A Club Worth Joining

by John Ettorre

 In a very real sense, this column traces its roots to the autumn of 1988 and an RTA bus slowly winding its way up Cedar Hill.

I was commuting from work that long-ago evening, obsessing about impending fatherhood, worrying about the financial and emotional challenges. A month before, I had taken the most self-indulgent trip of my life, a solo visit to Washington, D.C., to marinate in self-pity while bidding farewell to my youth. At the age of 30, I was sure my life of independence and perhaps achievement was largely over.

Then God, or maybe just randomly firing synapses, interceded. I got a vivid mental picture of what this first child might be like. Not that I could divine the gender (though if truth be told, few men picture a girl when they envision their first child) or how this tiny newborn might otherwise look. So I reverted to my default setting and did what writers tend to do when trying to sort through pain or doubt or wonder in search of some larger meaning. I whipped out a pen, grabbed a legal pad and began scribbling.

"Dearest child," I began writing. "I’ll surely be writing many notes and letters to you in your lifetime: when you graduate, get married or maybe just have a birthday. But let this be my first. It’s written while you’re still safe and cuddled in your mamma’s belly. Soon you’ll be out to greet the world. And I’m really looking forward to seeing you, to playing with you and holding you close to my heart …," and on I went, in similar fashion. OK, so this letter admittedly wasn’t going to make anyone forget about the soft, lilting rhythms of the English Romantic poets, but then neither was that the point.

Writing — and its mirror companion, reading — have always done that for me. They’ve helped me make sense of experience, brought a kind of rough order to life’s otherwise disjointed parts. When that first-born finally made his debut into this world, just four days before Christmas, I penned a truly awful proud-new-dad-intensely-roaming-the-maternity-wards account of his first few days, a kind of written cinema verite (or so I imagined).

A trusted editor gently convinced me that it was far too good a piece of work to share with the larger public and that it would be better all around if it were instead dispatched to my private memorabilia collection, like a favorite bottle of brandy marking an historic occasion. As a reader, too, I’ve gained crucial insights on parenting. While my boys were still toddlers, an <I>Esquire<I> columnist explained in an essay how parents don’t have the luxury of being pessimists, because it means passing along a limited sense of possibility to their children. I never forgot his point, and it helped speed my transition from cynic to skeptic.

Alas, this column and its author are far too humble to harbor any similarly grand ambitions. Instead, I’ll simply try to make some sense of the experience of parenting, about which I’m hardly an expert (just ask my wife). I’m generally impulsive and sometimes too quick to anger. I admit that, with the exception of those written by my fellow columnist Dr. Sylvia Rimm, I don’t always read the latest book on cutting-edge parenting strategies that my wife consumes about weekly before putting on my nightstand for the latest installment of our patented Read and Discuss Parenting Pillow Talk Series (available soon on videotape).

But in my own idiosyncratic way, I’ve been an unstinting student of parenting. In my 15 years on the beat, I’ve studied it and thought about it and scribbled plenty of notes. I’ve taped interviews with my toddlers as they returned from a session at day care and casually picked the brain of hundreds of parents who might have something valuable to share about the best time-out strategy or the most effective way to coax chores from teen-agers. Mostly, I stepped back and watched closely to learn from a sublimely gifted parent, my wife Julie, who learned her craft from two earlier stalwart masters of the trade, her parents Mary and Bill Kerrigan.

Of course, I’ve also learned much from watching my two boys, 15-year-old Michael and 13-year-old Patrick, as they have slowly grown into smart, spirited and good-hearted young men. They’ll at times be my co-authors, at other times my editors, if you catch my meaning. We have an understanding that ensures a basic zone of privacy, no small item for adolescent boys.

Still, I’m guessing that my most important resource on parenting will by my newest — all of you, my dear readers. Through the generous support of this publication, I’m blessed to have regular access to perhaps as many as 125,000 of you fellow strivers. I hope you’ll read and reflect before bombarding me with e-mails or old-fashioned letters, or even phone calls.

Tell me what you like or don’t like, what you think I should be writing about that I’m not, or what I’m writing about that I shouldn’t. Heck, don’t even hesitate to let me know if you hate my sentence structure or you think my photo should be digitally altered. Most of all, tell me what you’re thinking about and struggling with in your own parenting, and feed me war stories from the front lines, tales from your life as an imperfect-but-striving-to-be-better parent.

After all, like it or not, we’re all in that category together.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor who has worked in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Over a 20-year career, his writing has appeared in more than 70 publications, including the New York Times. To reach John, send an e-mail to jettorre@voyager.net or leave a message at (440) 708-2994.