The Daddy Business

On beginning life as a father

This week I resume with another piece on the role of love in American life.

The first couple years after I got married may well have been the happiest of my life. My new bride and I rented an apartment in Providence on the far side of the city from the university, in a neighborhood where the first shoots of gentrification were pushing their way up through urban soil. We had a mutt with a wonderful disposition that we took on walks in the park, went to the movies on the weekends, and got taken out to dinner regularly by my new in-laws, who lived nearby. The pressures and uncertainties of the job market were still a few years away as we worked on our dissertations. We both had good part-time jobs as copy editors at a local newspaper which provided plenty of pocket money for what was still a Spartan existence of hand-me-down furniture, mix-and-match kitchenware and cinder block bookcases (our one true extravagance was books). Heaven.

From my earliest recollection, I had always assumed, in a hazy way, that I would have children. Probably two, like my own parents. Though I understood that raising children was hard work, my unexamined assumption is that it wouldn’t really interfere with the rest of my life. For precisely that reason the notion always seemed distant—it would interfere as long as I was trying to establish myself.

My wife didn’t see it quite that way. Besides the usual considerations of the biological clock that all would-be mothers had to consider, she faced particular uncertainties involving her reproductive system. As a child, she had the ironic good fortune of being thrown from a horse, which led to an X-ray that revealed a massive growth in her abdomen. It turned out to be that she was carrying the remaining fragments of a non-viable twin sibling (the size of a deflated football, with hair and teeth). The mass was removed, saving her life, but the necessary operations resulted in tissue scarring that would make bearing children questionable.  I don’t remember this being a major consideration on my part in my decision to marry her (I reckoned we’d pursue children another way, if at all), but she understandably wanted to know where she stood. To that end, she endured another round of surgery, whereupon she was told that the only way she could bear a child was through the still relatively new, and highly uncertain, technology of in vitro fertilization. For her, the clock was suddenly ticking—loudly. And I was confronted with the press of her powerful urges, which I could not fully understand or moderate. This person, with whom I had cast my fate, wanted to be a mother, and was willing to do anything in her power to make it happen.

In what is surely a familiar scenario, my foot-dragging became the first serious test of our marriage. There were multiple sources of unease. One was my Roman Catholicism, however wayward, which made me uneasy about wading into the waters of assisted reproduction. Even more nausea-inducing was sinking into the maw of the U.S. healthcare system for a procedure not covered by our medical insurance. I found the prospect of entering a long tunnel of uncertain outcomes and staggering bills to be terrifying, even though my in-laws came through with significant help. Then there were the logistical complications—getting to appointments, taking tests, procuring medications, and the like. My wife, for her part, faced the far more frightening prospect of hormone injections (I became pretty adept at wielding a syringe), among other discomforts. So it was that we went forward. And at the end of it, she got pregnant. (No, she informed me repeatedly: we got pregnant.)  I found it a little odd that this strange alternative process we’d undergone had landed us into a typical childbirth pipeline: no one cared how it happened; from this point on it was business as usual as far as everybody inside and outside the medical establishment was concerned.

So now my focus turned toward the fact that I was a typical father-to-be, whatever the hell that meant. Even if I wasn’t a hopelessly cerebral fellow anyway, it was hard to think of a baby as much more than an abstraction, occasional visible kick from the belly notwithstanding. But when that boy emerged from my wife’s womb on one early August morning, I was utterly overwhelmed. She was afraid I was going to faint from squeamishness. But it was merely my coming face to face with the meaning of life.

I dealt with fatherhood pretty much the same way I dealt with every other major undertaking I’ve made in my life: as a job. That may sound clinical, and I suppose that in at least some ways it was, but for me, the work of everyday life has generally been a source of purpose, comfort, and emotional stability. There was furniture to buy, rooms to set up, diapers to change. Car seats, trips to the doctor, visiting relatives. Bathing, feeding, middle-of-the-night comforting. I remember it as fairly hectic, sometimes grinding, but punctuated by moments of pure joy. And then what I regarded as a better stretch of the road got underway: backyard football games, overnight trips to historical sites, conversations about what was going on in those Disney movies (which often involved saying factually incorrect or wrong-headed things so that my son would be empowered to set the record straight and reason with his clueless father).

As far as I was concerned, this was the happy ending of a dicey episode in biological engineering. We had agreed, as a compromise condition of my religious scruples, to implant any unused frozen embryos from our successful IVF attempt to give them a chance to take root as viable lives soon after our son was born. It was a less expensive and invasive procedure, and much less likely to work. It did not. I hoped that would be the end of the story (and if, at the end of the story, the Good Lord decided to send me to Hell, I would go believing that I had done the best I could on behalf of others at least as much as myself.)

But it was not the end of the story: my wife wanted a second child. This proposition, even more so than the decision to have our first, was the real crossroads of my life. Rationally or not, I felt—viscerally—that we were tempting fate by going to the well a second time. Besides my personal unease, the cost, and the added challenges of undertaking this enterprise when we already had a child, I was afraid of the medical complications that might occur, especially since my wife was now in her late thirties. But I also understood—a little more quickly this time—that arguing the point would be worse than futile. I had veto power in this decision, could exercise it, and my wife made clear she would abide it. I believed her. But I also believed that this woman could never be truly happy if we didn’t jump off what I regarded as a cliff.

And it was here that I finally and fully came to understand that my own happiness depended on the happiness of someone else. That this woman who had given me so much needed to take this leap in the hopes of fulfilling what had become her imagined destiny, and that my destiny was now intertwined with hers. I still nursed my own ambitions, and it was possible to imagine achieving them without her by my side. But I now saw—I now knew in my gut—that any honors I attained would be ashes in my mouth if I did not man up at this moment. We jumped.

I am now a father of four grown children.

Next: The child insurance policy.