I am standing on the edge of fatherhood, and to paraphrase my friend Erik, it scares the pants off me.
Don’t misunderstand me. This has been something I’ve looked forward to for as long as I can remember. Literally. Since I was a kid and old enough to form memories, I have wanted to have kids of my own. My brothers and sister and I would turn the garden cart over onto the picnic table in the front lawn of the Olsen house, where we lived before we moved onto the land where my dad was building a house, and we would play Pirate Ship, and I would think, someday I want to have my own kids, and watch them invent worlds in the front lawn.
Now that someday is upon me.
In fact I wanted about a dozen kids. Mind you, I didn’t want to contribute my own genetic material to a dozen kids. Maybe one or at most two given the world’s population growth: two children from two parents is a sustainable number. But I wanted to adopt another ten or so and raise a dozen. I was blessed with good parents and a happy childhood, and at age seven I could imagine nothing more fun or rewarding than being a parent myself, to as many little ones as I could.
It was my older brother who recently reminded me of this childhood dream, I think sometime shortly before or after LL became pregnant.
“How many kids are you guys planning on having?”
“Oh, I think one, or two at the most.”
“Not a dozen?”
“A dozen!?”
“Yeah, when we were little, you used to say that you wanted to adopt a whole bunch of kids. Do you remember that?”
I did, and when we talked about it, I remembered that scene in the front lawn of the Olsen house: waves crashing over the deck, the ship tossing in a South Seas gale, the cargo full of richly plundered loot, and lo! off the port bow, a dark shape looming through the salt spray: a desert island? a sea monster? Ahoy, mates!
It strikes me in these memories of childhood that our parents were so often in the background. They loved and supported and encouraged us in every way to become whoever it was we would turn out to be with very little demands of what that might look like. In retrospect one of the ways they did this was by continuing to be who they were. My mom served for twenty years on the local school board, worked as a home health nurse, and in the same year that I graduated from high school, completed her outreach degree as a Family Nurse Practitioner. My dad worked as an ER doctor 60 miles away in order to put four kids through college, and in his free time built a mortise-and-tenon house from floor to ceiling with essentially his own two hands. And between the two of them they read stories to us every night, put a hot home-cooked meal on the table every morning and every evening (pancakes every Sunday), took us on overnight backpacking trips into the Eagle Cap wilderness and on road trips to Albuquerque to visit Granddad (with plenty of stops to run amok over the red-rock canyons en route), patched up the scraped knees of bike wrecks and the bruised emotions of junior high crushes, and listened and listened and listened to us. Without being overbearing they were always close by, always there.
Now, as I contemplate the birth and raising of a single child—never mind twelve—it scares the pants off of me.
I know that very soon our days and nights will become a joyous and exhausting marathon dictated by our baby’s cycles of crying, feeding and pooping, and I will not have time to be terrified. But at the moment my fears are irrationally focused on the distant future of what our baby will grow up to be, and all the myriad pitfalls that I might step into as that baby’s father. I will want to comfort and caress, instruct and inspire, protect my child from everything the world might throw at it, and ultimately the best I may hope for will be simply to be there.
Perhaps I might take a morsel of comfort in observing that my siblings and I did not grow up to be pirates or pillagers. Turned loose but always able to count on the sturdy mast of our parents’ love, we instead became the opposite: each in our own way striving to bring more healing, joy and understanding into the world.
In this recognition comes a clarity of purpose for today’s writing. Not to somehow pretend that with words I can set a lifetime’s course as a good parent, but to take a moment and give thanks to my own parents.
