The Apple of My Eye

You Can't Always Get What You Want

The end is the beginning is the end, so the song goes. Or maybe it's the other way around, I don't really know.

What I do know is that when I held Rebecca in my arms for the very first time, still in the delivery room, and she looked into my eyes—I'm sure she couldn't really have been looking, but let me get my point across here—I knew that was a pivotal moment in the direction my life was going to take from then on. And she didn't beat around the bush, either, my little Rebecca. She was a major screamer, I tell you, to the point that she scared me a little. I thought there could be something wrong with her.

"She's perfectly fine, don't worry. It's great that she's letting it all out like that," the nurse assured me. "She's just mad we got her out of her mommy, is all."

Her "mommy" was perfectly fine, too, by the way. It had been Chloe's second C-section, and, like the first time, everything had gone according to plan. We shared in that moment like there was nothing wrong between the two of us. And there really wasn't. We had incorporated a sense of civility to our act that was truly admirable. Plus, everything else seems insignificant when you're invested in bringing a child into this world. Everything pales in comparison. The whole concept is overwhelming. Chloe and I were too absorbed in the moment to care about all our troubles and tribulations. And while I wasn't acting as a birthing coach or anything of the sort, I wasn't the squeamish kind of dad, either. This was my second child, and I was determined to be there for her just as much as I had been there for Victoria, from the very first second.

I was still in the blue sky scrubs and the head cover the nurses had given me when I proudly showed off my baby to Victoria and my parents. Rebecca was wrapped so tight in this white blanket she looked like a plastic doll that had been made to look like a real baby. She was no beauty contest winner, few newborns are, but she was so still and peaceful now. Victoria was ecstatic to be meeting her little sister, and I was drooling all over the place looking at my two beautiful spawns.

Just the sheer thought that I could ever give up on them and make them the second most important aspect of my life seemed so improbable and so damn selfish now. I could not think of a better or more logical reason for me to be alive than to bring these two girls into the world, and then bring them up right, you know, make sure they would grow up into happy, well-adjusted women.

See, the irony of it all is that here I was, having wished for a baby boy for no reason other than variety, then for a while wishing Rebecca hadn't even been conceived at all, then all of a sudden I had two girls to call mine and take care of. If there is a God, then he must have a sense of humor, and a wicked one at that, for thinking that a self-absorbed son of a bitch like me could be just what two little girls needed in their lives. It's not like I ever viewed myself as a misogynist. I didn't, and I'm really not. I'm convinced I'm not. I love women. Always have. All shapes and sizes. I love just being in their company. But I was a hopeless wanderer, that much I couldn't deny. I was aware of my shortcomings then as I am now, I'd be the first to admit. And I knew that, to everybody else, from the outside looking in especially, me moving in with a sweet young thing half my age was akin to being a major chauvinistic cliché of a man. All right. I can live with that assessment. Even if the experience had been somewhat different than that.

Be that as it may, though, I was not about to let my daughters down. Oh no. I couldn't allow myself to do that. It's not that, deep inside, I wanted to get the hell out of their lives and hope that they did all right without me in the picture, but couldn't bring myself to a thing like that because then I'd be consumed by guilt. That really wasn't the reasoning at all. It was the complete opposite. I wanted to be around them for my sake. Every day of their lives for as long as I lived. Well, that's an exaggeration, but you see where this is going.