Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

  It didn’t come natural. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the kid, and I didn’t know what I was doing. The baby was terrible, and he wouldn’t stop crying. I lost all sense of myself and sense of time. Then the instincts kicked in, and now I love it. It’s awesome. I love it so much. My son is the greatest guy ever. The greatest guy ever. It’s the hugest, massivest, suckiest adjustment. Thankfully my husband is solid as a damn rock.

  LOUIS CK—COMEDIAN, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, ACTOR

  When I had my daughter, or when her mother had her in front of me, everything changed. I just fell in love with this kid. I remember she was screaming in the delivery room, really upset. She seemed particularly upset. Kids are supposed to cry when they are born, but she seemed angry to me, and upset. You know when a kid’s crying in a delivery room, everybody is smiling. “Aw, look at her cry.” But I was really upset for her. They put her on this little table, and they’re putting stuff around her.…

  Sorry.

  I’m unexpectedly emotional. It’s not a story that I tell a lot, so.…

  Marc

  It’s all right, man.

  Louis

  Let me have some water.

  Water’s good, it washes away your love for your children so you can talk without a shaking voice.

  Yeah, they put her on this little table, and they were fucking jabbing shit into her, and they’re just rough with her, and she’s screaming. It was a C-section, so her mom is being sewn up. Her mom was just taken away.

  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—COMED
IAN, WRITER, DIRECTOR, ACTOR

  I’ve never sought out my father. Absolutely not. He lives in New York. I’m sure I pass by, I don’t know where he is, but I’m sure I’ve ridden my bike past his place. My last interaction with him I was nineteen. It was on the phone.

  I’m resigned to what it’s going to be, and have been for a while. I’ve never had that, not once have I ever had that moment that I should let bygones be bygones. There’s nothing in it for me except anger and bitterness and recrimination and I don’t know why I would invite that in. He doesn’t deserve the satisfaction, and I know I’m being obstinate. There’s certainly a bit of stubbornness, but stubbornness is just something you apply to the situation.

  I don’t forgive him.

  I don’t, nor will I. I hope that I will have children someday soon, we’ve talked about it, and I hope I am an exemplary, good, better father for it because I know, I just cannot wrap my head around a father or mother who just doesn’t care about their kids. Their level of selfishness supersedes responsibility for a child. I don’t understand it, I don’t get it. It’s soft and silly to say I have a lack of respect for it. I loathe it, I hate it, I don’t like those people, and there’s no excuse.

  Unfortunately, in this world, that’s how a lot of people are.

  I just turned ten when he left. He had just moved us back to Georgia from Syracuse. We had no money, zero, nothing. He basically left to go to Phoenix, owing a lot of money. My mom had no job, three kids. We had come from Syracuse, we got kicked out of there, and he chased this job in Georgia, which didn’t pan out. I subsequently came to find out all the lies. He was not a con man. He didn’t have thought-out cons. He would misrepresent himself, lie about stuff. He was so proud. He was a bit of a pathological liar, and he was the victim in everything. It was never his fault. The world was against him, and if he was fired from a job, it wasn’t his fault.

  Again, when you’re ten, and I loved my dad, I thought he was fucking awesome, you don’t really have anywhere close to the full story, but as you grow up, you come to know more stuff. He just sort of sat us down and said, “Your mom and I are going to get separated,” he left, we didn’t see him again until my bar mitzvah, in which he took my bar mitzvah money. Asked for it and took it. I was happy to give it to him because my dad was back in Georgia, oh my God, that’s great. “Don’t tell your mother.” You got it, Dad. “I need this, then I can stay here, and we can hang out.”

  I just don’t know that level of psychotic selfishness. As I was saying before, just this idea that there’s this guy who got married, had three kids. Who knows if he ever really loved my mother? I just imagine him truly thinking, you know what, I don’t like this Being Married thing, I don’t like this lady, maybe a kid will make me feel different, so he has a kid, and then they end up having a couple more kids. He’s like, nah, it’s not for me. I’ll see you guys later. It’s a simplistic way to view it, but that’s literally the mind-set of this guy saying, “Yeah, look, I gave it a shot, guys, you can’t blame me. I thought it’d be my thing, it’s not, so I’m going out to the West Coast, you all take it easy. Definitely write. Call me.”

  In the beginning I did. He was my dad, I loved him.

  DONNELL RAWLINGS—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  My dad spent time away from home in places where it wasn’t too appropriate for me to visit.

  Marc

  What got him in there?

  Donnell

  He was a heroin dealer. When he first got out of prison, I kind of just started my career. This is a true story. Only thing I wanted him to do was to be proud of me. I was a stand-up comic. He came to one of my shows. I’m like, “Dad, first off, it’s good to see you.” I was like, “So, how’d you like the show?”

  He was like, “It was … It was all right.”

  I’m like, “It was all right?”

  Then he said, “Why you telling them lies about me?”

  I’m like, “What lie?”

  I told a joke about him selling drugs. He said, “I never sold shit two-for-fifty, nigga.” He was mad that I made a joke about him being on the block. He was pissed. That’s how he rounded up my set.

  SUE COSTELLO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  I stopped talking to my family. I told my mother, “You have to treat me with respect. I can’t talk to you.” By stepping away and doing what I did, I realized, oh my God, I don’t need them.

  Marc

  I had a therapist say to me once that you can train your parents, because after a certain point they will abide by your conditions because they want to have a relationship with you.

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN—MUSICIAN, SONGWRITER, AUTHOR

  There are irretrievable relationships where events have occurred that relationships don’t come back from. I know plenty of people who had to sign off from their families for a variety of reasons. For good, healthy reasons and move on with their lives. That can happen. But if the relationships are retrievable, and I felt like mine was, then there’s a nice payback in seeing things come closer and become a little healthier.

  You look back on your anger as part of youthful misunderstandings. Of course you had your reasons and there was bad behavior. My pop could be very cruel when he was young. It’s not that you let that slide. You live with it, it’s a part of your life. If you’re lucky, it’s fuel for the fire. I mean, people don’t end up in my circumstance who generally had these very placid, loving, very happy, fulfilled lives. It’s not how you become a rock-and-roll star. You’ve got to have some chaos, tumult, disastrous relationships, humiliation at a young age, feel disempowered, enormous amount of weakness, and suddenly things start to burn, burn, burn. When that burning starts, if you take that flame and you aim it toward the right thing—powerful weapon.

  RACHAEL HARRIS—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  My parents divorced when I was two and my dad moved away. I saw him once a year until I was in college and that’s when I started having a better relationship with him. I was like, oh, I better know this man.

  He always kept contact with us, and what was great was that when I did go to college, and I moved to New York, he got to kind of come in and be there in a way. He didn’t live in New York, he lived in Alabama at the time.

  I think because I wasn’t living at home, and because I was in college, especially when I moved to New York, I think it was easier for my dad to deal with me as an adult than it was as a child. Unfortunately, my brother and sister didn’t have that, they never got to really have that relationship with him that I did.

  He passed in 2006. I was so, so glad that I’d had that relationship with him.

  I got to know him as an imperfect person, and be okay with it. We often put our parents on a pedestal, and want them to be infallible, and I got to deal with the real him.

  LOUIS CK

  My kids were an imposition because I love them. If I didn’t care about them, there wouldn’t have been an issue. I would have been one of those dads, “I can’t really spend much time with them, but they’re there somewhere.”

  When you read about people, famous great guys from the past, and their kids were just completely and utterly ignored by them and everybody just thinks that was a by-product of how great that person was, and we all give them a pass for it.

  I had seen a lot of 60 Minutes episodes, where they talk about a guy, like Bill Parcells, or whoever. Look at how he’s so manic, and he’s so amazing. Then they talk to his wife, and she always has this kind of smile, and says, “We just know that we don’t see Bill from September 1 to February 15. You know, you make a deal with yourself that that’s okay. I love him.” Then at the end of the episode, Morley Safer says, “They’re divorced now.” I always remember that, and seeing the kids going, “Dad loves football, and not much else.”

  I always thought, “That’s really not okay. Don’t have kids if you’re going to do that.”

  PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON—WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER

  My mom and my dad had four kids, me and my three sister
s. Then my dad had a first marriage where he had five, so he had nine kids total.

  Marc

  How many do you have?

  Paul

  Four.

  Marc

  Is that just something you did because you grew up like that?

  Paul

  Probably. It’s nice to have a lot of kids running around the house. It’s like having a warm fire. Every once in a while it’s like throwing a bag of cats into a warm fire and it could be a nightmare, but it’s the best.

  JIM GAFFIGAN—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR

  I have five kids and came from a family of six kids. I think we’ve been told that it’s culturally weird to have six kids. By the way, when you think about it, if someone says, I have six cats, you think they’re crazy. But what if someone really enjoys six cats and their apartment isn’t covered with cat turds?

  Marc

  That’s a long shot.

  Jim

  And I can afford to have my kids. I make a decent living, so as long as I can afford a decent cheeseburger, I’m all right, it’s not like I need a boat.

  It’s like, So what? I’m going to be bald a year earlier?

  What I get from these kids is immeasurable and I know it sounds like a rationalization, but it’s amazing.

  BOB ODENKIRK—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, COMEDIAN

  My kids are growing up, and it’s great. It’s nice that they’re getting older, because the other option is they pass away at a young age. No, it’s great that they grow up because life gets easier I think.