Reading essayist Joseph Epstein’s autobiography recently, this sentence made me smile:

As to what phrase my children might have heard most frequently from me when they were growing up, my guess is that it might be, “I’ll be there as soon as I finish this paragraph.”

I had the good fortune of being Epstein’s student. It was in his class that I first produced an assemblage of paragraphs that deserved to be called an essay. Now I know that when he was teaching me, he was also raising four sons as a single parent … and penning beautiful essays at the same time.

Like Epstein, I had the opportunity to freelance while raising our children. I didn’t become an editor in an office again until the youngest was in third grade. As a result the girls grew up with a mother who was available for the big things (cuts and bruises of body or spirit) but who made them wait for the little ones (a snack, a story, a trip to the pool on a hot summer day).

Most mothers and fathers now don’t have this opportunity. For me it was made possible by a burgeoning magazine market and a willing and good-natured partner.

I’m forever grateful that I had the opportunity to conduct interviews while nursing an infant, to wrestle words on the page while listening to giggles and shrieks from the next room, and the opportunity to say, over and over again: “I’ll be there as soon as I finish this paragraph.”