JP: Avoid this in later life.

My post yesterday about why we shouldn’t hate Mommybloggers who strike it rich comes from an honest source: me.

My financial woes have taken up considerable space aboard the DadWagon (and with a tightly edited and curated site like this, how dare I be repetitive?). I won’t trouble you good folks with any more of it. Times are tough all around these days.

My paranoid side reads the recent news that the economy has in some way recovered merely as evidence of the strong taking advantage of the weak. Seems as if so many solvent employers have used the downturn to rid themselves of valuable but high-priced employees, or to use this moment as an opportunity to degrade already bad wages. The creative industries, such as they are, have fared as badly as any.

Which, finally brings me to the–admittedly minor–point of this post. Would I want JP to follow in my footsteps?

All fathers, on some level, would like their sons to view them with admiration. That’s pretty natural, and I see it in myself in small ways. When JP is scared by monsters in the middle of the night, I don’t try to convince him that there are no monsters, or even that he could take on the monsters himself (maybe I should). I tell him not to fear–monsters are afraid of daddies, and he can rest easy. He tends to sleep better after that, and the value to my ego shouldn’t be underestimated either.

But to make his way into the writing world? I’m primarily an editor these days, but my first love was fiction writing. I have the shoeboxes filled with (justifiably) rejected novels to prove it. God forbid JP should ever take an interest in something as painful, unrewarding, and increasingly reviled as coming up with stories and setting them down on paper. In fact, I may preemptively ground him now–at age 3–to get that idea out his mind.

What then, you ask? That’s easy. It’s the finance life for him–oh wait, not that. That’s dead. He’ll be a lawyer! Uh, that’s not too good either. Doctor? My son the doctor? That’s gotta be good. Except they’re not faring so well either. Well, then, it’s settled.

The lottery it is.