Even if a child of mine were born tonight, I’d be too fucking old and way too fucking clueless to be a good parent. I’d wanted to be the guy throwing the baseball with my son in the backyard or threatening my teenage daughter’s dates with certain death. Having a child at fifty-three didn’t seem fair, either to the kid or to whatever woman I managed to procreate with. Now that she was gone, I found myself missing something I’d never had in the first place. As it turned out, that was what she’d been banking on, despite her protests to the contrary. I’d been forty-five when I’d met her, and I’d feared my chance to be a dad had passed me by. And, when I’d finally tried to, everything had fallen apart. I’d been so wrapped up in trying to keep her happy, I hadn’t bothered to make myself happy. I hadn’t wanted to chase her off with unreasonable demands. At first, I’d been satisfied just to have her. But, as the years had gone by, and we’d kept putting it off, it had become clear to me that children were likely not in the cards for us.
When I’d married Gena, I’d assumed we would have children. “And what do I want?” I’d asked her, thinking to delay the inevitable moment when I would give in and agree to the damn fix-up.īut Sophie. “She’ll love you,” Sophie, my friend Neil’s wife, had insisted.
But the woman I was expecting to meet was “perfect for me,” and I would “definitely love her.” It had ended in front of her dormitory, with her saying, “Well, this didn’t work out, did it?”Īfter eight years of trying to push a consistently failing relationship up the steep side of a mountain, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to try again.
I hadn’t gone on my first official date until college. Boiled in oil.ĭating, in general, was a terrifying concept. Smashed into little bits by a pile of heavy stones. I do know that whoever it was, he was a miserable bastard who deserved some horrific, medieval execution.
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