by Ed Damon
I am a member of the gen-x-politically correct, pop-psyche, child rearing, book reading, sensitive male-generation, which meant that seven years ago I was the only one of my friends about to have a baby.
My generations belief being that it’s far wiser to put off children while you pursue at least a decade of drunken one night stands and that elusive career that will provide with enough money to make raising children oh so easy.
As an early-twenties father to be, my father enjoyed a circle of friends that could share in the camaraderie of their paternal futures. I had become something more like a museum exhibit than a freak show, but no less curious, to my friends that went out to the bars while I engaged in the pointless preparation rituals of a first time father (like polishing the floors in the babies room because infants are notoriously picky about the shine of floor surfaces).
My membership in the “enlightened male” generation did, however, prepare me with a neatly packaged response to the two questions I would have to answer during the next nine months.
Yes, there were only two questions.
My wife-the few times she wasn’t working, sleeping, or eating-would have to answer more questions than the head coach during Super bowl week.
How are feeling? Have you felt it move? Are you going back to work? Will you get drugs or natural child birth?
She had real input, and was probed at every possible opportunity for some locker room insider information. I was relegated to the role of an over obsessed spectator, the fat guy with the team colors painted on my belly.
There was some local interest in the fact that I generally existed, but what I actually said was irrelevant. I had to accept my wife’s gratitude, that was every bit as generous and fictitious as when the quarterback refers to the fans as the twelfth player, with that same unashamed fat guy behind a tailgate barbecue smile that gets thrown into the pre-game collage just before commercial.
If I was even allowed to open my mouth for anything other than the new father equivalent of waving the big #1 finger, it was to answer the same two questions.
The first question was, “do you know what you’re having?”
Of course, we’re going to have a tiny human. They’re easy and fun to make. Whether it was going to be a boy or a girl, however, I did not know. There’s a whole list of reasons I could have said for why we didn’t find out, but the truth is I like surprises.
I was that kid that never tried to find my Christmas presents. Even if I knew where they were hidden, I would close my eyes as I walked past them. My wife’s growing belly was the greatest, most mysteriously wrapped present of my entire life, not that I got to say anything like that.
Remember, I’m the fat guy behind the barbecue. I can’t be allowed to start making unguided comments. I’d just say no, and they’d move on to question two, “What do you want?”
My immediate response was involuntary and every bit as programmed as the talking Barbie that said “math is hard” when you pulled her string. “I don’t care,” I’d say. Then the obligatory, “as long as it’s healthy.” I repeated it so many times and with such conviction, that I didn’t even doubt the validity of what I was saying.
After all, what sort of backwards Neanderthal would care about anything other than the health of the baby-to-be? It wasn’t as if I needed to hand down the farm and carry on the family line. There was no reason for me to care at all.
Why, then, after an hour of labor (that’s right, one hour. My team mopped up on game day), as the doctor pulled a bundle of blood and mucus from between her legs, was I searching for signs of a penis like a SETI researcher scanning the stars for alien life?
My search was about as productive too. Somewhere beneath the purplish-white snot and blood in the doctor’s hands was a little girl. I was no more disappointed than when I opened a Christmas present I thought was a remote control car and found a Nintendo instead. She was perfect, purple and her nose was squished to one side, but perfect.
Still, there was that moment that I couldn’t deny. I was searching. I was hoping for a boy. Despite my neo-feminist domesticated-male obedience training, I was no better than a back wood hick. No matter how many times I repeated “as long as it’s healthy”, I still had visions of tossing the football and harassing his teenage friends about their escapades in search of teenage girls. I sure as hell didn’t want to be on the other end of those escapades.
Some part of me wanted a boy.
It was five years later, when my wife was pregnant with our first planned child, that I began to think about how infinitely stupid it is to deny. Do we really think that by saying we want a boy; we are somehow saying we don’t care if it’s healthy?
Do our dreams of father son hi-jinks make our daughters any less beautiful as they disarm us with a smile?
Of course not, but I have to admit the truth. Before my daughter was my daughter, when she was just a mysteriously wrapped package, I thought of her as a little boy inside there.
So as I fielded the same questions (now with a little more room to speak offered from other friends with children), I quickly said that I want a boy. I said it with pride, damn well I wanted a boy.
As the mid-wife pulled another ball of snot and blood from between my wife’s legs, I didn’t search for a penis this time. There was nothing to hide. I didn’t have to prove my new age liberalism.
“She’s a girl,” the mid-wife said.
Girls a pretty good too, I thought.
So I didn’t get what I wanted.
Hell, I never wanted to be a father at all.
Some of the best things in life, I guess, are the things we didn’t want.
