Kids Are People, Too

"I left London one Saturday afternoon in the autumn to make some arrangement about a son going to school."

So begins the last chapter of Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish A Room, the tenth volume of his hypnotic, twelve-volume A Dance To The Music of Time, which I read every night during the twenty minutes when a son's nursing coincides with another son's bath.

Elsewhere Powell refers to his children as "it" or, mostly, not at all. Strange to be a father when so many of my literary role models have no kids, or had kids before kids were considered to be people, too. At the other extreme from Powell, Amy Fusselman writes well about parenting destroying her writing.