Undesired Fatherhood & The Volte-Face

Yesterday, after my morning super fatherhood ritual, which involves waking, dressing, and making breakfast for my kids, I hopped on Twitter. The first thing I saw in my stream — a phrase I can never say without visions of urination — was this tweet from my good friend @chicagosean;

I had to laugh — out loud in fact — because it took me back to a time when I was afraid, nay, fucking terrified, of being a father. Like South Central, fatherhood was a hood I wanted no part of.

I came to the daddy game late in life. The average age for a first-time father in the US is 29.3 years old. I was 38.

I was so unready, so unwilling, so in denial about being a father that when my wife informed me that her water had broken, I replied, “Are you sure?”

“Are your sure?” is a response that is dicey at best and incalculably dangerous at worst to lob back at any inquiry from you wife or girlfriend, even in the best of times. But when you say it to your bloated, water retaining, nine-month pregnant, I-just-want-to-get-this-thing-out-of-me wife, hit the shelter boy cause she’s going nuclear.

Even in the hospital room I busied myself with anything, ANYTHING, that took my attention away from my impending fatherhood. You know what I remember about my first child’s birth? Trying to get a cell signal on my crappy flip phone so I could salvage a position I was underwater in on Apple Inc.

“Hold on honey, I’m about to get filled on this!”

I wasn’t ready to be a father. But guess what? I wasn’t ready to get married. Or sell my company. Or watch my father die. Or any number of other major and/or minor life events. Who is?

Fatherhood is not the only thing you’ll question

There is no amount of preparation you can do to be ready for most of what life throws at you. It’s perpetually the summer of your 9th birthday. You are on the high dive, trying to figure out how you got there and if there is any way on God’s green Earth you can get down without looking like a pussy. But you can’t. So eventually you just do it. You jump. And you survive.

It should get easier, but it doesn’t. So when I am facing another of life’s unsure challenges, I do something I like to call “historical projection.”

I pull something out of my history that I never thought I could do/survive/accomplish/get through, and then project into the future and remember that I did. Like fatherhood. It’s a bit of cognitive dissonance, but it works for me.

I’ve got two kids now. They seem well-adjusted. I seem to be a good dad. And despite all my trepidation, I think I have a handle on it.

Editors note: Check back with me in the teenage years to see if I am eating either my words or a bullet.