I was terrified of becoming a father because I did not know whether I could find the time, or the love, to spare. All my extra time went to my writing, which was my act of creativity. I expected that a child would be an enormous consumer of both time and love. What I did not expect was that a child, my son, would do more than demand; he would teach me — unintentionally, by his existence — how to love and how to give of my time, the one thing I did not want to share.

I not only played a role in creating a child, I also discovered that fatherhood recreated me by forcing me to recognize that the creation of a child did not stop at birth. Every moment with my son is a part of this act of creation, and of creativity.

All the time that my father could not spend with me, I spend with my son. Perhaps it was predictable, being the son of a writer, that he became a strong reader. Far less predictable was that we would become a father-son duo.

When he was 5, I took him to a writers’ residency, where he met Bao Phi and Thi Bui, the author and the illustrator of a children’s book that he loved, “A Different Pond.” Inspired, he drew and narrated a comic book of his own (I wrote down his words). I posted it on Facebook and an editor at McSweeney’s asked if the company could publish it. Hoping to recover some of the costs I had incurred from my very expensive son, I said yes.

More work needed to be done. I wrote additional words, while Thi enlisted her 12-year-old son, Hien, to draw new pictures. She colored his work, and this year, Ellison’s book was published as “Chicken of the Sea.” The story is all his, the misadventures of bored chickens who run away from the farm to become pirates.

My adult mind could never have come up with this story. I think about adult things like war and refugees and modernism, not about dog knights and hidden treasures of gold. But once upon a time, when I was 7 or 8, I too, dreaming of escape, had written and drawn a book called “Lester the Cat,” about an urban cat suffering from ennui who ran off to the countryside and found love. The local library, in San Jose, Calif., gave me a prize, and I started to think of myself as a writer. My school librarian took me to the award ceremony. My parents were too busy at work. I never showed them the book. What was the point?

Now the point, as I study my new daughter, pink and asleep, her foot the size of my thumb, is that the relationship of parent and child is wrapped up in love, time and creativity. Money and the social resources to realize the potential of both children and parents are also part of the relationship. Though they hardly guarantee love, time and creativity, they at least make those things easier to share, for those who want to.