Titles and Preparation

Blogger. Dog Lover. Amateur Painter. Slightly-Above-Average-When-The-Course-Matches-My-Crooked-Ball-Flight Golfer.  But I’m just under one month away from the expected arrival of an additional title that will forever change everything about me except my past: “Father.”

Kind of scary to think about my life (and my wife’s) changing forever in 30 days or so and I’ve never felt more unprepared for anything in my life. And I’m the planner of the family…go figure. I even felt more prepared when I asked my wife to marry me and I didn’t have or need 9 months to get ready for that life change.

“Husband” seems to be the one title that comes close to “Father,” but it’s different. Not to say that one is more weighty than the other but we spend years practicing and honing skills to be a quality partner, some more than others. We date and figure out what we like and what we don’t. We figure out how to handle crazy and how to deal with rejection. We learn (oftentimes the hard way) how to be men that women don’t want to slap or label the dreaded “creeper.” We shape our attitudes and behaviors over the course of time to adjust from the immature, hedonistic boys we started as. But we can also choose whom we marry unless there exists some very sad and unfortunate circumstances. We can’t pick our kid, although I’m sure there are some that wish they could have. So it’s not quite the same.

There’s no “Rent-A-Baby” store to aid in the preparation of the upside-down world we step into when we cross the once familiar threshold of the house we’ve stepped into a thousand times, only this time with a baby in arm. (I’m almost positive a store like that would be highly illegal and, if not, a very poor and inefficient business model with the constant necessity to replace “inventory.”) The closest thing I have for practice is 2 dogs.

But they’re almost 2 years old and they barely need me anymore. The only thing I have to provide them now is food, water and a fresh supply of things to chew on that aren’t meant to be chewed on. And obviously the amount of time and energy required to raise dogs and children are vastly different.

I’m sure this is something that most first-timers go through and, at this point, I don’t think there’s anything I can do in the next few weeks to magically feel completely prepared about what’s going to take place. And that’s OK with me because I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to learn on the fly.