You can let this parenthood thing change you.

“There are a lot of things I wrote in the eighties that weren’t right,” he told me. “The big change was my having children. I know it’s a cliché, but once you have children you start to understand that everyone is somebody’s baby. It is an insiders-outsiders thing. You grow up and these people are characters on TV or video games or baseball cards—y

are your kids.” Commenters responded with emotion-filled posts, such as “The graveyard is full of ‘irreplaceable’ and ‘important’ people” and “I’ve missed so many birthdays, plays, and events for work, and I can’t even tell you why. I don’t remember what I was working on, I can’t tell you why it was important. But I can tell you how my not being th