I guess the easiest jump-off for this story would be years ago in another place. I suppose Mother’s Day is commonly in May. I believe this story is May 2013. Got married (the first time, which is always a nice thing to have to add to “got married”) in March 2013, so this was two months later, and my ex and I are sitting at “brunch” (it’s inherently class warfare) in Uptown Minneapolis. I’ve long been into the idea of being a dad, although I ain’t quite there yet, and I tried to say something coy at this brunch like “Well, this might be the last Mother’s Day that you don’t have the mom title.” I got a half-smile and semi-acknowledgment, but then we moved on to discussing something else. In the moment, my heart sank a little bit.
Now, if you want context on that moment and that relationship, I can’t bark up that particular tree very far because it’s not my story to tell. But I can tell you both of us had Northeast ties, and kids maybe happen later (common narrative!) therein, and I think in May 2013, none of our friends had kids, so I guess the half-smile makes sense. If I did something like that to a woman from Texas/the south, they’d probably jump me on the brunch table and be like “Make it a reality now!” A generalization, but not by a ton.
Alright, so how that worked out is … we didn’t have kids, we barely even really tried to have kids, and we got divorced in March 2017. Then I end up with someone else, and this whole concept is back on the table, but by this time I’m 38-39 — now I’m 40 — and most of my friends have kids approaching double-digits or even high school. Also, virtually no one is honest about their own fertility journey, so I’m of the perception that most of my friends hit it once and BAM, here’s Baby Peter (fake name) ready for the loving embrace of social media (and Russian bots who are archiving his photo for nefarious purposes). In reality, many of my friends might have struggled. I got a friend with a six (maybe seven now?) year-old and I only learned recently that him and his wife had multiple miscarriages. And I barely learned that at the intersection of “being drunk” and “having to pull it from him.”
So when I got back on the kids kick a little bit, I decided to be transparent about it when blogging where I could. Again, these stories are two-way streets and they are not fully mine to tell, but blogging is catharsis, and I was moved by a text that one of my friends sent me about a month ago. He had “lower levels” when him and his wife were trying (PS the word “trying” is upper-middle-class white for “fucking on a schedule,” right?) and he texted me something like “I can talk about whatever with you because I know what it’s like to feel like there’s a problem, you can’t give your person what they want, and not enough people talk about it.”
As a result, I get out here and talk about it.
I’m just kinda in the early stages of trying to ameliorate (I don’t think I’ve ever used that word before in this blog, cool) years of excessive IPA consumption and generally-average health into something greater, which is like zero-to-less drinking and tests here and there. As a result, I got some scrotum ultrasound thing on Wednesday. I don’t know exactly why, but I guess it’s to look at your flow and shit. (Shudders.) A woman did it, so that was weird. I tried to make small talk like “Hey, do you do fetal sonograms too?” She wasn’t really having it. Ironically that 12-minute process ended, awkwardly as hell in my White Sox hat (I’ve never attended a White Sox game in my life and would not call myself a fan), and I looked at my phone and had a text from someone wanting to get a beer at 12:25pm. It was a nice little example of the different cross-currents of being a 40 year-old male with limited senses of purpose.
Written about this whole “when to if” problem before — people spend a lot of time discussing the when elements of their life, i.e. “When I see Asia” or “When I become a best-selling author” or “When we have kids,” and some of the “whens” gradually become “if,” and that’s a painful transition that impacts people at a deep emotional level, but I’m not entirely sure they always discuss it openly.
As for me, I’m still on the “when” kick with kids, but I can’t tell you the specific form that will take in terms of organic, organic with paying for a process, adoption, foster, etc. I still think it would be a cool thing to have during my time on Earth, if it happens. So here’s hoping on that front.
I started a good deal of sentences in this post with “I” or “so,” which is indicative of potentially choppy, nervous writing — which seems right down the middle of a White Sox strike zone for this type of post. Onward.
