A Blog Is Born

And here I am.

I had this funny idea the other day. "How about I make my own blog?"

I'm a cynic by nature, and I've always been a cynic when it concerned blogs. "They're places where self-absorbed folks go to make themselves feel superior," is more or less in line with my thoughts on blogs (in general). Maybe it's just that, by the time I'd discovered what blogs were (and that they existed), they were "too popular."

So what changed my mind? Fatherhood did.

You see, in August of 2004, my wife and I discovered that we had a baby on the way. We were scared, exhilerated, uncertain. Could we do this? Were we ready (financially, emotionally, spiritually, insert-your-own-ually) for a child?

Flash forward seven months, to March 2005. My wife is laying on a gurney in an operating room, I'm sitting next to her head with the anesthesiologist two feet to my right side. I can hear the chatter of the doctors as they're performing a caesarian section, which is mercifully hidden from us by a large, blue sheet.

"Your son is about to be born," the anesthesiologist says to me. "Stand up and take a look." The guy was younger than me, or seemed to be. I'd met him earlier in the day when he'd given my wife her epidural.

"Oh, I don't know about that," I answered. I'd heard stories about this; the last thing I wanted to see was my wife's internal organs spread out over her chest.

"Trust me, it's a beautiful thing," he replied. "Stand up and watch the birth of your son."

So I did.

They pulled the little guy out, and it was pretty much like you'd expect; the baby was covered in blood, mucus, alien slime, whatever. The first thing he did (before belting out his first cries) was to pee on the attending pediatrician. I firmly believe that my wife's Ob/Gyn aimed the boy at his peer as a joke. It worked; everyone, including the pediatrician, had a good laugh at his expense.

And this is how Stephen Paul came into the world, a perfect human being in miniature.

Those first few weeks were pretty rough. I'm sure you've heard it all before; bringing your first child home, and all the literal and figurative crap that goes with it, is what keeps a lot of people from having kids in the first place. Your sleep cycle is destroyed by this needy, loud, occasionally smelly newborn. He doesn't care if you've got to get up for work at 5:00am, nor does he feel sorry for you when you're already two weeks late on a deadline because you're too exausted to concentrate on being creative.

To be honest, I didn't like Stephen very much. I tried, honest I did. It was hard to love someone who was so demanding. My wife was very much in love with the boy, from the moment she held him for the first time the night that he was born. My feelings were somewhat guarded on the topic of my son; I wasn't sure what to expect. I was a nervous wreck trying to maintain some illusion of surety and courage in the face of an unknown quantity.

I'm not entirely sure what changed my mind, or when it happened. I think my wife is right when she tells me that, once he became "interactive," I got sucked in to his world. I never thought for a moment that I would love someone as much as I love my wife; but I do. I love that little boy more than I imagined possible.

Stephen is three months old now. He's growing, as his great-grandfather would say, "like a bad weed." He smiles at us, plays with us, and bitches at us as only a hungry (or wet or tired) baby can do. Our lives will never be the same, but they've been enriched nonetheless by his arrival.

Anyway...back to the point. Why am I, he who has always been averse to having his own blog, creating one now? What has fatherhood done to change my views on this medium of expression to the point where I am actively participating in it?

I'm a freelance writer and game designer. The work I create is largely related to pen and paper role-playing games. The most popular of these is Dungeons & Dragons, which most people have no doubt heard about. There are other, less well-known, titles, too, but D&D is the one that most "normal" people recognize when I attempt to explain what I exert my creative energy to create.

I've got a web site, Gary Astleford Dot Com, which is my "professional" page. It's where I post news items (in a blog, of sorts, instituted by my web-savvy wife so that she wouldn't need to post the news items for me, her HTML-challenged husband) relating to my writing career (as it is).

Lately, while posting said news items, I have often been tempted to mention tidbits relating to my son. Why not? After all, I'm proud to be his father. I love the little guy. I want to go on talk shows and, Tom Cruise-like, run around shouting about my new-found love for another human being.

Outside of oblique remarks and references about my child, I have thus far refrained from doing so. It is, after all, a site dedicated to my writing career. It's a place where game companies will (hopefully) find my information, read my writing samples, review my portfolio, and then contact me with offers for work. Paying work, one would hope. I could be wrong, but I figure the last thing that an editor wants to read about is my home life.

This is the place for these family-related ramblings of mine. This is my place to voice these feelings, to let them be known. I honestly doubt that few folks will actually read this stuff, but I may be surprised. It makes me feel a little better, knowing that I've got an outlet now.

There's the story, in a nutshell, of how Freelance Father came to be. I intend to post other things here, too. Musings, news, opinions, and the like. I mean, why the heck shouldn't I?

So that's it. I'll post again later, if this thing even works.