I'm Having a Baby

WHAT THE F*CK DO I DO NOW?

Well, my wife is having a baby.

But what’s hers is mine, so I have squatter’s rights (or something). The looming dad apron of fatherhood is a huge milestone for a couple of reasons.

A). I haven’t had a baby before, not unless Tamagotchis count, in which case I forgot to feed my “baby” for a day, and it turned back into an egg.

B). I wasn’t sure I could have children because I’d been blasted by so much chemotherapy that the doctors thought my swimmers might have packed up and left the pool.

If you’re a parent — or were once a baby — perhaps you can relate to my thoughts on fatherhood.

Let’s call them Daddy’s Deep Thoughts (eww, let’s not).

I think… baby naming is a nightmare

Choosing a baby name is hard.

Quick, think of a cool name… chances are there’s someone with that name who was a dick to you once. If a ‘Samantha’ threw sand at you in kindergarten, that name is tainted. Thanks Sam, you bitch. Also, ‘Sandy’ is out because it reminds me of the sand Samantha threw.

I thought AI might be useful, so I made a reasonable request for names that would help my child live a successful life. The results were as AI as you’d expect.

Cashmere Lux is the name of a dancer in the first strip club on Elon Musk’s terraformed Mars. I’m sure baby Cashmere will make a set of parents proud someday, but it isn’t for me.

Also, who knows what will happen to a name in the future? In 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966 and 1968, the most popular name in the world was ‘Karen’. That name has vanished faster than a Mars dollar down Cashmere Lux’s g-string.

I never had this much trouble picking names for my pets, though some people (my parents) would argue that calling a pet scorpion ‘Jack The Nipper’ was a bit stupid. I maintain it was the type of pun a predatory arachnid would love if they had the brain to comprehend it.

I think… I’ll try and be patient

I’ve been a cancer patient. As a father, I’ll try to be generally patient. I’ve been on the kid's side. Now, I’ll experience the family dynamic as a parent.

The Porters were a bath family (even though we also had a shower), and it was the Porter way to stand up and shake the water off your legs before you stepped out of the tub and dried off. Once, after a good soak, I stood up and kicked out like a mule, connecting with the faucet and snapping it clean off the wall.

I could tell my Dad was annoyed even though water still filled the bath. It just came out of a hole in the wall like a mini waterfall or sewage outlet instead of a tap like other families. We didn’t fix it for a while, and eventually, the bath-hole became normal to me. I missed it a little when it was gone.

It’s only now that I realise we didn’t immediately fix the tap because we couldn’t afford to. It wasn’t an avante-garde design choice. My Dad was the sole provider for a family of four kids, and the last thing he wanted to see after working all day was one of those kids crane kick his faucet from the wall like I was about to win the Under 18 All-Valley Karate Championship tournament.

I got in trouble for being a dumbass — but no one screamed at me, no one made me feel like a fuck up, and no one turned me into an outlet for their frustration.

Entering fatherhood has helped accelerate the gradual change in how I view my parents over the last fifteen years. It’s hard enough for me to put dog food in a bowl and food on the table (or, worse, get it the wrong way around).

My Dad did an incredible job bringing his five sons into the world (with minimal destroyed bathroom fixtures). When it would have been easier for him to erupt at me, he chose a path of patience.

If I can show the same patience in the face of my own kid’s inevitable "WHY THE F*CK DID YOU DO THAT” moments, I’ll be happy.

“If do right, no can defence.”

I think… there’s a ton of pressure to do things the “right” way

My childhood best friend lived up the street from me — maybe a 2-minute walk.

After a day of smashing lemons with a cricket bat, his Mum told him to walk me home. When we got to my house, we decided he shouldn’t walk home alone, so I turned around and walked him home. Naturally, this posed a challenge when we reached his house. He was now home, but I was not.

For ten minutes, our parents frantically swapped phone calls, wondering where their respective children were, until they went outside to see us marching up and down the road like the world’s stupidest explorers.

That was the type of potential trouble we faced growing up in suburban Australia in the 90s.

Today, kids are using iPads before they can speak. What does that screen time do to their brains? What risks come with growing up in the technology generation? When are you meant to get a kid a phone… a social media account… a cricket bat to smash lemons?!

I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but since my wife called my ‘Daddy’ outside the bedroom for the first time, these thoughts have looped around in my mind like two idiot kids walking each other home.

I don’t even have my child earthside yet, but I worry about the earth they’ll enter.

Knowing what to do—or not to do—feels overwhelming, and I have no idea what path I’m meant to take.

I think… I never thought this would happen to me

Early in my cancer treatment, a doctor suggested I should freeze my sperm because of the damage chemotherapy can do. I felt this was an excellent idea and looked forward to the next steps (especially the harvesting). Instead, I never heard from that doctor again.

I hadn’t given much thought to being a father when I was diagnosed with leukemia because I was only 20, and also I hadn’t even had sex at the time. This is called putting the cart before the horse. It’s like signing up for a marathon when you haven’t done any training… and don’t even know how to walk.

It was years after cancer and I broke up that fatherhood became something I thought about. At first, the main appeal was Father’s Day. I only get gifts at Christmas and on my birthday. Adding Father’s Day would increase my “gift days” by 50% — there’s no denying that’s a huge statistical jump.

As my cancer experience fell further and further behind me, the general fear I had about relapsing faded. And when I could finally stop looking back, it was easier to see what might be ahead.

I wanted to be a dad.

I think know what comes next

Uncertainty can be crippling.

Whether it’s the fear of relapse that plagued me or a more personal uncertainty in your life around your job, family, or direction, an obscured view weighs down the soul.

Despite all my concerns and unanswered questions about becoming a Dad, I’m not afraid. The path ahead is too dark to see, but there are footprints alongside mine — someone has been here before.

On the day I was diagnosed with leukemia, my Dad pulled me into a bear hug and said, “It shouldn’t be you in that hospital bed. It should be me”. I could tell he meant it. As he held back tears, I could feel his pain. I knew he would switch places with me if he could.

I couldn’t vocalise it then; everything was moving too fast, but I wrote about that day in my Cancer Diary. I wrote down my Dad’s heartfelt words and how he’d said he would switch places with me. With tears in my eyes, I wrote that I wouldn’t have let him.

I gifted him the diary years later, knowing he’d read that.

We’ve never spoken about it, but that’s OK. I know he read it. I know he would have taken my cancer from me if he could, and I know I would have taken it right back. His love for me was cancelled out by my love for him.

That’s the level of love I have for my daughter already, and as scary as all the parenting unknowns are, I’m comforted in what I do know.

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t think we ever do — whether we’re parents or not.

But I know I’ll do everything I can to be to her what my Dad is to me.

Everything else will make sense along the way.

I can feel it.

With love,

New World Porter

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