Congratulations, Alex. I just hung out with a buddy of mine whose parental development has followed yours, roughly (daughter + 2 years = son) and he was a) proud of having a son and b) worried about having TWO kids when he still considers himself a kid.
So sayeth a comrade of mine from ILX, and oof! does it ever ring true. I cannot describe how surreal it feels to say -- let alone know -- that I now have children, as opposed to simply child. Having one child still retains the whiff and promise of newness and exploration. "Children" implies FAMILY in big, scary, block capital letters. Somewhat unfathomably -- I am now the father of two little people. Though I may still churlishly model myself as a beer-swiggin, leather-clad rock pig with one Chuck Taylor in the gutter and a trigger-happy middle-finger for all and sundry, I'm now a burp-cloth-brandishing doting daddy times two!
I took little Charlotte out for a late afternoon stroll today (freeing my long-suffering mother of her baby-sitting duties so that she could go grab her first gander at little Oliver, still in the hospital with my wife). We decided to walk towards Hudson River Park, being that it was an incomparably warm, sunny, early Spring day. It still feels like yesterday when we found out Peggy was pregnant with Charlotte (it was the weekend of the 2003 blackout). Said little girl is now just shy of two, and there simply isn't enough bandwith available for me to describe how hugely she has changed my life in every conceivable fashion. It is both indescribably thrilling and abjecty terrifying to think of how her brand new little brother will similarly impact our lives.
I'd always sort've assumed that the state of new fatherhood would bring with it a figurative hypodermic needle filled with a dose of weapons-grade "maturity" to prepare the newly minted dad for the trying struggles ahead. But it doesn't quite happen like that. I didn't suddenly morph from a needlessly argumentative and foul-mothed music-geek into a nurturing nest-tender overnight. While I immersed myself in every stage of Charlotte's development, happily opting out of beery nights out with the boys seeing stroppy Punk bands in favor or tending to her teary teething-tantrums, I'm still the same largley vacant-skulled idiot I was prior to her arrival. I still trawl around eBay looking for ancient Stranglers posters and vintage Devo tchotchke. I still thrill to the notion of a new Killing Joke album, and dutifully snap up each and every new volume of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVDs (though I'll be damned if I can find a time to watch them anymore). In short, I still feel like a barely post-adolescent cheap-o thrill-seeker and trivia monger. I remember bartending at some nauseating event out in Quogue about fifteen summers ago and hearing some peer of my parents' trying to chat up some comely female several years his junior by saying he still felt like he'd just graduated from of college. I remember thinking, "yeah, whatever you say, old man!" But damn if I don't already empathize with him. I'm now the father of two with unrelenting real-life responsibilities, but I still feel like the same whistled-headed nogoodnick that was just begrudgingly sprung from college without the slightest semblance of a firm plan for the future. Yet here I am. Scared? Oh you betcha, but still strangely calm and hugely enthused. It's going to be scary and bumpy and unpredictable and filled with all sorts of messiness, but I cannot wait. At the very moment, I'm deathly afraid of how little Charlotte is going to cope with her new sibling. I know it's going to be alright -- virtually every other family under the sun has dealth with it -- but I can't help but feel concerned. I love her more than I can possibly describe, and the thought of her feeling hurt or confused is an unspeakable anathema to me. But had you suggested that I'd feel this way about a child -- let alone suggested the possibility of me even ever having a child -- ten years ago, I'd have invariably flipped you off, stalked over the jukebox and drowned you out with some high voltage AC/DC.
Funny old world.
In any event, while I'm busy waxing about how my paternal instincts have kicked in with a vengeance, I couldn't help thinking, as I was chasing little Charlotte around Hudson River Park (see above) that there's going to be a time when she's eighteen and her little brother, Oliver, will be simultaneously sixteen, and both will be dead set on informing me at every possible opportunity what a dictatorial, square jackass I am. Until then, I'm just going to enjoy myself.
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