DEAR PRUDENCE
Dear Prudence: I’ve felt ambiguous about having children for a long time. My husband has always wanted children. He has health concerns that will make parenting more difficult the older he gets and wants to have kids young enough so that our parents can have active roles in their lives. I am not against having kids— I’ve just never been excited about it. I am (perhaps overly) aware of how exhausting, expensive, and lifechanging a child can be. My husband thinks that I let the negatives eclipse the positives (which is probably true). A couple years ago, he suggested we start trying. When I said I wasn’t sure when I’d be ready, he gave me time to think (as our only other option was divorce, which neither of us wanted). Since then, we’ve had many conversations, and I started feeling more open to the idea until I was comfortable enough to go off birth control recently.
I know having a baby is very trying for couples. I worried I might resent my husband for encouraging me down this path, and he would resent me in return. When we’re having sex regularly, we are extremely close, but after a few days without it, my husband starts to get a little distant. It gets worse the longer we go without sex because he just doesn’t feel as close to me. My sex drive is very low naturally, so I read dirty novels to keep my interest up (which works great). Unfortunately, when the reading stops, so does my interest in sex. I worry that the stress of a new baby plus the lack of time and energy to keep my sex drive up could destroy our relationship. But if we don’t have kids, I’d be ending an otherwise happy marriage. My husband insists he knows that many aspects of our life will be different with young kids, but I know that not having sex for weeks at a time is not something he will handle well. I’ve started looking forward to many aspects of being a parent, but I still get doubts sometimes. Is that to be expected? Am I just overthinking this whole thing?
—Overly Anxious
I’m sure it’s possible to overthink the prospect of becoming a parent, but your concerns are serious, persistent, and well-founded, and I’m glad to hear that you’ve been giving yourself a lot of time to sort through them. I can’t help but notice that the strongest positive language you have at the prospect of becoming a parent is “comfortable” and “open to the idea.” I don’t want to read too much into your husband’s irritability after a few days without sex and interpret that as a general inability to compromise, but it does raise questions for me about his ability to put his children’s needs before his own.
Does anybody write kids-with-strange-powers better than Stephen King? And, is there anyone on the scene who has more insider knowledge of the publishing industry? “Later,” King’s third Hard Case Crime installment, threads both of these into a single short novel that packs a punch.
Jamie is a kid who can see dead people, and his single mom is a literary agent willing to do whatever she has to in order to keep bread on the table, never mind the literary ethics. Before you get nervous that this is that same “The Sixth Sense” dynamic we all know and sort of love, sort of dread, Jamie, our narrator, is well aware of M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 film. More importantly, King seems aware that “The Sixth Sense” is basically a superhero origin story: A kid figures out his powers, looks around, and then tries to make the world a better place.
This is not how “Later” plays out.
As Jamie reminds us throughout, “this is a horror story,” and horror stories aren’t so much about making the world a better place as they’re about trying to get out alive, with as many shreds of your soul as you can steal back from the darkness. As Jamie quickly finds out, convincing those around him that he can see dead people is an invitation for them to make use of that ability — there’s a mad bomber menacing the city, there’s a lost manuscript, there’s fortunes only the dead know about — and this is where King has always excelled. His premises and situations extend themselves in your head just when you hear them sketched out, don’t they?
This is King’s special power. We’re already participants just from hearing the setup.
King’s writing in “Later” is as clean, direct and evocative as it’s ever been. The short, to-the-point chapters make for quick reading.