Remember that one?

Maybe you weren't like me, but I definitely went through a phase or two where I swore I'd never have children. The planet was too messed up. I didn't feel grown up enough myself. The economy was a disaster. Et cetera. Perhaps these things are all still true, and yet here I am, now just seven months away from being a real live daderoo.

There comes that time where you have to make the call, presuming life hasn't already made it for you. It might be a cliche, but for us it had a lot to do with a certain tick, tock you begin to hear around thirty. I can't quite put my finger on it, but somebody must have come up with a name for this phenomenon. Baby crazy time? Uterus clock? Yeah, that sounds right.

The choice seems so definite now, but then again, when my wife and I had a bit of a scare earlier in the pregnancy, we agreed that we could always take a few years and try to adopt when we were forty or so. It would be nice to have our thirties clear. I have always pictured, at some point in my life, writing a novel in Spain, drinking lots of red wine, and just soaking in the Mediterranean from a serene, white villa. Were there always kids in this picture? Perhaps no, but I can picture it now. It'll just have to be a novel full of characters with short attention spans. I don't think I could bring myself to write a kids' book, but you never know.

In all seriousness, though, it's amazing how many realities we live within a single life. When I was a twenty year old young man, just moving out of my parents house for the first time (well before I moved back in at thirty-four), I could have never imagined that I'd be looking forward to having my own son or daughter. I am the same person I was them but I am also a completely different one. Life's floors me.

That about wraps it up for this week. Sorry about the writing vacation yesterday, but I had some other pressing projects that didn't afford me the time to post. Hope you have a glorious Friday and a wonderful, fulfilling (or at least vaguely relaxing) weekend!

A few years ago I was the teaching assistant in a university Children's Literature course, and I witnessed in that role a fairly bizarre phenomenon. I am referring, of course, to baby ventriloquism -- the act of using an imaginary or real child as a puppet to play out your own weird characterization of childhood. Students loved to write everything through "the mind of the child" and "the eyes of the child" and "the child's experience", which in reality seemed little more than sentimentalized fantasy-projections onto what childhood actually was. It was kind of funny to read all this, especially when the writers were only a few years out of being children themselves. How quickly we forget, I suppose.

I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, I was rather mischievous. My friends and I would basically think of anything we could to break the rules: shoplifting, vandalism, hucking snowballs at cars, tripping kids in the hall. We were brutes. I suppose the whole "mind of the child" existed in the form of not really understanding the repercussions of our actions, both for ourselves and others, but to paint us as pastoral, innocent lambs seems a bit disingenuous. The irony of the whole thing was that I had a hyper-developed conscience, so I would chastize myself after any minor misbehaviour, walking around in a cloud of guilt for days. So much for my carefree existence. I'm less worried now.

When people speak through their children, I honestly think it reveals more about the mind of the adult than anything else.  People ventriloquize about what they want childhood to be: an exciting and free time devoid of any concern or worry. Pure shenanigans, weekends in Cuba, or whatever. In truth, I think we learn a lot during our childhoods, and not all the lessons are easy ones. I remember in grade 5 giving away 90% of my hockey cards so that I could be at the center of attention for the afternoon, then sitting in class afterwards, devastated that I had lost 90% of my hockey cards. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, but as an adult you know how that one turns out.

Speaking through children is actually kind of endearing, I suppose. Cute even. It lets people throw around their imaginations willy nilly, which should be encouraged at all times. My favorite is when people speak through infants (or even pets). There you can't even pretend that you aren't pretending, but somehow it's a socially acceptable behaviour, practiced by millions. My friends use a thick eastern European accent to ventriloquize their one-year-old daughter. My cat is a disdainful British noblewoman. But I, of course, am a very serious adult.

Last weekend, we went to check out the Vincent van Gogh exhibit showing in our city, and I was struck by one of his works that I hadn't really appreciated before. Almond Blossom was one of the Dutch painter's final pieces, completed in 1890, just months before his death. When I had seen reproductions of it in the past, it just looked kind of bland and dainty compared to the vivid, lively stuff he did elsewhere. This was just background noise, as far as I was concerned.

The story of the painting is what caught my attention and began to change my view. On January 31, 1890, there was a new birth in the family. Vincent's most dedicated supporter and worldly agent, his brother Theo, had a son and decided to name him Vincent Willem in honor of his talented uncle. In celebration of the family's newest member, van Gogh painted the delicate and celebratory masterpiece to be hung on the wall of the baby's nursery.

Can you imagine?

It's so beautiful it breaks my heart. Seeing the painting up close, I gained a better appreciation for its remarkable depth. While you can't often see it in reproductions, the background sky churns with the same twisting energy of the blossoms and branches themselves. The painting encapsulates perfectly the loving eye that Vincent turned on the simplest elements of our world.

It's the perfect painting for both a child and an adult. As you begin to focus on the foreground, you are suddenly presented with the fact that the background, too, is alive. Everything is connected -- the blossoms and the trees and the sky itself. I can't imagine a better gift and more invaluable lesson to leave for a child as it grew up, and it's so fortunate that as a grown up I was finally able to discover some of this painting's lessons for myself. Thank you once again, Vincent.

We went out for our badminton/relaxation night on Friday, and the awkward "Why we're not drinking" conversations were kept to a minimum, thankfully. Our friends who were hosting have a very lovely little one-year old, and it got me to thinking just how much I'm looking forward to this whole parenting thing.

It's been a somewhat tough time finding good work in the past few years, and now that a baby's coming, in a lot of ways the pressure should be even higher. For some reason, though, I'm not bothering to stress over it (at least not yet). I'm keeping an eye out, and gearing up the work search, but I'm not letting it dominate all of my energy and focus. There's no reason to believe it won't work out beautifully.

I think my attitude has something to do with seeing my friends and their babies. You can spend all of your time focusing on the potential disasters in life, trying to prevent anything bad from ever happening, but this directly takes away from time you can spend celebrating the joys. I also think (always) that for some reason good news is just around the corner. Perhaps I'll find a way to sell the novel I've been working on, or make some vital connection by getting more active on the community learning front. You never know. When I see my friends and the amazing little families they're making, it's hard to imagine things going poorly in our situation. Though it seems like a ton of work and a huge shift in focus, there's a lot of joy that comes with it.

So, here's to opening up to the uncertainty life has to offer, and enjoying each day on its own terms. I heard  a quote recently that seems to sum up everything I'm describing: "It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." Definitely words to live by!

One of the things you always see change when people have kids is that they stop referring to their pets as their children. I was noticing this yesterday as I was calmly looking out the window, watching my kitty chew on some miscellaneous object off the ground. I've definitely called her my baby for the 15 years I've had her, but the fact is if it was my person-baby doing that, I'd be running for my life and screaming bloody murder. There is a difference. Kitties have at least some modicum of a survival instinct, even if dulled through years of free food and adoration. Kiddies, not so much, at least not for a while.

I'm curious to know how other people's pet lives changed when they had kids. Does the pet just drop a notch on the family totem pole, or is it perceived in a fundamentally different way? I hear a lot about fear of the pet being jealous, and that would be a nightmare if it happened. My kitty may not be overly precocious, having learned essentially nothing since she was 6 months old, but she's been a part of my life longer than I've known any of my adult friends. She's pretty easy going. Perhaps she won't particularly even notice when the baby arrives. Isuppose you have to hope for the best!

Signing off for the weekend. It's ungodly hot here, and tonight we're off to a BBQ, and all of those super fun dodgeball games that happen when you're hiding a pregnancy from your friends! Hope you have a great one, too!


PS By the way, I hope I didn't come off as pretentious or self-serving in yesterday's post. Definitely not my intention, though the unconscious can be a hilarious trickster.

Since I started this blog, I've noticed a ton of other dads floating around on the internet, sharing their tips, stories, and opinions. It's great. It feels like an instant community, and I think it represents the ideal of what the Internet could and should be.

Of course some of them are trying to sell you stuff, but I don't actually think there's anything wrong with that (Heck, I wouldn't be mad if you clicked on one of the links and bought something off Amazon). Here's why the sales thing isn't a problem, in my opinion: it's because a lot of these dads you see on the Web are forward thinking, generous and caring people, who are providing a vital service to other like-minded dads and fathers-to-be. They are sharing honest, unfiltered perspectives on their experiences in a lot of cases, and they're making it okay for dads to be more active participants in their children's upbringing. They're trying to make a progressive, egalitarian lifestyle an economically feasible choice, and that's just cool.

By contrast, I currently live in the 'burbs and (confession time) reside in my mother-in-law's house, with my expecting wife. I won't bother getting defensive about taking some time to cultivate my career as a writer, but to a lot of people in these parts, it looks weird, a grown man not out there grinding away at a regular day job. If I felt totally isolated and alone, it would be extremely difficult to work on this weird life I want to create. That's why I love the Internet dads phenomenon. It always reminds me that there are others out there who don't want to be confined to some pre-determined life narrative. They used to say that the university is the sanctuary for new ideas, but I think the Web is actually serving this purpose in a much more interesting way these days. Go dads! That's part of why I'm here. I'm just so darn next.

As a final and slightly separate thought, I think there's an obvious reason why it's so much easier to find forward-thinking dads on the web. It's because in the vast majority of cases the dads who would blog about their experiences publically tend to be the forward thinking ones. If you looked through my Twitter follows,  for example, you might think that the world has become some kind of egalitarian paradise, where people divide family work according to their talents and needs rather than prescribed gender ideals. There, in this perfect webby word, parents are creative, constructive collaborators, sharing in all the joy and exasperation of raising young ones. It's a good place to be, and it provides a model for a way of envisioning a more connected and meaningful family life.

I just talked to my little brother on the phone, and I swear at least ten opportunities sprung up for me to announce that we're expecting. He's one of the people I can't wait to tell. It'll be his first time as an uncle, so I know he'll be both shocked and excited. The reason why my wife and I are waiting to make the announcement is largely because the first trimester is notoriously shaky for a lot of people, and it would be terrible having to tell everyone how things didn't work out.

It's not like others aren't onto us anyway. The moment my wife stopped drinking, the nosy, awkward speculation kicked in. We got all of these sideways comments from our friends: "Oh, so why are you not drinking tonight? Oh, it's been awhile since we really had some fun -- we should do it up!" I stopped drinking too, but of course nobody said anything about that. In some ways I wish they'd respect our choices, but I'm not totally sure why it matters, besides perhaps the mildly disturbing fact that our friends expect us to have a drink in hand at all times.

My wife's more annoyed with others' speculation than me, to be honest, but I don't blame her. It seems like one of the biggest unspoken aspects of pregnancy is the massive surrendering of control it involves. It's little more than a bit of queasiness for her at the moment, but soon enough there's going to be this whole other organism clearly inhabiting her body. After that, from everything I hear, kids pretty much take over every aspect of your life. Your neat and tidy spaces get constantly tornadoed, your schedules become pure chaos, your hygiene becomes sporadic and unpredictable. Even your thoughts are constantly intercepted by the cute but ceaseless chatter of the wee ones. Yep, that's surrender.

I'm guessing that the better you are at embracing the upheaval, the more you enjoy your life after birth. I suppose there's some kind of spiritual/philosophical lesson in there somewhere, though I'm sure you have no time to ponder it while you're in the thick of things. Maybe the need to keep things secret for awhile has something to do with this lesson: the last, lingering moment of serenity before the hard, world-shattering smack of parenthood.

We went to watch a certain popular movie about pregnancy this weekend, and I walked out feeling a little like I'd been smacked in the ballsack. The movie itself was funny enough on its own terms, I guess, but there was something that bugged me the more I thought about it.

There's a word we loved to chat about occasionally when I was doing my various grad degrees in literary studies: interpellation. It means, roughly, creating something by naming it. We are interpellated every day of our lives as citizens, employees, family members, etc. This activity helps us find our way in the world, but it can also be the source of all kinds of alienation, discomfort, and even anger. When somebody defines you in a way that you don't agree with, and you can't do anything about it, it can be pretty awful, and I think that's exactly what I didn't like about the movie.

The expecting dads in the movie were alternately defined as reluctant, cowering, utterly nonchalant, and merely proud of their seminal contribution. Interestingly the only father who had any hint of intelligence, excitement, or self-awareness ended up with a partner who miscarried. What does that say? Symbolically speaking, it suggests that if you don't fall in line with cliches about parenthood, or if you try to be an emotionally mature male in this world, your line is doomed. The miscarriage also just happens to occur for the family that conceives outside of wedlock. I think the symbolism of that one's pretty obvious.

I thought we were all grown adults here. Do we really need these morality lessons that simultaneously goad and chide us into strict regimes of behaviour? Snooze.

Even the movie's supposed moments of honesty, such as Elisabeth Banks' hilarious outburst at a mommy convention, fall into easily identified movie formulas. That one was the "sick of being a hero confessional." We saw it when Samantha pulled off her wig and told it like it is about cancer in that later episode of Sex in the City. This formula is supposed to reveal the humanness lying behind media images of various people, but in fact it's so predictable that its authenticity always rings through as deeply contrived. The revelation always seems to be "this actually sucks," but it never goes anywhere besides that. It never confronts us with the scary implications of that suckiness (in this case, perhaps, that parenthood is actually a terrible thing not worth doing).

Now's the time when I should tell you what these movies should be doing instead of what they're doing, but in fact that's not my job at all. That's the job of artists. An honest exploration of parenthood, say, would not follow a formula. It would hit you in a way that suddenly revealed some new, previously overlooked part of yourself and your experience. It's no easy thing to do, but it's an ideal that is worth the attempt.

We went for our second early ultrasound on Friday, and as the title suggests, all was well. We saw the heartbeat again, which amazingly took up 1/3 of the embryo's complete size. The baby measured in at a whopping .93 cm, and still resembled a tiny grey blob on the ultrasound screen. You want to be able to tell people that your kid is a good looking kid, but I'm afraid to say my kid looks more like a small cumulonimbus at the moment. Next ultrasound's at 12 weeks, and apparently the cloud will have a face by then. Can't wait!

It was also father's day this weekend, as you know, so there was major dad buzz in the air. The city newspaper ran half a dozen stories on the modern father, and I was interested to see them make a fairly progressive acknowledgement of categories like stay-at-home dads and work-at-home dads (which they unfortunately went on to refer to as SAHDs and WAHDs). I remember when masculinity studies were all the rage in academia, back around 2003, and it's good to see some of those insights and debates finally making their way into the mainstream.

Notably, one of the complaints about masculinity studies when they were a big focus in academia was that they were basically a creative way of turning attention onto men, which is basically what had been happening since the beginning of history anyway. I don't think the attention to modern dads needs to be thought of in such negative terms, as long as it doesn't start to eclipse the hard work that their partners (male or female) are doing outside the home. I think the ideal would just be to see value placed on the hard work that everyone does, not just one gender or the other (or the other!).

A focus too heavily on hetero male parenthood would basically be an annoying switcheroo of the situation feminists of the 70s and 80s worked so hard to remedy. Back then, the work of mostly women homemakers was disdained, and hard battles were fought to get childcare thought of as extremely valuable hard work. I hope that the increased attention on home fatherhood doesn't just indicate that men have noticed that moms have been getting too much of the attention, and so they want to move in on it. That's certainly not how I feel, but it remains a possibility.

In all honesty, I think that the modern world still has a way to go on gender issues, so it's good to have any discussion of men and women inhabiting non-traditional roles with regard to work, parenting, and relationships, this super awesome blog included. When I saw a large banner at the mall this weekend reading "The Greatest Sale Known to Man", I felt like I'd been zapped back in time forty years. I suppose the battle rages on, and it's one worth fighting, because the stakes are a less alienating, more welcoming world for everyone.

Looking forward to seeing grainy, indecipherable images of the wee one again this afternoon. We're scheduled for early ultrasound, round 2, at 1:00. The baby is now almost the size of a blueberry, apparently, which is another important stop on the cute food chart of growth (I think the next step is raspberry. They grow up so fast!)  I think they're going to give us a due date today, which will be weird and exciting, like pretty much everything that's happened so far.

All in all this week has been significantly more mellow on the baby front than the past few. Ever since we got past our scare last Friday, it feels like things are just moving along as they should. One of my wife's new favorite jokes is to brag about how she's multitasking at any given moment. Examples: I'm making this smoothie AND I'm growing a baby. I may be watching mindless reality TV right now, but are YOU growing a baby? I'm off to the office AND to grow a baby. You get the picture. Laugh riot.

Today is sunny and beautiful, so I'm going to keep this short and sweet. Hope you all have a spectacular weekend!