Let me begin with a confession. I never wanted children. I never professed to the urge to procreate, never yearned for the proverbial pitter-patter of little feet around the house, was not secretly pining for a little Babe Ruth to coach. I saw children as a costly nuisance; a disagreeable combination of money pit and millstone around my neck that would end my carefree life as I knew it.
I was a child of the sixties and early seventies, carefree and cavalier; a not-so-young hippie who considered a six-month lease more commitment than I was ready for. I was too emotionally immature to raise a hamster; so self-centered that had the earth been struck by a comet, I would have been convinced that it happened merely to inconvenience me. Add to the equation the sorry fact that the prospective mother and I could not abide each other two days out of five, and you can understand my lack of enthusiasm when informed that I was indeed about to become a father.
I was also ignorant on the subject. My youngest brother was only a year younger than I, and neither of my older siblings had yet reproduced. The closest I'd come to children was dealing with the toddlers of single or newly divorced young hippie mothers; unruly children with trite counter-culture names like Tomorrow or Skye or Ellis Dee, who were usually being raised on philosophy in lieu of discipline, and showed it. I had not, in the main, enjoyed the experience.
Most young men are not groomed for fatherhood. Little girls have that genetic hard wiring that causes them to play with dolls and want to hold babies half their size; little boys play no such games. Even now, my amusement level with some infant nephew or niece is short-lived until they get large enough to entertain me back. I still perform the obligatory Oohs and Ahs, but the only baby I could ever hold for long periods of time and really enjoy the experience was the one that I had helped to create.
Having said all that, I can honestly state that fatherhood has been the most rewarding experience in my life by such a wide margin that I cannot say with any surety what else is in second place. All my fears, apprehensions, misgivings, fears that I would not love her enough, disappeared like ice before the fire the first moment I lay eyes upon her.
I was enchanted, and terrified. I was sure that she was as fragile as a Fabergé Egg, and walked about the house with her like I was holding that vial of nitroglycerin someone always got stuck with on runaway stage coaches in old Western movies. I moved through the house noiselessly, lest I disturb her nap. I had yet to discover that my little Jessica was, pound for pound, tougher than a circus roustabout, or that the New York Philharmonic playing Jimi Hendrix's greatest hits could not wake her if she was ready to sleep. It was all new ground for me.
I recall running through the house one morning screaming for my wife; the baby was having some sort of convulsions or spasms that seemed to involve her stomach leaping clear up into her chest. She and her friend ran into the nursery to see what the fuss was, and then laughed together at how stupid men were, to not even be able to recognize hiccups in an infant. I would sit for hours with her nestled sleeping against my chest. She would pause between breaths, and I would find myself holding my breath until her next one came. I awoke to every cry in the night, and my wife would feint sleep, knowing that I could not out-wait her. I had to get up.
Like many people who have not been raised around babies, I had some basic misconceptions to work through. As a result of a high school psychology class and the skimming of a few articles misinterpreting Spock (the child psychologist, not the Star Trek character), it was my conviction that you received your little lump of baby clay at the hospital, and took it home to mold into your idea of an acceptable human being.
While any child can be warped by bad enough parenting, or the lack thereof, I am now convinced that a great deal of the personality is hard wired and in place at birth. My daughter has been essentially the same person from the day we brought her home from the hospital. Surely, she has been shaped to some degree by her upbringing, but the baby of two months, the child of two years, and the twenty year-old woman of today have displayed the same traits of character and temperament from the very beginning.
