Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood by Lewis Michael

Author:Lewis, Michael [Lewis, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2009-04-07T23:00:00+00:00

ONE OF THE many surprising things to me about fatherhood is how it has perverted my attitude toward risk. It is true that there are many kinds of risk—emotional, social, financial, physical. But I can’t think of any I enjoy taking more than I did before I had children—unless you count the mere fact of having children as a kind of celebration of emotional risk. Otherwise, I’m rapidly becoming a wimp. There are little risk-averse things I do now that I never did before and little risk-averse feelings that I have now that I never had before. To wit:

Item: The other night Tabitha and I went to see Minority Report. It’s the sort of movie that just a few years ago I would have cheered and Tabitha would have at least tolerated. But in the middle of the film a small child is abducted from a public swimming pool. That was enough to ruin it for Tabitha and to make me feel we ought to just skip dinner afterward and go home and make sure nothing terrible had happened to our children. This is obviously neurotic. I don’t know a single case of a small child being kidnapped at a public swimming pool in Berkeley, California, while her father holds his breath underwater, much less from her bed at night while being guarded by babysitters. But I am no longer rational on this subject. My emotions are easily manipulated by cheap dramatic tricks involving the suffering of small children, and by the current media hysteria about what is in fact an ordinary rate of child murders. I think I could still sit through the scene in Richard III when the villain has the two little princes smothered in their beds. Anything closer to twenty-first-century American life ruins my day.

Item: I no longer enjoy rolling the dice in the stock market. I never enjoyed it all that much, but what pleasure I took in it vanished with Quinn’s arrival—well before the stock market collapsed. With her arrival, for the first time in my life, I began to worry a bit about money. I have no reason to worry about money, but that doesn’t stop me from doing it. When people talk about the mood in the financial markets they tend to assume that the market drives that mood. But of course it doesn’t, not entirely. A few years ago a piece in the Michigan Medical Journal argued that the reason the Internet bubble reached such ridiculous heights was that huge numbers of investors were now taking drugs that lowered their inhibitions. With a third of the U.S. investing population on Prozac or some other mood-enhancing drug, the paper concluded, it was no wonder that so many people believed the market would simply keep rising.

Small children are also a mood-altering substance with financial consequences. Their effect on the human mind is the opposite of Prozac. At any rate, my own current financial taste for cash and bonds seems to be at least partly a response to parenthood.

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