Anderson Cooper surprised and delighted many when he revealed that he had welcomed his son, Wyatt, into his life earlier this summer. After a flurry of articles about becoming a dad and raising his son with his ex-boyfriend, Anderson and Wyatt have since retreated to quieter days. Anderson recently opened up to WSJ Magazine about how becoming a dad has changed his life, and it sounds like the changes are resoundingly positive.
He begins by noting that even though he's 53, he still had to wrestle with a gnawing feeling that he was waiting for his life to begin … until Wyatt came into it.
"It's changed everything. I've often in my life felt like I was waiting for my actual life to begin — it's obviously ridiculous because I'm 53 years old — but … I've been very focused on getting to some place, getting a story. Because I'm focused on him, it gives an order to everything."
Some of those changes are the type of thing that just about every new parent has to adjust to, like a brand-new sleep schedule for … yourself:
"I used to be a late riser because I work nights. But since I had a son, I pretty much wake up at seven. I don't use an alarm anymore because I guess I'm just naturally getting up. My whole motivation in the morning is to be there when my son wakes up because it is the greatest moment of my day."
He continues, "He sleeps in this sleep sack, which I didn't know was a thing, and he makes all these great sounds and he stretches and when he finally wakes up and sees you and smiles. It's incredible. I live in a 110-year-old firehouse in New York and I'm on the third floor and he's on the fourth floor. So I go up and I wait around for him to make sounds and then go into his room to be there."
He's also all about coffee these days!
"For about six months, I've been fasting, so I don't eat breakfast. I've become addicted to coffee, I'm not sure if that’s a good thing. I allow myself one to two coffees a day: iced coffee, black and nothing else in it because that's not breaking the fast. As soon as I've seen my son wake up and I feed him, I usually wait until he goes back to sleep. He wakes up around 8:15 and by 10 he's ready for another little nap. As soon as he goes down, I run and get an iced coffee and I cannot tell you the degree to which I look forward to that."
He also fully believes that coffee is an addictive substance … which is kind of hard to deny:
"I never really drank coffee until my son. It's amazing. I now understand coffee, although I do think it's basically just a narcotic. And we've all just accepted that, oh yeah, coffee's not a drug, it's just a drink. No, it's not, it's a drug. But everyone seems to think it's OK, it's legal. Anyway. I have a Dunkin' Donuts coffee or [one from] the cafe, the little bar next door has opened up a cafe during the pandemic so I try to support them and go next door."
In addition to parenting baby Wyatt, Anderson has also been spending this time going through his late mother's belongings. Gloria Vanderbilt died in 2019 following a battle with stomach cancer. She and Anderson were very close, and he's spoken often about how her death changed his life.
He says he's been going through her belongings for about 15 years, and it never stops being fascinating:
"At a certain point, once I had a house of my own and a place I could store stuff, I started moving stuff out of the unit, so I've been going through stuff in boxes for fifteen years. It's finally now down to two large rooms of stuff. It's personal papers of hers, journals and artwork, her paintings — there's hundreds of paintings and drawings. It's fascinating because you never know what you're going to get. You open one box and it's a chandelier, you open another box and it's Rice Krispies from 1953, then you open another box and it's letters from Gordon Parks or Roald Dahl, just extraordinary history."
Anderson has a bunch of personal habits that are pretty intriguing. He's on a social media diet and instead likes to read his physical newspaper while his son naps in the morning:
"I actually still like to read the actual physical newspaper, which I know is a completely foreign concept to a lot of my friends. I really enjoy getting the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and I find it very calming after I have my coffee and my son is napping to sit and read the paper. It's just a habit I've had since I was a little kid."
It sounds like he is especially happy to be raising his son in New York, especially since the city is so important to him:
"I really wanted to stay in New York. I grew up here, I've been to a lot of places where societies have [been] disintegrated and torn apart and I'm a big believer in staying put and not getting out. It's interesting how the city is reforming itself in ways, with more people biking, the sidewalk cafes being able to open up. I'm hopeful about the city. I have no doubt it's going to survive in an interesting form going forward."
It sounds like Anderson has moved into a particularly grounded, lovely phase of his life. He recalls a quote that his mother loved and credits it with inspiring him:
"My mom had a quote that she liked a lot and she actually wrote it on her fireplace. It's attributed to Plato, but it's not Plato, it's a Scottish writer, Ian MacLaren: 'Be kind, because everybody you meet is fighting a great battle.' It's a really important thing to remember."
As someone who has survived a good deal of trauma, it's probably a quote that really resonates with Anderson:
"Some people show their scars but not everybody does. And everybody has been through something and is struggling with something. And it's very easy not to be kind, it's very easy to treat people as 'other than.' It's an important thing to keep in mind, that when you start to get self-righteous and want to shout at somebody, maybe this person's fighting a great battle that we don't know about."
