths. Research is being gutted. There is a societal backlash against “experts.” I must admit that recent advancements in AI are impressive, and it’s not clear what I can do that a model can’t do faster and cheaper. I have the sense that once again my rising star is but moments away from combusting. My life feels like it’s all promise and no payoff.

For The Record

When the clerk finished interviewing me, she slipped the completed worksheet into a manila folder and told me the birth certificate would arrive in six to eight weeks. I walked back across Cedars to the room where Allison was recovering and Parker was sleeping. Researcher. Writer. Whatever I am. The form will yellow in a drawer somewhere, a record of a man who hadn’t yet figured out his life at the moment his son entered it.

Maybe Parker will find it one day and wonder about his father—why he hesitated, what he was afraid of. I won’t be able to explain that the question wasn’t really about occupation. It was about whether I had become someone worth being. I don’t know the answer and I suspect I never will, not fully. But I’m learning there’s a kind of manliness in simply looking at all of it.

The failures, the bills, the foreclosed dreams, the 3 a.m. terror that I am not enough—I look at it all and do not look away. I will continue watching even when it feels unbearable. I may not be able to conquer my fate, but I can refuse to lie about it. That’s a kind of man worth being, a kind of man my son can respect.