parenthood.

I am twenty-four. Angela is twenty-three. We’re practically spring chickens. Right? I mean, based on our fairly conservative, non-smoking, always-look-both-ways-when-crossing-the-street lifestyle, I would gage that we both have somewhere between sixty and eighty years of life left in us. Maybe more if we lay off the Diet Coke and cellular telephones. That leaves us plenty of time to engage in the archetypal activities of adulthood—traveling, investing, quietly developing hemorrhoids, shopping at JC Penny, replacing the rock n’ roll music in our CD cases with whole albums of ocean sounds, and perhaps most importantly, procreating.

But if you compare us with our peer group (straight, college-age, suburban, excruciatingly white, Mormon newlyweds), we are falling behind at a rather alarming pace—especially when it comes to that “procreation” part. Some of our friends and acquaintances are on their second or third pup by now. All the potentially sharp edges in their homes are behind flimsy plastic gates or under multiple layers of egg-carton foam. But not our house. It’s a virtual death trap. A child probably wouldn’t survive ten minutes. We keep our knives in a knee-high drawer. Our poisonous cleaning products sit on the tile of the pantry floor, just inches from bottles of organic lemonade. Once we left our iron piping hot and sitting on the carpet for nearly two hours because we got wrapped up in an episode of Law and Order: SVU (and then Monk, which came on right after it). What kind of environment is that for a child?

In essence, we just haven’t yet converted to the parental way of thinking. If you ask me how old my twin nephew and niece are, I will tell you they are one year old and be done with it. A true parent, on the other hand, thinks differently. “Oh Olivia here, she’s twenty-two and a half months.” The conversation comes to a dead halt while I carry a six or contemplate what to do with a remainder of nine. I eventually give up. “So what’s that make her, like four?”

But this isn’t to say that Angela and I don’t want kids. We do. Especially Angela. She makes a real spectacle of herself whenever we encounter a newborn, infant, toddler or other variety of pre-adult. She fawns over them, suddenly unable to compose a cohesive sentence. Sometimes I think she is silently coveting the child. Or even waiting for the parent to look away so she can snatch the baby and run. I await the day when a valley-wide Amber Alert warns of a brown-haired, twenty-something woman in a slate grey, late model Mazda. She’d be spotted heading south on I-10. The authorities would assume that she was en route to Mexico, but they’d be wrong—just on her way to the Baby Gap outlet in Casa Grande.

But I think having a child will be far more fulfilling if it’s legitimately ours. Things always seem more worthwhile when you work for them. And I can only imagine what it would feel like to hold in my arms a little creature of my own creation. It’d have my nose or Angela’s feet. I’d be really excited to watch it to grow. Forget ounces and pounds. Everyday I’d compare its size to the breadbox that sits on our kitchen counter. “Angela, Angela! Guess what? He’s definitely bigger than a breadbox!” When it was older I’d teach it all about the interesting nuances of humanity like blue darts and that thing with Mentos and Diet Coke. The whole prospect excites me very much, especially with all the Hollywood stars that seem to be endorsing parenthood lately. I figure if a coked-out Brad Pitt can handle a half dozen kids, so can I.

But the real question is “Am I really ready for that kind of responsibility?” and honestly, I’m not sure of the answer. A little less than half the plants we’ve bought since we got married are now dead. I guess that gives the hypothetical kid about a fifty percent chance of survival. Sixty percent on a good day. I figure if worst comes to worst, we could always have another one.

optimism.

I am all about the power of positive thinking. I try very hard to be a the glass is half full kind of guy. I even try to encourage other people to have positive attitudes. For instance, whenever I go through the drive-through at a fast food restaurant I always let the workers know that they probably won’t be stuck in their sucky job forever. “Just hang tight buddy. Things will get better,” I assure them while reaching out my car window to apprehend the grease-drenched bag. “Oh, and my wife would like a different soda. She says she saw you touch the straw. Thanks.”

Why do I do it? Well, because I am of the opinion that pretty much everybody would benefit from cranking up the optimism a notch or two. The only exception is gambling addicts. As a group, gambling addicts are way too optimistic. Collectively, we need to bring them down a peg. But other than that, yeah, pretty much everyone. Go optimism!