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I DON’T CONSIDER myself to be very “Hollywood,” but in terms of fatherhood, I’m practically a cliché.
It’s because I had my kids in waves. There’s my son Will, 26, and daughter Mercy, 21, from my first marriage, and my daughter Cornelia, 6, from my second and present marriage.
There are a lot of us old-dads-of-young-kids out here, and the main reason is that there are so many Los Angeles men who, after they get that first marriage out of the way, employ a sort of Benjamin Button philosophy towards the subsequent ones in that as time marches forward and the end of life moves closer, the wives get younger and younger.
I don’t lump myself in with those geezers, though, because I am 60 and my wife is 50, and the narrowness of that merely ten-year gap affords me the moral superiority of a guy married to someone with whom he can have actual conversations.
But the fact remains that I was 54 when my youngest was born. And yes, I have done all the math. I’ll be 72 when she graduates high school, 76 when she graduates college, and god knows what kind of drooling diapered mess I’ll be when I’m giving the toast at her wedding, champagne flute in one hand, the other one white-knuckling my walker.
But it is what it is. I fell in love with a single mother who, after many years of a successful career, wanted a child and hadn’t found a suitable partner to raise one with. A relationship with Jen was always going to be a package deal, and it’s the best one I’ve ever been lucky enough to gladly tumble head over heels into.
When I started letting people know that we were engaged and that I was going to adopt the then-two-year-old Cornelia (I was calling it “getting back into the toddler business”), people had one of two reactions.
The first was along the lines of Why the fuck would you do that? For so many people, and especially parents, the idea of going back to raising a pre-pre-schooler was incomprehensible. To them it was like driving through a hurricane and then making a U-ey to take one more crack at it for fun.
The other reaction was that I was some kind of saint. That to so selflessly dive back into the stress of making a person out of what is basically a little wild animal that can delete seven phone apps in less than one minute made me some sort of super dad, the menschiest of mensches.
This take was, while flattering, a little embarrassing, because years ago I figured out that all you have to do be hoisted on metaphorical shoulders and pronounced a Good Dad is about 30 percent of the work that it takes to be a Good Mom.
I also felt a little sheepish about the idea that signing up to help raise a two year old was somehow heroic because I knew that this little girl was giving me a gift: approximately 16 years of not having to figure out was I was going to do with myself.
“What should I do now?” has been a question that has plagued me for my entire life in both the micro and the macro. It’s why I smoked for almost 20 years. When you’re raising a child, you don’t have to come up with something to do—you’ve got that kid to take care of. You want a purpose? How about making a decent human?
When you are raising a child, it’s always good work. You are never wasting your time on an unworthy project. (A quick stroll through my IMDB page will show that I have done that more than a few times.)
So when a group of kindergarten girls asks me, “Are you Cornelia’s grandpa?” I just let it roll off my back, because they don’t know about the scam I’m running. I have found a way to get to do the thing I love most for as long as I possibly can.
And there’s a good chance that by the time she’s ready to head out on her own, her older brother and sister might start having children, which means I will possibly get to have a life filled with babies and little kids for a long, long time. And that is a huge win for me.
I once heard Bob Odenkirk say on a podcast, “When you’re raising little kids, you know what your job is.” I know exactly what he means, and I love my job.
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