With a little over 110 days to go in the pregnancy, I still have not overcome the one niggling little doubt that I’ve had since day one: how could I decide to bring a helpless little human being into the world?

You would have thought that I would have addressed this before now. And, frankly, I did, just to no final resolution. I was exceedingly torn over the notion of bringing a defenseless child into a world like this. It’s a tremendously cliched notion, but knowing this does not make my worry fade. The world right now is, err, troubled? Not right? F***ed? War, political strife, disease, disaster…the sorrows of modernity know no end. And yet the counter-argument would simply be, “but hasn’t every parent said the same thing, regardless of what era they lived in?” Perhaps. But I don’t know how they came to be at peace with themselves over it.

I decided that I couldn’t not have a kid. I’ve always said that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know I want to be a father. And it’s true. Why? Well if you believe in callings I suppose that’s where such rationale would fit nicely. Or perhaps it’s all more complicated, and the desire is for some narcissistic reason that I’ll discover in an awkward therapy session fifteen years down the road. I’m hoping for the former, rather than the latter.

So to sum it up, I wanted to be a father more than I knew that I could protect this kid or ensure that I wasn’t damning it to a painful, tortured life of it’s own. A terrible gamble with stakes that really have little to do with me. In this light, it all seems so cruel and unfair. It makes me want to apologize profusely to the kid when I finally get to see (insert gender pronoun) in June.

This still wakes me up at night. And I fear it won’t disappear any time soon. Or maybe it will eventually, just to be replaced by the fear of the kid falling face-first down a flight of stairs in the middle of the night like dear ol’ dad did as a youngster. And then after I find out that (insert gender pronoun)’s large head cushioned their fall, and that they’ll be okay, I can return to feeling inconsolably guilty about subjecting them to this vile world.

Guess I know how therapy alcoholism pampering starts.