Before I get to the point, allow me a brief digression. Some twenty years ago, my brother and I were sitting outside on the steps, casually discussing when was in store for our future. Ours were not the common dreams of poor kids in the throes of everyday daydreams. Our future did not involve football glory or fame borne of film or television. Nope, we chose more… earthbound dreams.
You see, at the time my brother was having troubles with the opposite sex, dating-wise, and I was having troubles getting members of the opposite sex to realize that I was not – in fact – a tree, but someone with some measure of relationship potential.
How did that impact our dreams?
My brother and I both confessed that we saw ourselves as single fathers of adopted children, living together somewhere on the eastern coast trying to raise our daughters well. My brother imagined himself becoming a law enforcement officer, and I imagined myself in some area of the arts. (Don’t forget – neither one of us saw any future in which we were married.)
Well, twenty years later, and our juvenile predictions have come to some measure of fact! Well… With one major exception.
My brother is a little more impetuous than I, but our collegiate career brought forth many changes for us. For one, women actually started to pay attention to me… For good reasons. For another, my brother altered his ideals slightly. Suddenly, our lives were taking shape and our ideas from the past were becoming the realities of the present.
My brother decided upon a different career of service: teaching. If you allow for a few hiccups in my professional career, while I currently dally in retail, I am selling product related to the arts.
More importantly, however, after several attempts, we both struck gold. My brother married a fine woman, also a teacher, and I found someone who complements me so well I often have to pinch myself.
But even more so than finding our own wonderful life partners is when happened to that whole parenting thing.
While my brother and I were the product of the stereotypical broken home with single parent, and we both imagined ourselves ending up as such, it didn’t quite work out as we had planned. My brother is now the very proud father of some 300 children… No, no, no… After a mild twist of irony, my brother and his wife have 8 amazing children. That twist of irony? Of the 8, only two are girls, and they were adopted a few short years ago. So, with the exception of being married, my brother’s prophecy came true for the most part.
My prophecy of self takes a little more stretching to accept as truth. Sure, I work in the arts… Peripherally. Yes, I live on the eastern coast. I also shunned perceived fate and married. And then, real fate intervened.
Well, actually it was my wife’s biological clock, but that’s neither here nor there.
(Okay – so that was a longer digression than I had anticipated.)
As I’ve already written here, my wife and I have been together for quite a while, and married for ten years. About five years ago, the discussion of parenthood came up in earnest. We’d broached the topic briefly when my wife’s father was battling cancer. Understandably, my wife wanted her father to be able to hold his grandchild before he died, but as it just couldn’t happen, we shelved the notion of having a child.
When the issue came up again, it was more about my wife’s internal clock and whether or not we even wanted one or more children. I also had to deal with my own past, and wrestle with notions of becoming like my own father. (My father was – as I have described – the only physically present absentee father I have known. He had mentally given up on me and my mom, he just hadn’t made that move physically.) Once those hurdles were crossed and we decided that we would at least try to have a child, and live with the results regardless, our foray into the world of parenting had begun.
I made the mistake of joking that no mater the outcome, we would at least have fun trying to have a child.
Karma, in its best Rod Serling suit, got me back. My wife got pregnant with the first try.
Momentarily stunned, when I found out, all I could say at the time was “well at least something of mine can swim!”
The pregnancy itself was smooth for the most part, and when we went for that first ultrasound, again I opened my mouth. The doctor left on the heart monitor so we could listen to our baby’s heart, and I blurted out “that’s gotta be man-made,” a line from our favorite movie. When it was revealed that our child was a girl, I offered a potential name, suggesting that we name our child after my wife’s father, who had died some time before.
Well, then the adventure was on.
The rest of the pregnancy went well, but stress from my employment situation, combined with an error at the hospital, left the recovery difficult, and leaving us without the option of more children.
(A side note to any men out there that have not yet experienced fatherhood: if your child is to be born via c-section, do not let them sit you in the OR facing the doctor! I didn’t eat spaghetti and meat sauce for a year. Consider yourself warned…)
There were difficulties early on, with our daughter, some from the delivery, some from the fact that she may have needed to cook for a few more days.
Either way, we were blessed with a beautiful little girl, who took almost no time to show which parent she would potentially take after.
While she is now in every way my wife’s own “mini me,” early on she took more to me, primarily in her facial quirks, but also in her love for biscuits and fried chicken. After all, at least half of her DNA was rooted in the deep south.
As she has grown, our daughter has evolved into a miniature copy of my wife, save her giant feet, prompting the jokes that my DNA couldn’t get far off the ground, or that my wife’s German heritage stomped all over my Irish roots.
What has been so amazing in this new life is watching a totally blank slate evolve into a person all her own. We can see her process things that I or my wife will do, and sometime later they come back at us, with that little tinge of her own limited life experience coloring the phrase or event ever so slightly.
This is definitely something I would have missed (whether or not I was married) had I adopted a child. (It should be noted that both my brother and I had decided upon adopting older children, as they are often the most neglected in the foster and adoption process. And with my brother adopting two and my having one – despite the circuitous route – we both got our little girls.)
Sure, it’s been frustrating trying to help raise this child. She is far more attuned to my wife than myself, both by just the amount of time they spend together and by biology. She is also a child, and children do frustrating things because they are always learning, but then parenting is also a learning process, so it tends to all work out in the end.
It’s interesting to interact with our friends that have young children that are a little older than our daughter, and watch their faces as we talk about something the wee one has done, and watching a look of bemused recognition. Apparently it’s perfectly fine to give helpful advice to friends about parenthood, but it’s also fun to watch your friends go through those growing pains too. That’s fine, though… Like I said it’s a learning process for us all.
Four would appear to be a particularly good year for a kid. My daughter is learning to appreciate music other than the Backyardigans or Barney, and is willing to watch the occasional “mommy or daddy” program, giving us a break from Spongebob or Caillou.
She also loves to help… Well almost. She hates picking up her own toys and stuff, but is more than willing to help collect the trash or help in the kitchen.
She’s also developing her picky eating habits, so we’re counteracting that with not only the usual desert bribe, but also by getting her involved in menu planning and assembling dishes.
In fact, part of Thanksgiving dinner this year will include dishes she helped make with mommy, as well as her own “crazy glazy carrots.”
Things have not been easy these past few years, but it’s been an amazing ride.
And I guess that’s what I’m most thankful for: the coming unknown.
Whereas your relationship with your own parents is pretty much predetermined, one’s spouse and child are relations that are chosen. My wife and I chose to have a child and bear the responsibility for that life.
And I’m glad we did. I still have concerns; still have fears.
But this little goofball makes it all the worth while when she comes racing to me when I get home from work to give me a big hug. Or when she climbs up to give me a goodnight hug. Or when she discovers a bad pun for the first time, and howls with laughter.
Being a parent is a real risk, but despite my wish that we had been able to try a few more times before actually getting pregnant, it’s a risk I am very thankful we took.
(I’m also admittedly thankful that we’re not using my daughter’s recipe for Thanksgiving Turkey… But more on that later.)
Happy Thanksgiving to all…
(The Squirmy one, at a recent doctor’s visit, apparently helping to diagnose her cow’s lactose intollerance.)
