So, you can see, I had lots of reasons not to take the risk of fatherhood yet now, at the age of 38 years old, I find myself expecting a child for the first time ever and I haven’t run away…yet.
Well, over the years, there have been the occasional wobble where after copious amounts of alcohol on work nights out, I’ve come home and asked my wife if she wanted to have a baby, which she found very amusing. I love my wife very much and on occasion I have worried that one day she would grow to resent me for taking away her opportunity of motherhood.
However, when I woke up sober the next afternoon, normal service had resumed and she would laugh it off and I’m glad she did because both partners need to want a child. It’s not an easy ride or something to be taken lightly and it’s vitally important for a child’s development that they have both parents around. I know that this isn’t a popular opinion in today’s society where the role of the father is deemed optional and completely unimportant but I think fathers matter to their children and can make a big impact on preparing a child for the outside world.
Many young men are completely turning their backs on the prospect of parenthood given the amount of demonisation of fathers in society and I honestly don’t blame these men at all. The anti-male rhetoric in society is truly toxic, it’s everywhere but like boiling a frog, it’s been going on for so long that most people are completely oblivious to it.
For me, the thoughts of introducing new life into this world started as a parting gift for my wife when I was at the brink of suicide with a very severe depression. I wanted her to be happy and I wanted to leave something behind to bring her comfort after my death, one tiny, perfect piece of me that hadn’t been destroyed by my mind turning in on itself.
That started the thoughts but something else was happening at the same time. In November 2020, my wife’s sister and her three children came to live with us. Unfortunately, they lost their nursery business in March 2020, just as the COVID-19 crisis started to grip. Without the business, they had to sell up their dream home and the relationship between my brother in law and sister in law had broken down so when the house was in the process of being sold, they separated.
Our household went from two humans plus four cats to three adults, four cats, an eight year old girl, a twelve year old boy and a fifteen year old girl over night. We knew this was coming so over the summer months we did our best to transform our three bedroom house to maximise the space and storage for our additional household.
It’s not ideal having three kids share one room and there have been the odd tantrums over who gets to play where but we all gelled straight away and it just felt like we were one big family and that they’d always lived here.
Having those kids around really brought out a protective side of me, I did my best to make Christmas as fun for them as possible with fun games and presents. Having three kids come and give you a big hug before they each went to bed, having the family film nights, the in jokes, the feeling of being wanted and comforting them when they were sad made me feel like maybe I could actually be a good father after all.
As I slowly started to have more days where my mood was improving and it was no longer about a parting gift, those feelings of wanting to have a child of my own didn’t go away.
I felt closer to my wife than ever before and our levels of intimacy just increased. One night as we were kissing and holding each other I felt a desperate urge to make love to my wife without protection, in the end we didn’t but we talked about it again and about how we both felt and then we decided that we would just start making love naturally and just let nature take its course. We wouldn’t put any pressure on each other, we would just go with the flow and if it happened, it happened, if it didn’t, it was no big deal.
Rant Over 