Personal Things

Posted on September 3, 2002    Posted by John Scalzi

Someone wrote in not long ago to ask me why I haven’t written about Athena recently. The short answer is that what with the books and all, I haven’t actually been writing about much of anything here, much less Athena. But the other reason is that simply that I haven’t much felt like it. As most of you know, while I’m usually pretty personable in this space, I don’t really get all that personal — I try to avoid talking about my neuroses on a constant basis, for example, and as far as any of you know, my wife and I have never had a cross word or misunderstanding. I prefer to keep it that way. I know many of you feel you know me (and in some cases that feeling is actually true), but some things are my own, and not yours, and I have no problem keeping them that way. This isn’t a confession booth or a therapy couch, at least not directly. Not every thing needs to be said in public.

In the case of Athena, as she grows older I grow more cognizant that her life is not merely an extension of my own, or just fodder for the space here or with some other writing assignment. Don’t get me wrong, I will still blather on about her and about being a dad, and so on and whatnot (especially if there’s money involved! Mmmmm…sweet, sweet money). But on the other hand I’m not in a rush to chronicle every last adorable moment or pride-bursting achievement. Others do that, in traditional media and online, and more power to them. I don’t intend to do it as often as they. I heartily intend to bore my audience in other ways.

And yet (and of course), I love talking about her, and writing about her. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, one of the great surprises about fatherhood has been how consistently fascinating having a child has been. Before having Athena, I had expected that a kid of mine wouldn’t really become interesting until it could actually speak; therefore the first two years of your child’s life was something of a waiting game, counting down the time until you could actually engage your spawn in conversation. Like most of my assumptions involving parenthood, this one was spectacularly wrong; Athena was interesting from the get-go, and she gets more interesting as she goes along.

Every parent thinks that, obviously (or should think it, in any event), and the fact that we do makes me wonder where along the way we forget that kids are capable of surprising leaps of, if not intelligence, at least intuition and imagination. It’s probably because most of everything before five is kind of a haze. I once interviewed Orson Scott Card, a novelist who has written several novels with incredibly precocious children, and I asked him if he had ever met a child who was as self-possessed as the kids in his books. His response was that children had the same subtlety of thought as adults, they just lacked context and experience. The children he wrote about were exceptional, but in some sense he was simply translating the inner life of children in a way that adults could understand.

In my opinion Card’s a little overgenerous in the general sense (he never really did write about anyone but truly exceptional children, the sort that write extended political essays or fight multi-tiered battles with aliens, rather than the kind that like Fruit Roll-Ups and Blue’s Clues), but he’s correct in the basic premise that children can be sophisticated thinkers rather more often than adults give them credit for being so. Athena has yet to best either her mother or me in a game of logical reasoning, but that’s mostly because we have the better part of three decades on her. Like a raptor poking at the fences in Jurassic Park, she’s constantly testing for weaknesses and slip-ups, and it’s really actually enjoyable watching her try to get one past us. It’s only a matter of time before she does.

Mind you, when she doesn’t, she’s still not above having a tantrum to try to get her way, so she’s still very much the three-year-old. These tantrums typically don’t work. But hope spring eternal. In the meantime, and as you can see from the picture, she’s strong-willed, smart, and sporting a ‘tude, and no, I have no idea from where she might get that. I don’t expect she’s all that different from other children her age, although I wouldn’t mind terribly if she were. I wouldn’t mind her being an exceptional ‘tude-sporter.

In any event, Athena will continue to make her appearances here, and probably on a not-infrequent basis. But I hope you don’t mind if I keep some (many) things to myself, between me, her mother and her own little person. Eventually, she’ll be old enough to tell you more about herself and her point of view, if she wants to. If she wants to, I think it’ll be worth the wait.