Thoughts of Being a Dad
I had the hardest time today not telling Beth (my boss) that I’m going to be a daddy soon. I hid my mouth with a printout of a work procedure and smiled ecstatically at one point.
Beth asked me a number of times if there was anything she could do before she left on vacation tomorrow. I nearly spilled the beans.
At lunch the regular crowd ate while laughing and talking. I wanted to pipe in—guess what, Meg’s pregnant!
Meg and I decided that we’d wait until she visited the doctor on November 8th before telling anyone. (Well, except online. We’re both relatively anonymous online, so the news won’t leak to family or local friends.)
We want to make sure the fetus implanted as it should, unlike Meg’s ectopic pregnancy last year. “I have a better feeling this time,” she said. “I always had a bad feeling about the last one.”
“Woman’s intuition?” I asked, smiling.
“Something like that.”
I’m still in a bit of shock about the whole thing. Me, a father in July? I can’t wait to see Meg’s belly swelling with growing life. I touch her belly anyway, holding my hand in the spot I imagine the little sesame seed baby is. Feel my warmth, I think. Feel my love and grow.
Meg and I talked about baby names again. We’ve had a boy and girl name picked out for years now, although we’re undecided about a girl’s middle name.
“Crimefighter?” I suggested.
She shook her head.
“You have to be a celebrity to name your kids that,” I concluded, grinning.
I hope I’m not a bad dad, I think as I get ready in the morning. My dad wasn’t very good to me when I was a boy. Can I do better? Will I do better? I want to do better.
Our debt worries me a little. They always say that money will take care of itself and that you can’t wait for the perfect circumstances to have a child. I always told Meg not to worry about it, that it’d be okay. We’re in a bit more credit card debt than we should be, since we hadn’t saved for our recent home improvements. But I think we’ll get it paid off within about a year. Debts always worry me a little.
I’m going to be a daddy, I think. I’m going to have a little son or daughter. I can show them how wonderful the world is, all the joy, the laughter, the music, the art, the words, the stories. I can give them the best childhood I can. When I come home I can pick them up and whirl them in the air, laughing with our reunion.
“It’s me and you against the world,” I tell Meg sometimes. Well, not anymore. It’s me, her, and jellybean.
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I didnt realise men felt this way (and looking back on that remark, how sexist are my thoughts?), its warming and makes me smile.
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Congratulations! It’ll be entering a new phase of life. You’ll clearly be an excellent dad. Davo
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ryn: First of all, I respect your opinions even if I don’t agree with them. Reasonable people can agree to disagree. For the life of me, I cannot imagine why someone would commit so much effort to writing a book that they did not want to publish, but if you say that’s what you did, I’ll accept that without understanding it. As for the success of writing for distance–I see a point there, I suppose, but it also seems like an odd way to run a race. You take the final hurdle first and then go back to jump all of the previous ones, in my opinion. But let me ask you this: As someone who has done this project and written to a word limit every day, don’t you think you’d have been better off writing for a set amount of time every day, not to a specific word limit and expanding your project beyond 1 month to the more typical 3-6 that most professional writers take to write a book? What does writing a book in a month do for you? I just don’t understand that. And thanks for the feedback. I’m always open to some good discourse.
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