Yesterday I spent six hours languishing over just how much money I’m going to have to spend to be a complete disaster of a father to my child that has yet to be born. Or, as I told my employer, I spent the day visiting potential daycare centers. Same thing.

Despite having put it off for as long as possible, The Wife™ and I finally scheduled time to have a look at a few places. She had done quite a bit of research and narrowed the list down to eight potential centers. And when you remember that the kid will spend 10 hours of each day there, you realize with a renewed sense of nausea that “crucial” is not a severe enough word to accurately describe the importance of this decision.

All of the places were fine. None of the daycares were sketchy in the slightest. Yet like a bad episode of Pop-Up Video (blooop!), the nagging feeling that recurrently dominated my thoughts at each new place was just how much of a failure I am to this kid. I do not make enough money and therefore am not successful enough to support my wife on my salary alone, thus forcing my child to spend almost all of his/her time in the care of complete strangers. It’s that simple.

No, my wife doesn’t think this way. Nor do my parents or in-laws, or anyone else who knows me for that matter. But the self-imposed fact still remains that this is how I see myself. And it kills me.

Is daycare inherently evil? Of course not. In fact, many would argue that the good points far outweigh the bad in relation to social development and even resistance to leukemia. My wife comes from a daycare background and thus does not fully understand my dramatic aversion to it. But can’t help it, as I come from a household where my mother sacrificed an exceedingly promising government career for her children, and could do so because of my father’s job. I want to be able to offer my wife that same choice.

“But the self-imposed fact still remains that this is how I see myself. And it kills me.”

It’s said that today it’s almost impossible to do it. All I know is that in our household, with my current job, we can’t. And simply saying those two words rings a deafening bell of failure for my being, an indictment of my dereliction as a father and husband.

So soon we’ll have to make the big decision, choosing which Bleach Odor Academy will take our money dampened with the tears of both guilt and necessity. And we better get a move on if we don’t want to be double-failures and not able to get on the right waiting list.

Sigh.

Amidst all the injuries and other minor miseries of the past few months, it seems as if Jonas (having passed his second birthday) is now in a bit of behavioral regression. Old habits that were thought to be conquered have poked out again, at a time that I must admit is a little less than ideal.

Our family members have been worried about Jonas and his, err, excitability with the baby on the way. We’ve joked about it, we laugh it off. But in the back of my mind I truly am worried. I had pinned my hopes on the idea that he would magically be un-puppified when he hit age two, as his first birthday seemed to mark a rather drastic difference. But now, with a scant 10 weeks left until The Big Show™, I’m becoming increasingly concerned.

There’s not much to do, I suppose, beyond practicing patience and reinforcing his fundamental training. We’ll have to ignore the willful exertions of adolescent dominance and general mischievousness, praying that he doesn’t maul the baby’s face upon first meeting.

But really, if he would just get over his new “defending the castle” schtick we’d be slightly better friends. A leaf, that man cutting his grass and that bird across the street are not a threat to you, sir, and your booming barks do little but scare the living bejeezus out of us. And greatly diminish any chance you have of getting a treat.

When you’re young, and still locked inside the tyranny of a school year, you are never the less privileged in a way that only a young mind would fail to notice. Focusing on the daily, dull drudgery contains the mind, enslaving it to the notion that life is boring and unfair. Days agonizingly pass while you’re not allowed to stay at home playing Nintendo or riding bikes. But eventually, and always eventually, summer rolls around.

Each year, as the snowy fields gave way to greener landscapes and sunnier dispositions, we could smell freedom. March relented to April, and soon May arrived, bringing with it an almost uncontrollable urge for release. The welcomed spring temperatures were matched entirely by an air of hope and excitement.

But much is lost in the transition to adulthood.

When you grow up, you are thankful that daily threats of looming homework fade away, along with nagging parents who would scold you for watching television immediately. But what also fades away is this notion of a measured year, a scheduled break. No matter how weary you were, how burned out tests and classmates made you, there was always that proverbial end in sight.

Now, the arrival of spring merely signals the addition of outdoor chores to the list of those still undone indoors. And if you’re unfortunate enough to not have any vacation planned, there doesn’t seem to be much hope or excitement in the air as once used to be. The jittery legs and wandering minds from childhood don’t have much purpose or direction. Yet another sad reality of being an adult, another thing that I wish I took for granted less as a child. Goodness knows I would gladly trade homework time to have that end-of-May finish line back. Gladly.

When it comes to politics, economics, international diplomacy or anything else remotely, err, adult? Well I’m an idiot. I have little knowledge (yet a healthily restrained desire to learn), and don’t pretend to be an armchair authority on anything. But actually, none of this is really about that. Certainly not about politics or parties.

I think it’s pretty widely-acknowledged now that the US has taken captives from around the world, and moved these people, identified as “persons of interest” to a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. Both Fox News and CNN could agree on this, I’d say. Or at least they’ve reported it.

Going a step further, the detainees here have been treated “harshly,” whether you see that as right or wrong, justified or unfair. I restrain from weighing in on this in public. But all major news outlets (and worldwide) have reported on many of the interrogation techniques used and living conditions of these camp detainees. And knowing this (again, free of political bias), I still can’t come to grips with one thing.

If there were/are people in the world that hate western culture, hate America and whatever it seems to stand for these days, how does treating them this way make anything better? Those that are released and allowed to go back home, are they really going to just go back to living a “normal” life? Can they? Those that die in captivity, what sort of message does it send to their relatives back home? Certainly it’s not one wrapped in condolence, one claiming that they died for a good cause.

The nagging thought in my mind since watching the towers fall my senior year in college is, how is this retaliation not going to foster an entirely second generation of extreme hatred? How is any sort of heavy-handed military action not going to give justification for countless lifetime promises of revenge against our country?

I don’t know. My knowledge is too shallow and my mouth too restrained to even wager a guess. But it does not change the fact that I worry about this. I worry about it in the context of the world that I’m bringing a child into, a world that truly is far more complex than what you, I or any talking head realizes.