For the longest time, I felt barely, loosely connected to any community I lived in. There are plenty of reasons for this, both personal and professional, but the truth is that I was an outsider – an outsider on purpose. A lot of what constitutes community life – family, church, tradition, neighborhoods – was simply not a large part of my life. This began to change when my wife and I had a child, in all the radical ways that parenthood changes you. I tend to think of it, not entirely jokingly, as the moment I joined the human family – the moment I began to recognize that my outsiderism, my journalistic disdain for the positive and joyful aspects of human connection, was a form of ignorance/Shawn Vestal, SR. More here.

Question: How did having your children change you?