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“We’d Never Post OUR Baby On Instagram. Too Many Crazies!”
One interesting thing about aspirational fatherhood that goes nowhere biologically is that, if you meet a bunch of guys who have “gotten there,” and you ask them to describe what it’s like “in the room” on their first kid, most of them cannot do this. It could be the case that I just don’t know many guys who are good with words; that could be true. You expect a guy to say it’s important, or relevant, or life-changing, or something. One time I had a guy tell me where he went to get a sandwich.
Disheartening.
Anyway, I used to know this guy through church who actually had a good answer to this question. We were friends for about a year, and then a bunch of shit eroded. Some of it was that I was drinking day-side pretty heavily at the time, and I’m sure I unnecessarily challenged him or did things to make him recoil. Part of it was that him and his wife got married within two weeks of me and my wife, and bam, they were almost immediately pregnant — and we found out via social media, even though we had hung out with them several times. If I’m being honest, for a while I felt like my wife almost “took his side” on things because he got his wife “there” (pregnancy) sooner, so I had a lot of issues with everything.