I’m in the middle of this. I’m between her mother, who I’d been caring for. She’d been pregnant for nine months and I’d been caring for her. It all had been about the mother. The thing that happens when you have a baby is, for the better part of a year you live with the pregnancy, and it’s all about that.
When the woman’s in labor, you just think, “This is about getting this woman through this. When it’s done, she and I are going to go home.” As much as you think you understand, you don’t really understand that there’s someone else in there. You get through this thing that we’ve been taking classes about, we’ve been reading books about it. You just don’t know until you see the kid’s face that there’s somebody who’s now going to be with you for the rest of your fucking life. I didn’t know how that would feel. But when she came out, it wasn’t about my feelings. It was, “This kid is scared shitless, and she’s really angry at being taken out of her mom.”
There’s this woman that’s been the center of all this, she just got cut in fucking half in front of me. They just made a hole in her belly and took this kid out, and she’s being sewn up and she’s alone. This kid is over there, and she’s alone, and I’m in the middle.
I went to the kid.
I got my head next to hers. She’s screaming, purple face. I said, “It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. It’s all right. I’m here.” She stopped screaming on a dime, turned, and looked right at me. Kids can’t see an inch in front of them until they’re a couple weeks old. But she turned her head and opened her eyes and looked at me and stopped crying. Everybody, all these practiced people, said, “Oh my God, she heard you.” I just heard a voice say, “She knows who you are.”
Then somebody, at that moment, stuck a fucking pin in her foot, or something, to get blood, and she screamed again. But I didn’t understand that I had a role in this kid’s life until that moment. So it became about this kid. She changed everything.
One way that she changed was I expected her to be unhappy. She lived in someone’s belly, and she was living this perfect life. Then you’re taken out to where your skin is raw, and being hit by the atmosphere, and you cough all the time. What an awful life. That’s the way I always looked at it. It’s just terrible. The moment you’re born, you’re coping. Must just be awful. Shit and piss and diapers. What an awful life. But after that bout of crying, within an hour she was breast-feeding and she was happy. I watched her eat her first meal, and I watched her shit her first shit. I saw the system start working right in front of me. She dealt with it beautifully, and I was inspired by her.
I don’t like babies. I’m not wired for that. Before I had kids, I was really worried about having kids, because I don’t like being around babies. I didn’t like them. I didn’t feel sympathy for babies in the past. I didn’t know how I would get. I thought it would just be taxing to have someone screaming and crying. You don’t sleep very much. They get you up in the middle of the night. I was like, “I can’t do that.” Pregnancy gives you some training for that, because your wife gets up in the middle of the night. She has to pee. She needs help. Pregnancy is a perfect training program for having a kid. It’s the closest you can get, anyway.
What I learned was that I could do it all. I didn’t mind getting up. I didn’t mind being bleary and sleepy. I didn’t mind her screaming and crying, because I had sympathy for her, because I wanted her to be okay.
I found out that I’m a patient person. I didn’t know any of this about myself. I’m a patient person. That I had capacity for giving love and affection that I didn’t know I had, and receiving it. That I was really interested in teaching her and talking to her and interacting with her. All this stuff that I never knew I had. My own anxiety about my life just went away, because I didn’t give a shit. I instantly knew that I’m going to get old and die, and I wasn’t afraid of it anymore, because it’s about her now. It’s about giving her a chance to be happy, and have her own confidence and her own life. That’s what it became about. But it was a struggle. I didn’t give up without a fight.
DAN HARMON—DIRECTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER
If you ever met somebody who grew up with swell parents, I’m really, really suspicious of them.
DAVE FOLEY—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
The thing I learned from my mother, which was basically her motto for everything in life, was, “Don’t fuss.”
“Oh, don’t fuss.”
“Horrible things are happening!”
“Oh, don’t fuss.”
GARRY SHANDLING—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR (1949–2016)
I’m a good reactor. I said, “God, hey, give me kind of a wacky mom so I can just fucking react.”
ROBIN WILLIAMS—COMEDIAN, ACTOR (1951–2014)
My mother was a very, very funny terminal optimist. Everything is wonderful, beautiful. My father is the hardcore pessimist. When I told him I wanted to be an actor, he said, “Great. Have a backup profession like welding.” Between the two of them, I got this weird, not cynical, but hyperrealism and this hyperoptimism of my mother, of everything is rainbows and beauty.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
My dad was a tragic figure in a lot of ways. A brilliant man by all accounts who sort of took a leap from a tiny village in the backwaters of Kenya to suddenly the United States, getting a degree, attending Harvard, and he never managed that leap as well as he could have.
Part of the process of me writing my first book was to figure out what happened to him and how did he become who he was. He ended up becoming an alcoholic and abusive toward his several wives, and to some degree a neglectful father.
In some ways, because I didn’t grow up with him, he was an abstraction to me. That stuff didn’t seep into me. My mother and my grandparents, who did raise me, fortified me. Although one thing they always did that I thought was wise was they never portrayed a negative picture of him. They actually accentuated what was good about him rather than bad, which is an interesting thing. It was a good myth, and I didn’t internalize a bunch of negative attitudes about who he was, and thereby didn’t think that that was who I had to be.
I had the adolescent rebellion screw-up period that has been well chronicled, but it turned out that a lot of his craziness, I didn’t end up internalizing it. One of the things that I always say, I’ve said this to Michelle, one of our biggest jobs as parents, because we’re all a little bit crazy, is let’s see if we can not pass on some of our craziness to our kids.
DAVID CROSS—COMEDIAN, WRITER, DIRECTOR, ACTOR