A letter to my unborn son

You should know we had you for selfish reasons. For us, not for you.

Before your mom, I dated other women. Almost married one of them. When we broke up, I thought about becoming a single dad. Could single men adopt? I looked into it and found that they could. Apparently it’s a thing now. Hard, but doable. I decided not to. I didn’t want you that badly.

When I first talked to your mother, she cried.

Your auntie Joey and uncle James introduced us. So I slid into your mom's DMs (I’ll explain later), and asked her if she wanted to talk about a Paul Graham essay we both liked. (This was a common courtship ritual in our day.) She said yes, and we scheduled a FaceTime call.

We talked for three hours; she wept. We spoke for hours every night that week, and every night, your mother wept. You’ll have to ask her why. It’s as easy for her to cry as it is difficult for me. I hope you’ll take after her. In adulthood, anyway. Crying is a good thing.

She rented a car and Airbnb, flew from California to Hawaii, and quarantined for three days so we could meet. I was so excited to finally meet her. But when we finally did meet in person, we didn’t like each other. Not at all. If it weren’t for the pandemic and thousands of dollars in sunk costs, we wouldn’t have gone on a second date. Two years later, we married. (Three times!)

When we decided to have you, she didn’t like kids. She still doesn’t.

For her, procreation was about spreading her genes. I don’t understand this about her. Nothing special about my genes, as far as I’m concerned. But she was concerned. Her genes had to continue. She’d frozen eggs, in two rounds of IVF just to be safe, years before she and I met. (We didn’t use them, you came au naturel.) 

She could dote on her cat for hours, spend afternoons at the vet attending to every minor ailment, but she couldn’t see the point of having a kid. Besides the promulgation of genes. A means to an end.

I laughed it off, certain she’d change her attitude once you arrived. But a part of me wondered what I’d signed up for. Was I about to effectively be a single dad after all?

There was a part of me that looked forward to that challenge. Maybe I’d assemble a team of fellow single men to share the burden, leading to hilarious and heartwarming hijinks. Like that movie Three Men and Little Baby. (Movies were like these 2 hour-long TikTok videos. Except they were sideways instead of up and down. And you had to go to a special big dark room with a sticky floor to watch them and pay $18 and if you talked while you watched someone would yell at you. If you got bored, you couldn’t just swipe to the next one either, you just had to keep watching, or leave.)

I like kids.

I like my nieces and nephew. You’ll meet them soon enough. I like playing with them when I visit, then I like going back to my neat and orderly life.

I thought it might be pretty fun to have a little me running around. But I wasn’t really looking forward to the baby part.

In my 20s I idolized a few designers, and one was this rebellious guy named Tibor Kalman. I only found out about him by reading his obituary. (When someone important died, they used to publish these little essays about their life in the newspaper, which was…like these huge sheets of paper with the Internet printed on them. It came out once a day and it was about everything that happened the day before.)

I read everything about Tibor once I found out about him. He was a badass. And in one of his interviews he talked about how having kids was one of the best things he did. He said he was able to see the whole world anew through their eyes and it had a huge impact on his creative work. That seemed pretty cool.

When I got leukemia when I was 31, they told me I had to start chemo right away. And that the chemo would make me sterile. They asked me if I wanted to freeze my sperm, in case someday I wanted a kid like you. I said yes. But as I lay in that hospital room dying, connected to beeping machines, while nurses and doctors burst into my room every few minutes to take blood, ask questions, or run tests, masturbation–that’s when…well, we’ll get to that later–anyway, masturbation seemed impossible. I gave up in frustration. Who needed kids anyway?

They were right, the chemo did sterilize me.

But some years later, miraculously, my sperm started working again.

And now here you (almost) are.

You should know our lives are really good without you.


We have a dog. I have a company and I work with people I genuinely adore. We live in Hawaii. We just got married, and we’re in love. We watch shows and read books and workout and take walks and sleep in on weekends and generally luxuriate in our time. I work a lot, but it’s because I like it a lot..

I was wrong, our lives aren’t good, they’re great. We don’t need you to make them better.

So, why you. Why now?

I’m honestly not sure.

It might be this look we’ve seen on other people’s faces when they talk about their kids and how their lives changed once they did…they get a kinda goofy, cult-ish look.

If it was just one or two of them, I’d nod and smile and find someone else to talk to. But it seems like almost all of them.

They just really like their kids. Even when their kids seem like absolute jerks.

It could be a shared mass delusion. But if they’re this happy about it, maybe we should delude ourselves too.

And there’s something else. I think we both feel it.

It’s a hint. A sense, a scent, a tickle in the back of our minds that there’s something more. That the point isn’t just to cook some nice meals and do some good work and be good to ourselves and to others. That maybe there’s some deeper part of the human experience that isn’t any of these things. Something we’re missing out on. Something that might complete the whole thing.

I mean, people spend their life savings, decades of their lives, and all of their time. They sacrifice their careers to raise a screaming baby into an ungrateful teenager that resents them and think they’re the lamest person on earth…and they seem to think they made the right call.

Gotta be something to it.

I’m eager to meet you, little one. And terrified of all the ways our lives will change as a result. In my experience there aren’t anywhere near as many one-way tickets in life as people think there are. But this probably is one, despite the fact that your mom says we can always give you up if you suck.

See you soon,

Dad

p.s. My heart just did a skip beat when I typed “Dad” just there. That’s the first time I’ve written it and meant myself.

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