Adrienne and I are expecting another child. This is a late notice; the due date is Oct 3rd, I just haven’t gotten around to writing about it until now. The baby is a girl, and that worries me a bit. I can promise to love her with all of my heart until she is twelve. When she hits thirteen all bets are off.
Few things frighten me more than the thought of being the father of a teenage girl.
I guess I will adjust. Who knows what I’ll be like by the time she is a teenager? I am certainly not the same person now that I was before Reese was born. For one, I own a leaf blower. How the hell did that happen? I never set out to own a leaf blower. In fact, I’m sure at some point in my youth I vowed never to own one. This was probably around the same time I expressed disbelief that anyone could NOT have a six-pack. And yet there is a leaf blower in my garage, and if I still have a six-pack it is hidden under a fat-pack now. But I still have my hair. Oh yes, I still have my hair!
Becoming an old man kind of freaks me out. My sister-in-law Elaine and her friends (all young college students) were hanging out at our house a while back. We were chatting when one of Elaine’s friends mentioned with horror the age of an acquaintance, “She’s OLD! She’s like 31 or something!” I shook my fist at her—I will turn thirty in November.
I would like to attribute some of the changes in me to fatherhood, not just getting “OLD!” When Adrienne was pregnant with Reese it seemed like a couple of dormant parts of my brain were awakened. I had thought I was just not a mushy guy, but the slumbering mushiness control-center kicked in and I could suddenly get teary eyed over a commercial, or spend twenty minutes just watching Reese sleep. I now have absolutely zero tolerance for seeing little kids get hurt or sad.
I have definitely mellowed with age. I used to be so competitive that I couldn’t enjoy a friendly basketball game unless I was dunking on someone. OK, maybe that isn’t a matter of mellowing, it might just be my ever-decreasing vertical leap (Adrienne is looking over my shoulder and saying, “You could write a book just about your former competitiveness!” I don’t know what she is talking about).
But aging and fatherhood haven’t brought pure mellowness. While Adrienne was pregnant some sort of Caveman Brain also emerged. I was ready to kill at a moment’s notice. Adrienne and I were walking to the park one afternoon— well, “walking” is not quite right. Adrienne was eight months pregnant and I was scheduled for fairly serious knee surgery in a couple of days. “Limping to the park” might be more accurate.
Three teenagers in a truck drove by and shot Adrienne with a plastic pellet. I never heard her yelling, “Josh, it didn’t even hurt!” The caveman brain had taken over and the only thing I heard was “KILL KILL KILL!” as I sprinted down the middle of the street. They wisely sped away, though I nearly caught them. I couldn’t walk at all the next day.
If I had caught them and beat the living hell out of them, as was my intention, I would probably have cried afterwards, because, “My little boy will be eighteen some day—will he shoot pregnant ladies with plastic pellets?!” That will be the first rule my teenagers have: “No firing projectiles at pregnant women.” The second rule will be, “Don’t act like a total know-it-all jackass.” That and don’t say “jackass.”
Who am I kidding, I have no idea how to set rules for teenagers. I never had any. OK, that is an exaggeration. I had two rules.
- Do not disrupt the power grid of Simi Valley.
- Do not leave the country without telling Dad.
I broke one of them.
Even though I broke 50% of my rules I really never got into much trouble as a kid. There were a few times where, if I had been caught, I would have gotten into trouble, but I didn’t get caught. I think most of those times were Corey’s fault. Thanks Corey, high school would have been much more boring without you.
On my own, I probably would have never been much of a risk taker, but parenthood has made me even less of one. Now I have to calculate the Fun Return on Investment on any risk since the consequence could be leaving my family fatherless. I can remember a time when the ROI on leaving my family fatherless was quite high. We were just out of school and dirt poor. I was working for BYU, which offered me a ridiculously enormous life insurance policy. At that point I could have provided much better for my family dead than alive. That’s a different story though.
Maybe by the time our little girl (Anna?) is a teenager I will have become so mellow that her inevitable psychotic teen-girlness wont bother me? The mellowing out and calming down are a small price to pay for being a father. The leaf blower however…