Dad Spotlight - Bruce Grierson

We are so pleased to feature our first Dad Spotlight with Bruce Grierson author of U-Turn: What if You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living The Wrong Life?

Bruce Grierson is a four-time Canadian National Magazine Award-winning feature writer whose work has appeard in The New York Time Magazine, Popular Science, The Walrus, The Guardian, Marie Claire, Adbusters, The Utne Reader and many other magazines. You can discover more about Bruce Grierson at www.u-turns.org.

1) Please provide an overview and discuss the motivation for writing your latest book — U-Turn - What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?

The book was born out of a sort of combination of circumstance and a little eureka moment. Because Jen was pregnant with our first daughter, it seemed like the time to work on a book instead of the succession of freelance magazine stories that pay my part of the bills but require too much travel: that was the calculated part. I had actually started working on a different book, a biography of my grandfather, but then I came across something he'd written in a diary that connected some dots, and kind of resonated with some other themes I had been writing and thinking about for years. So poor Bob got shunted onto the siding and I worked up a proposal for U-Turn.
And, frankly, U-Turn won out over Bob partly because it was more topical and my agent thought it would be easier to sell. That's something I never really worried about as a single guy, but I have to now. I go at greater length into this question of the idea for the book on the website, www.u-turns.org. (Click, if you're interested, on "an autobiographical note.")

2) Provide an overview of your schedule as a writer and how many hours you work in a week.

3) Provide an overview of your home life, how many children you have, childcare arrangement, your wife's career and how you share the responsibilities at home.

Answer to 2 & 3:

Right now we have childcare three days a week, and I have Madeline one weekday and Jen has her the other. (Jen's a college English professor.) So we each get four work days a week if we're lucky. (Realistically, given errands and housework and sick days, it's probably closer to three.) I try to get up really early and get some work or exercise before people are up, and I conk out pretty early at night - I'm basically a really dull date. I rent a cheap office downtown to work it. It feels, to both Jen and I, like we have about half the amount of time we used to, and twice as much work to get done in that time. We rent a little house on the East Side of Vancouver. Our lives are pretty circumscribed right now. We each bear half the total load. But it's also true that without Jen's support - her steady income, her credit rating, her patience through the times I'm just not producing anything tangible - U-Turn wouldn't exist. I'd have had to do more lucrative contract writing, or teaching, or something, to bring in more dough. So in that respect I feel incredibly lucky.
Another baby is due in August; after that Jen'll be on mat leave for awhile. We're sort of girding for that stretch that follows. I'm looking forward to the baby; I am not looking forward to another round of sleep deprivation.

4) Have you found that being a father has impacted your career.  If so, in what ways?

Becoming parents probably saved both Jen and me from workaholism. Madeline is amazingly great, and she has enlarged our hearts about five sizes, and made us think about the right things.
But at the same time, you still have to do your job. And it's really hard to do it well without putting the hours in. Being a Dad has probably made me a better person, but a worse writer.
Here's an example: I'm working on a story at the moment about the neuroscience of compassion. This last week I talked to a guy who's sort of plying the seam between cognitive neuroscience and philosophy - at the very highest level — and I thought, before making that call, You know, I owe it to this guy really to have done my homework. This is pretty technical stuff and it's really easy to get things wrong (or at the very least oversimplify them). And I'm a doggedly slow worker, and not a particularly quick study. So everything in me wanted to prepare, prepare, prepare, to check and re-check. And that's how I spent the early years of my career: neurotically researching and checking stuff, and working every sentence until it felt done. But time can no longer be slow-burned that way. Time spent researching things into the ground is time that's stolen from somewhere else - your family.
This is one or the reasons people feel so verklempt in this stage of life. You want to be good at the work, and at the parenting, and in the marriage, and still have some time and energy to sink into the broader community, and you can't. You can't. The sheet's too small for the bed: the corners don't all fit at the same time. So do you fail everybody a little bit, or do you do right by a few people and fail everyone else completely?
While researching U-Turn, I came across a report by a Chicago psychologist of a client he was seeing named Ted. Ted was in a terrible state. He was a conscientious guy stuck in a midlife crisis. Ted was struggling with these same issues - whether to dig deeply in one spot or to be more widely … available. "Ted has reached a point where he is ambivalent about both of the two central tenets of his personal ideology, that life should be balanced, and that people should make commitments. Ted is still searching for a way to reconcile the conflict between these two central beliefs."
I read that and thought, Who isn't? Really: who isn't? Ted had articulated what maybe the practical dilemma of our generation, right now. We value two chief paradigms, and they are contradictory. The paradox is impossible to reconcile. Commitment or balance? Most of us have chosen to live between the two, satisfying neither and as a consequence perpetually unsatisfied. Neither balanced nor committed. Is there a creative solution in here somewhere that I'm missing?

5) Can you offer any advice for achieving a balance between your family life and your career.

Clearly, I have no answer to this. The most obvious answer - scale down your ambitions in all areas - doesn't seem very satisfying. Maybe, eventually, people just learn to live with the fact that everything coming out of the kitchen is a little bit undercooked. It's like how those east Indian fakirs learn to negotiate their relationship with pain: they learn how not to mind. I kind of hold on to the idea that if we can just hang in there until the kids are in school, it'll be easier. Try to keep going a day at a time, stay above ground, keep everyone alive. Try to hold on. And try to keep some sense of perspective. Because really, these things we complain about, these impossible choices, 90 percent of the world would see the whole thing as just so much juggling of blessings. And that's exactly what it is.