Fatherhood: The boat I missed
Among all you Mothers and Fathers, I am certainly an unlikely voice in regards to the joys and challenges of parenting.
Because I hail from a foreign tribe:
Those who have chosen not to have children.
While I’m not a father, I am an uncle to nine nieces and nephews, aged 6 to 44. I cherish each of them on their own terms and, along with their parents, celebrate the adults they have, or soon will, become.
But I still grapple with my decision not to have my own children.
For many years, it was an easy call, this childless life. Now, as I near retirement, what for many is a time of finally reaping the rewards for sacrificing all those years for your kids, I have little to celebrate.
But, why?
I come from a family of seven children and my free-spirited mother always joked that all she remembered about her 20s was being pregnant. I'm not really sure she even wanted to become a parent, but my father certainly did.
Maybe, as I got older, I filed away her “What-if?” moments about that other life my mother missed by having so many kids.
Or perhaps I was jaded by the front-row seat to my father’s struggles to feed and clothe us all on his humble salary.
Either way, there would be no kids for me.
But it almost happened, twice, a fact that at times makes me hang my head - not exactly in shame, but perhaps with a tinge of regret.
I got a girl pregnant when we were both just 17; but the first I knew of it was when her sister told me that she’d already had the abortion. We were both just kids ourselves, after all, I rationalized.
A year later, we went our separate ways.
As I pursued a journalism career, I harbored certain attitudes about having a family which, now that I look back, make me cringe:
I was getting older, but I wasn't growing up.
Having a child, I always said, was like having one foot in the grave — your life ends as theirs begins. I was that typical Peter Pan who refused to grow up. In my early 30s, I even scotch-taped over my desk at work the front cover of Texas Monthly magazine showing a hipster in a white T-shirt, its sleeves rolled up.
“Too Cool to be Married,” the headline read.
At parties, I mocked couples who used the royal “we” when describing their weekend plans, insisting that no one should ever surrender the “I."
My soulless sermon.
The wives and girlfriends of my pals all loathed me, of course, and, as I look back, for good reason. One whispered at a backyard gathering that I would make a terrible parent. A woman colleague, a single mother, defended me that night, as I recall, saying that I was a unique spirit who would encourage his children how to follow their own paths, just as I had.
My friends cackled at the image of me as a parent. I’d raise wild-hearted offspring who spewed four-letter words and knew no boundaries, just like their old man.
On drinking binges in Vegas, I’d entertain the fellas with stories of an outing of myself as parent: I’d roll up to some Walmart in a gas-guzzling road boat with fins and wait outside, engine running, as my brood went inside to shoplift the items on my list.
Maybe it was fitting that my gene pool ended with me.
There aren't many photographs of me in any close proximity to an infant, but here is one of me holding my nephew Mike when he was a wee one, in 1987, back when I was in the midst of my Peter Pan daze.
Today, Mike is 32, a fine young man. We talk regularly on the phone and he has visited me a few times. Sometimes, Mike runs into situations he knows only I will understand.
Good old Uncle John.
Nope, I didn't miss the boat with Mike.
For me, back then, parenthood was some kind of cruel societal joke — until I faced it head-on as a married man, at age 35 no less.
My first wife and I were vacationing in Ireland when she fell sick two mornings in a row. The proprietress at our bed-and-breakfast said cheerily, “This one’s pregnant. You should go down to the chemist and get a test kit.”
We did, and the test came back positive.
Looking back, if I had been with the woman I’m with now, I would have picked her up and swung her in circles, knocking over the post card stand, shaking hands with strangers — all in abject happiness.
As it was, I was sweat-panicked.
We later had an ultrasound done in London that confirmed what we already knew: We were going to be parents.
I was aghast, an animal ready to gnaw off its own limb to escape the trap.
I told my wife we were a corporation and that she had 51% of the vote to my 49%—it was her body after all. But my vote was not to have the baby: she was going to school to become a teacher and needed to concentrate on her career.
The timing wasn’t right. Babies could wait.
She agonized, finally deciding not to give birth.
I remember the day we went for the procedure. We were in the examination room, waiting for the nurse, and as my wife lay atop the white table, I absentmindedly opened a closet door.
There, to my horror, sat the machine.
I quickly closed the door, hoping my wife did not see what I had seen.
But she had.
“That’s where our baby is going to go,” she said.
And I felt like dirt.
The nurse came in and asked me to leave. I refused, but she insisted that the doctor would not perform the procedure with me present.
“Go,” my wife said.
So, I did.
I sat in the waiting room and leafed through a magazine. This was wrong, I told myself. I should go back in there.
Then the nurse appeared and said it was over.
Just like that.
That day essentially ended our marriage. My wife got her teaching degree and spent a summer in Mexico learning Spanish. We rarely talked and I knew our relationship was in jeopardy. In August, I took a flight to Oaxaca to meet her.
I remember the motel well. It was called Las Golondrinas, the Swallows, and the window in our room looked out over a tiny courtyard. We’d booked twin beds, the symbol of the vast emotional distance that now lay between us.
I knew enough not to push; if I was going to save my marriage, patience was key.
But I’d also done a lot of thinking over the summer. At the time, for whatever reason, I thought David Letterman was a good parental role model, and I’d always told her that I wanted to be like him.
That first night at the motel, I went out for a vending-machine drink and as I entered the courtyard, I looked back into the room through the open window. I felt like those hired farmhands at the end of the Wizard of Oz, looking in on Dorothy.
My wife lay in bed on her side of the room.
“I’m ready,” I told her. “I’m ready to put my David Letterman cap on. Let's have another baby.”
Then she threw me a gut punch that still hurts, years later.
“It’s too late,” she said. “I’m already pregnant.”
She was carrying the baby of one of her Spanish instructors. He didn’t know and she wasn’t sure she was going to tell him.
I told her that I’d help raise the child, to make up for the one we didn’t have.
She refused. There had already been too much water under the bridge.
Our plan had been to travel down to Guatemala and take a week of intensive one-on-one Spanish instruction. My wife asked if I still wanted to go. “We can go home,” she said.
No, I insisted. We had to go.
We’d started out as friends and we could take the trip as friends. I’ll always remember those language lessons — me, still in shock, spilling my guts to my Spanish teacher, repeating phrases like, “My wife is pregnant with another man’s baby.”
It hurt.
I deserved it.
My wife eventually told her Oaxaca instructor of her pregnancy and they later had a second child. Now she has two grown daughters who are the light of her life.
Around the time of our divorce, I began to suffer my first flickering of doubt about my childless life. I took a writing class at UCLA Extension and was assigned an exercise in which the instructor offered prompts that we were to use to start an essay.
Mine was: “What I don’t know standing here is … ”
Of course, I knew precisely what I didn’t know.
My piece began, “What I don’t know standing here is what my babies would have looked like had I allowed them to enter this world. Would they have been sons or daughters? Blonde or Brunette? … ”
It was a confession of a man in mourning. The instructor hated it. But several female students approached me after class and asked for a copy. I guess they wanted a permanent record of a suddenly-sensitive brute in crisis.
Years later, as a foreign correspondent living in Seoul, I had a succession of young Korean assistants who translated my interviews and whom I encouraged to write. Many, I think, wanted me to be a father-figure.
But that was a role I could not play.
"I'm working out the dynamics of our relationship, just like you are," I told one young woman. "I have no previous experience here. I've never been a boss or a parent to anyone."
"Let's just say we're colleagues on equal footing and leave it at that."
I’m married now to a woman who always felt the same way about children as I did. One day, at one of her checkups, her physician advised that if we wanted kids we better get started.
We told her it just hadn’t happened. She replied that there were ways to explore pregnancy, and that we should go home and think about it.
We did.
And here’s the thing: For most couples, getting pregnant is the easy part, like pulling the goalie late in a hockey game. For us, we really had to consciously want to get pregnant.
We decided we didn’t.
These days, when people ask if we have children, my wife points at me and jokes: “He’s my child.”
Not that far from the truth, I guess.
She believes we left that choice to God and that he had other plans for us.
Sometimes, I’ll ask my wife what our children would have looked like and quiz her on how she would have handled thorny parenting issues.
But we both already know: She would have been the disciplinarian and I’d be the fun-loving, wrapped-around-their-little finger, Dad.
And so we have moved on, childless, more financially secure but somehow still lacking something. I have told friends that, without children, I will die alone, without anyone to look in on me.
One, a father, joked that the only sure thing about having kids is that you’ll have someone to drive you to the old folks home.
I’ll call my brother, a father of three, and ask him when he has time for himself. “Oh,” he says, “maybe for a half hour after I put Luke to bed.”
I still wonder how he does it.
I have come to so value my down time, my alone time.
Like many childless adults, I still have my moments of weakness.
I see how a friend’s twin sons have grown into fine young men, and how proud he is of them, and I rue my own relationships lost.
Sometimes, caught totally off guard, I’ll be at an airport or some other public space and see a little girl run into her father’s arms, calling out “Daddy!” with all of that innocence and unconditional love.
And then I become like my mother, nagged by that lasting, unanswerable question.
“What if?”