Daddy Call, Part Two:

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In The Drying Flow of a Mucus Volcano

In truth, this feeling of unworthiness has been with me for as long as I can remember. A friend of mine and I once discussed how it seems that there are certain people who move through life with a sense that they are deserving of everything; the entitled, we called them. The entitled that we were speaking of were not rude, disrespectful, or self-centered. No, they were glowing, successful, self-loving individuals who seemed to feel unquestionably worthy of the abundant blessings in their lives. My friend and I hypothesized that this strong, healthy sense of worthiness was something that these people must have been born with, or perhaps it had been taught or modeled to them at a very early age. Unfortunately, we both agreed that neither one of us was one of those people. In addition, my friend went on to claim that it was impossible for those of us without this built in sense of entitlement to actually acquire it later in the game. I remember arguing against his dire summation at the time. Perhaps I just didn’t want to accept the fact that I was somehow the atrophied product of some kind of inbred disenfranchisement. Back then, however, our debate seemed mostly esoteric, theoretical, and untestable. After the daddy call, however, I was challenged; I was at a cross roads.

Because while Cara claimed that for the purposes of procreation the disease in my body could be washed away so that there would be no risk of passing it on – I did not know for sure that the same held true for the disease of my spirit; my unworthiness. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus is detectable, measurable, quantifiable, and lives and replicates itself in specific places in the body; most notably blood and semen, so the concept of obtaining a sperm sample and then cleaning it of contagion before moving forward with insemination made sense. But where is the infection that prevents me from feeling entitled? Where is that human deficiency residing in me? When the question was posed by my therapist before I took off to grad school, I had no answer. And, again, when faced with the prospect of becoming a father, I could not pinpoint with any accuracy where my recurrent feeling of unworthiness was rooted. And if I am unable to isolate the origin of its growth, how can I hope to eradicate it? Or, in the very least, reduce it to a level low enough to make the possibility of infecting my child an acceptable risk?

At this moment, the weighty conundrum makes me think of my late grandfather’s backyard. When I was a child he owned an acre of land in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. In my memory, at the center of the large plot, out behind an old, abandoned potting shed was a massive tangle of overgrowth. At the center two tall walnut trees had come up so close together that they had, over many years, become fused into one massive trunk. The limbs were blended, knotty, roped, twirls stretching out in all directions. Covering that, a vine of some kind had grown unchecked and enveloped the conjoined treess from bottom to top, and the long, greenish brown tendrils hung from the massive unkempt crown like an old fishing net draped over a rusty beach umbrella. As a little boy I viewed it all as staggeringly beautiful. It was a shady, cool, jungle-like fortress; a one of a kind refuge in the hot, Southern California summers of my youth. Now, in retrospect, it strikes me as a little sad that those majestic, steadfast, twin trees were allowed to be overtaken and transformed into a bound up, choking trellis for some out of control, interloping shrub. I have felt like that.

At some point shortly after Cara’s phone call – in the drying flow of a mucus volcano – something occurred to me. Never once in all of the emotional tumult did it ever cross my mind that being a father was something that I did not want. I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything.

So, I was left with only two choices.

I could move forward, without retrospection, and begin the mysterious journey that might lead me to the birth of a child, and I could just simply hope for the best – in spite of the self-awareness that I somehow felt undeserving. It might turn out all right. Much like those walnut trees that stood steadfast in my grandfather’s backyard, while buried under mountains of overgrowth for so many years. After all, as a child I had always looked on their heavy and hampered existence as something exotic and beautiful. Perhaps a child of mine would view me in the same accepting, poetic light. A father, doing the best he could to stand tall under the weight of some long ago planted heavy burden that should have never been there in the first place. Perhaps, like me with those old trees, my child would not look on the whole, sad, untended, true complexity of the matter until I was long cut down and many years plowed under.

I could do that.
Or…
I could try to become worthy.
Somewhere between the daddy call that left me overwrought at the base of a huge temperature gauge at the Gateway to Death Valley, and my decision to come clean…
…I chose the latter.

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