Daddy Issues is a periodical about embracing, resenting and critically questioning what it means to be a father. It will attempt to account for the accomplishments and failures of a loving, contributing partnership in a human project. It will occasionally be insightful and/or funny (mostly in retrospect) due to its frightfully naive and oblivious author.
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My best friend is going to give birth to our child in about a month or so. No, we’re not ready. I don’t think we can be. It’s not that I’m not excited about it — it’s just that I’m caught wriggling beneath a massive Sisyphean boulder of anxiety when I think of the social, moral and economic gravity of raising another human being.
Do you realize that every human being on the planet is literally born from the sacrifice of a woman? Did you know that a fetus just holds all of the amniotic fluid, mucus and bile ingested in the uterus for when it’s born — and then passes it as a “vicious and sticky-like tar” in the first few hours and days after birth? Has anyone considered how this third person in our household will not pay rent for the next 18-ish years?
This is my current state of mind as a well-slept, well-nourished well-kept adult with hardly any real responsibility. “As long as we take turns freaking out, it’ll be okay,” is what we keep telling each other.
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Aaron Russin is probably not several children sitting on each other’s shoulders wrapped in a trench coat wearing a bowler cap. Follow them — I mean — *HIM* on twitter @aaronrussin.