Being a Hopeful Father and Backup Plans

I am not a traditional male in his thirties by any stretch of the imagination. Oh, sure, I have many friends who have had their children ten years ago and my aging peers watch me poke ruefully at the top of my skull to find the hairs that are migrating away like a crop circle, but up to this point in my life, I thought I'd escaped the whole concept of having a kid.

I could barely keep a cat, much less a girlfriend. I had an elderly Siamese cat for five years and spent more time obsessing about him eating habenero peppers than I did about what the girl of the month was going to think about me ditching her to go out and have drinks with her best friend's sister. (Mostly because it did happen more than once. Not with the same girl.) Some people go through their high school and teen years and then grow responsibility like a goiter. I kept trying to make sure I was on the Responsibility Chemotherapy plan, which also meant a steady diet of cigarettes, medium-shelf alcohol, wine held in racks on the wall and a half-assed attempt to make food that wouldn't kill me and a date.

I don't know how many men I know kept a supply of condoms, lube and at least four morning after pills in their bedside table. After one memorable evening with a friend that also resulted in a “uh, where did THAT go, exactly?” the Plan B made its appearance. The expression of a pharmacist when a tall guy with a scruffy beard rolls up to his counter and says, “Yeah, so I need a six-pack of the morning after pill,” without thinking about the way the words will tumble out –  that's probably something I could have used Google Glass for once upon a time. (I did apply for the Beta, but the reality is Google Glass is something I'd be using now, and back then, I probably would have happily worn it at all times. I'd also probably be the first one to ask for waterproofing, and I'm almost certain at least one of those testers has uploaded homemade porn to their sites with it so far. If they haven't, there's something wrong with the world.)

At any rate the pharmacist was kind enough to fill the request, though, in retrospect, he was eyeballing the at-home STD kits and using the hand sanitizer a little too much while he rang me up. I guess visions of some hedonistic orgy where six ovulating women somehow simultaneously became impregnated were dancing across his cortex, and while afterwards the friend and I laughed, drank a ton of water and had dinner on the balcony of my thoroughly urbanized and crappy 1960s–style apartment, I still had those Plan B pills.

Then I met The Girl, and she was…irritating. But funny, and smart, and somehow centered on me. I don't know what made me think “this is the one” but it was always a question of “this girl is the one I can't think about not seeing on a daily basis”. She also didn't need the Plan B, since she'd been on the knock-sperm-dead-in-the-head pill for a good ten years previously, faithfully taking one a day. Somehow knowing that if I routinely drank enough and went off the rails in the bedroom enough to lose a condom inside someone while having wild banshee screeching sex I should probably have backup plans, just in the event said person wasn't on some form of birth control other than the calendar method.

And she still knocked me back. In those days I didn't expect to really keep seeing someone for longer than a couple of months, and usually concurrent with someone else. But something about The Girl made me keep going back to her place. Granted, we were both in the single mode where bad decisions that are made when drunk and horny are often considered good decisions. To this day I can remember exactly the first time I saw her naked.

Two months ago she told me she doesn't remember much of the night and that she more or less blacked out. I am absolutely positive this is not much of the truth –  she was capable of speech, she was capable of conversation, and she was capable of introducing me to the Abusive, Deranged, Evil Spawn of Satan that was her elderly, cranky-ass cat. So either she's embarrassed that the first night we had sex she was out her gourd and made what most of her female friends would call a bad decision, or she truly doesn't remember.

I do remember asking, though, “Are you on the pill?” Memories of my tall, leggy, blonde friend having a moment of “wait, WHAT?” while performing a gorgeous, completely nude, acrobatic on-point ballet leap from the bed aren't supposed to dance though your head at such times but I'd been a nervous wreck six months beforehand and making sure certain constraints were in place…well, that's the key to a good relationship. Good company, similar backgrounds and values, and fantastic sex.

You move in together. You get married. You fight. You make up. You take showers together. You try to revise your schedules. You look forward to seeing them when you get home. You bump asses in the tiny, tiny kitchen and dream of getting a bigger place. You get the bigger place. Life goes on.

Fast forward through the next three years, and suddenly the problems that show up when you realize you have a finite window of fertility make you WISH for the magic of a lost condom. Because it's time, says the genetic clock. Time to make a kid or call it a day, because you didn't do it when you were in your twenties or your early thirties. A pregnant belly fifteen years ago made a man run for the hills; now he catches, simultaneously, almost all his formerly thick, rich hair falling out at the crown and finding the movements of pregnant women at the gym both graceful and sensuous. That the women are probably ten years younger than him doesn't hit home until he actually hears one of them talking about growing up during the 90s.

Shit, says the brain. What? says the penis. We talked about this. You were EXPLICIT about this. And now you're all trying to hurry up because your master plan to execute bachelorhood for life got thrown to the winds once you met someone you didn't want to hurl out the window via James Bond ejector bed after three months? Suck it up, I'm on a break. You remember those Viagra commercials? Yeah. They WERE funny, weren't they? Now you want to have a kid. Suck it, hot tub boy. We're on strike tonight.

Now we're looking at the clock together and wondering how it's all going to pan out. It means egg fertilization has to occur on a clock, with apps on our phones to sync up and check everything. It means the purchasing of tests in the form of sticks.

Sometimes it also means wondering if the days when you could just have a night (or morning) in or heading home from a party early to “get an early start tomorrow” are gone, because now you are both on a timeframe. I never understood how sex could be like loading the dishwasher, and how all the things you used to do together are now considered advantageous because it helps do X, Y, and Z.

Half the time I keep thinking, “I thought we just did that because it was a lot of fun. Now it's to make sure optimal fertilization happens? The fuck is wrong with people?”

And I have to realize that it's not what's wrong with people; it's that for so long I fought against being a parent by any means necessary that now the concept presents itself in a whole new light. I  –want–  to be a father. I'd love to have kids with my wife, and raise that child or children in our family. But the freedom-loving sex maniac that would have normally just laughed at a romp in the garage at 2AM has been replaced by someone who is as nervous and scheduled as someone who makes absolutely sure the right month is set so the tomatoes are ripe in the garden at the right time of year.

That The Girl's college friends are now having babies and doing their “firsts” might be pushing at her; that a woman in her late thirties is in the “okay, now or never” timeframe might also be another, and the fact that we simply still are figuring out how not to be fat and lazy on the couch together is yet one more.

But I still hope I'll be a father. I hope that I can be a father, and I hope that if this whole biological thing works out for us, that I'll be able to teach my son or daughter about having dreams and hope for the future –  for me, for my wife, and my kid.

Because as someone who finds himself in the odd position of now hoping with all his soul that the exact OPPOSITE of what he was praying to the contraception gods to grant him (namely, zero growth in the target zones) for twenty years will occur knows, sometimes all you really can do is cross your fingers, have some sex, and hope for the best.