Why The Hell do You Want a Kid? (CTL 21)

Countdown to Laughter

Issue 21

Since we are getting near the end of the story, I’ll tell you how it began. Nancy and I had gone back and forth for a long time about whether or not to have kids. We both had an inkling that we wanted kids, but also wanted to do a lot of things together first.

When we each hit 29, we started asking folks, “Why did you have kids?” The most common response was a variation on, “It just seemed like the thing to do.” Well that didn’t convince either of us. Another common answer was “To have someone to take care of you when you are older.” Well, this one didn’t work too well either seeing as how we both live nine hours away from our parents.

“Don’t you want to know what your kids will look like?” This one is just sort of creepy. Are we running some sort of genetic experimentation lab here? This is what they invented Photoshop for. “Well my (Wife/Husband/life partner) wanted one” Yeah well I wanted an X-Box, but Nancy wasn’t giving me on of those (God bless you Linda DuFran).

One afternoon working at Habitat for Humanity, Ann Marie Rogers told me, “We just couldn’t imagine an empty table at Thanksgiving”. I tried to dismiss that one, but couldn’t. A week or two later Michael Usey told me, “This is one time when God lets you be co-creator”. That one floored me. I know people reading are from different faith backgrounds, but the idea of helping create another soul really shook me up.

Ultimately, we decided that raising a child is as much a part of life as being born, falling in love, dying, friendship, laughing, crying, and making waffles. To really experience everything in life, we had to be parents. We would get to see everything for the first time, a second time (or third or fourth….that’s another story.)

One night in early December (the seventh Nancy reminds me), we were going to bed. Nancy had felt a little crummy that night (she had some sore titties), and was a little restless. She was really concerned that something was wrong, and wanted to go to the doctor. I was already in bed with my contacts out. I asked her, “Why don’t you take a pregnancy test?” She had taken three tests in the last month or so, all negative, and just figured her hormones were still out of whack after going off the pill. She didn’t expect the test to be positive. She took it. I was dozing off, when I heard from the bathroom, “Oh my God….Matt…..Oh My God….Come here….Matt….It’s positive.” We looked at the little blue line on the plastic stick like monkeys trying to figure out a cell phone. I asked, “Can you take another one to be sure?”.

Well the one we had taken was the last one, so the decision was made to go to Wal-Mart at about 11:30 at night. We looked like the sort of people you would expect to see in Wal-Mart at 11:30 at night. I wore my old scratched up glasses, and an old T-shirt, Nancy wore her jammies and was chugging down a bottle water. We bought three different pregnancy tests that night (Let me tell you something, those little bastards are expensive, but when it comes to something like this, “Sam’s Choice” is not the brand you want to go with.)

Well, she scored a hat trick on all three tests, and by 1:30, we settled in for a long, excited sleepless night.

And that kids is the story of the “First Halloween”, I mean Isaac’s pregnancy.

Big Matt