Friday
Oct 28, 2005
SGN.org
Volume 33
Issue 43
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Tuesday, Dec 02, 2008
04:54
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Tour De Life by Beau Burriola |
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| The Daddy Bug | ||
| I have a daydream that's been coming more and more often these days.
I'll be cooking, or talking to folks back home, or listening to grandpa's old CD, and then it happens. Suddenly I'm in the third grade and my dad is dropping me off at school. I look back at him with his big black cowboy hat and goofy grin. Then, in a day-dream haze, something changes and I find myself sitting there in the car with a cowboy hat and a goofy grin, waving to the faceless kid I never had as he heads off to school. For years, I've heard Patrick go on about his youngest girl, Elsa. As one of the only guys from my Army days I keep in contact with, I've had an opportunity to watch little Elsa grow from a genderless blob of baby fat and spit up to a dark-haired princess with big bug eyes and a huge smile. It was a quick transformation. "Are you going to have kids?" Patrick once asked me. "No..." I said, changing the subject and then thinking about it a lot more in the weeks after. Oh, I know having children is completely impractical to even consider in years coming. I've got unpaid bills, more than one job, no parenting skills, rowdy friends, and two houseplants that would scream neglect if they could. Children have always been something that happen to other people living other lifestyles, but that's never stopped me wondering what sort of parent I would be, or how parenthood would change me. I can't help but admit that when I hear about Patrick going into work all un-ironed and frazzled with no sleep and a layer of baby spit, I wonder what it's like to focus so much energy on building a person. When he talks about how he first held his oldest for hours in a row, amazed, I wonder what it feels like to realize that someone depends on you so completely. When he talks about his "family," I wonder about mine. When I listen to his stories, I wonder what family stories I will have to tell in ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years down the road. I think of that third grade kid being dropped off by his dad ages ago. Like a lot of Gay men looking for purpose in an undefined Gay lifestyle, these are the questions I find myself asking. In a world full of children who need good parents and stable homes, I wonder sometimes (selfishly, of course) if parenthood isn't just the transformation I need to catapult me from the Gay child I still sometimes am to that place in wisdom that my grandpa and my dad got to. Like a lot of HIV-positive men, I wonder, practically, if I would be able to provide enough and stay around long enough. I wonder if being Gay makes me less able to be a good father. "There are Gay positive people who have kids," Patrick said to me matter-of-factly when he finally got me to talk about it. Patrick has always been unconditionally supportive of anything I've ever talked about doing. Bike Europe? Sure. Go to law school? Sure. Move to the other side of the world? Sure. Practical advice be damned. "Do you know any?" I asked. "Uh, no," he admitted without looking up from his magazine, "but I'm sure there are plenty." "How do you know?" "There just are," he said. A child's answer, and suddenly Iím back in third grade, standing on the sidewalk after getting dropped off at school. I look over at my dad and he looks over at me, and in a day-dream haze we switch places and I'm sitting in the car dropping off that faceless kid I never had. I wonder if that faceless kid will ever come to be. I wonder if I'll ever know what that part of living is about or if I'll be ready for someone to depend on me so much. I wonder if it will ever get easier for Gay folks who want to consider parenthood to make that jump without fear of invalidation or stigma in the eyes of society and the law. I wonder if having HIV makes it all an empty question anyway. Then again, it's just as likely that my turn will never come. Maybe, like a lot of Gay men, I'll decide that my lifestyle is too selfish and accept that I'm not meant to have kids. For now, it's enough to leave the question open and allow myself to consider that faceless kid on the sidewalk that one day I might know outside of memories and daydreams. "I felt something impossible for me to explain in words. Then, when they took her away, it hit me. I got scared all over again and began to feel giddy. Then it came to me... I was a father." - Nat King Cole. |
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