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From The New York Times, I’m Anna Martin. This is Modern Love.
Today’s essay is about a woman who knows she wants a baby. She just needs to figure out how she’s going to get pregnant. The essay is called “Seeking a Father for my Child, (Relationship Optional)” written by Katharine Dion and read by Frankie Corzo.
Two days before I left South Dakota, Rex and I sat talking beneath the open hatchback of my car. In the distance, a lightning storm moved toward us over the open expanse of the Great Plains.
He was talking passionately about lithium batteries. I considered myself someone who could be interested in almost anything, especially when I was attracted to the person. But I asked myself, did I care about batteries?
In the lyrical version of what happened as the storm approached, we would have stopped talking and taken seriously the pleasure of our bodies. But I wanted to have a baby, and that made dating in my late 30s less like a poem and more like a math problem.
I didn’t care about having a relationship for a certain amount of time before we had a baby, or being in love, or getting married. I wanted to like the biological father of my child, maybe admire him. That was about it. I had observed that the more worried I was about getting pregnant, the less discerning I was about love.
It was easy to figure out which was more urgent. I planned to get pregnant using an anonymous donor sperm.
On my last evening with Rex, kissing in his tent, I realized there was a lot about him I didn’t know — who was in his life, where he worked, his last name. Before I crawled out of his tent, he asked for my phone number. He was headed home to Michigan and I to California. I told him I thought we should leave things exactly as they were, which seemed perfect to me.
What, are you crazy, he said? And he gave me his number.
Back home at the local sperm bank, I pored over anonymous donor questionnaires, trying to keep straight who liked video games and who preferred billiards. Phone conversations with Rex, though, were weird and memorable. He had inherited his father’s expressions, like son of a biscuit and jeez oh Pete’s.
He was the only 30-something adult I knew who had traveled on an airplane exactly once — a domestic round trip for a former job. He mentioned that his relationship with a woman in Michigan was crumbling. All he knew about me was that I wanted a child.
My search for a donor stalled, because I didn’t have a good feeling about any of them. When I finally told Rex about my plan to become a mother, he said, “I can help you with that.” I was silent.
Then I said, “Don’t say something like that without thinking about it.”
“I have.” He wasn’t interested in being a father or a co-parent, so we assumed that by the time I gave birth, he and I wouldn’t be romantically involved.
Soon he visited me in California. He had his first experience soaking naked with strangers in hot springs and his first contact with 1,000-year-old redwood trees. He cried. He gave back rubs that were accurate, not clumsy. His hands were full of life.
We were still working on our donor arrangement. We were also falling in love. I went to stay with him in Michigan, where he taught me how to use a chainsaw and care for chickens. Eventually, he followed me back to California, driving the whole way towing a homemade trailer filled with tools.
During this time, we were trying to live two separate stories — the one where every month we tried to conceive and the other where we were still getting to know each other. But the more we enjoyed ourselves, the more confusing our situation became.
Then I got pregnant. He was genuinely thrilled for me. Inwardly, though, he began to withdraw. He still didn’t want to be a father or co-parent. The idea of it brought up old wounds from his childhood. Every day of his indecision, I was tempted to try to convince him to stay. Most days I had enough sanity to recognize that if he stayed, it would harm us both.
On the day he left California, he took a photograph of me looking haunted. Then he got in his car and drove East. It was Father’s Day.
After he left, I scrambled into action, interviewing midwives, searching online for used baby gear and trying to explain to the being in my womb why I was crying a lot. I’m sorry, baby. I’m OK, just sad.
Then weeks later, without warning, a text arrived. I made a terrible mistake, he said. By then, I knew he wasn’t the only one.
When love and a baby coincided for me, I still believed I could separate the two and remain fundamentally unchanged. When Rex was gone, I remembered that tending to a lover or child is dirty work in the most wholesome sense. We don’t fall in love or have a baby to have our points of view and preferences affirmed. We do it, at least a little bit, to soften our singular, lonesome grip on reality and invite in the unexpected the undesirable and the inexplicable.
Rex came to this in his own way. He told me that since he left California, he had been listening to podcasts about fatherhood and looking at the picture of me he took the day he left. He’d been crying, too, and he wanted to come back. To the baby, I said, or to me? Both, he said. And he did.
He sold his heaviest tools, where he painted walls and put his house in Michigan up for sale.
And two months later, he was back in California in time to catch our son being born in his own hands.
After the break, we hear from Rex about what made him change his mind.
Hi, Rex.
Hi, Anna.
So Rex, you are — you’re a dad.
I am a dad.
You and Katy, the author of the essay, have a kid together — a little boy. Tell me about him. What is his — what’s his name?
Sandro.
Sandro.
Yeah. And he’s just turned 11 months old recently, and he’s a spectacular little man. It’s insane, creation and everything that comes along with it.
I feel like at that age, 11 months-ish, kids are always learning something new, like they always have a new trick. What is Sandro’s newest trick?
I’m not sure if it’s a trick, but he’s so amped up to check out the world and go from one thing to the next, that if you try to cut his fingernails even just inside the house, it’s difficult, because he’s wanting to go do something. So now I put him in this Ergo baby carrier just to stand on the deck outside. It’s all it really takes, because there’s so much to look at. And he calms right down, and he’ll let you hold his fingers, and clip his fingernails, and it takes about five minutes, and it’s all done.
Fingernail cutting with the view. You heard it here first.
Yeah, exactly.
So Rex, there’s this moment in the essay when Katy is finally pregnant, and you decide that you need to go back to Michigan. You need to leave her in California and go back to your home in Michigan. And then she writes in the essay that you drive away on Father’s Day. What did you feel like you were leaving behind in California?
Hmm. That was tough.
I wasn’t trying to think so much about what I was leaving. I was trying to think about what I was getting back to — my less carbon-intensive way of life and trying to — I mean, I’m kind of a builder, a tinkerer. I just like to fix stuff and make stuff better, and I was trying to work on solar mobility. And that was really what I was aiming to do, is get back and start working on that.
Tell me a little bit about what was going through your mind about Katy, about this kid, as you drove back to your life in Michigan.
So there was a lot of thinking about the things that I didn’t like about how I was raised. How could that have been better? You know, growing up I had a million questions. I was always trying to figure out why something was one way or another way.
I asked my dad questions, and at a certain point I remember he yelled at me for asking questions. And I kind of wonder if I just was getting in the way. And I think at a certain point I was just like, I can’t trust this man anymore. So I kind of became quiet. This was probably when I was around maybe six or seven, eight years old, something like that. And from then on, I just had a harder time with my dad. There’s a lot of pain around that for me still.
Did you ever see that more impatient, that angrier part of your dad in you as you got older?
You know, there was one instance with a previous partner who had a kid. And I raised my voice, which my dad often did to me. I raised my voice once. And in that moment, I kind of felt like I transformed briefly into my father in a way that I don’t want myself to be transformed. 5 seconds after that, it really hit me, like you are not ready to be a father. You have a lot of soul searching to do and a lot of things to think about.
So you leave California. You leave Katy. And in her essay, she writes that sort out of the blue, she gets a text from you. And you say, I made a terrible mistake. What was so terrible about it? What was the mistake?
You know, the terrible mistake was me not allowing myself to heal essentially from the wounds that I had as a kid. Some of the things that I wish hadn’t happened to me or some of the things that I wish had happened to me, that’s what I’m going to try to bring.
I’d love to know how specifically you think about breaking that pattern. Are there things you’re doing day to day with your son that feel to you like you’re breaking that pattern?
I think a lot of it is really we play, you know? I can’t imagine just not spending a bunch of time being curious about this little man. He has his own little world, and everything about him is different than anybody else. And I am so excited to spend time with him, and try to understand him, and just be there with him banging sticks on a little tiny xylophone. And I wish my dad would have had more time to spend with me, and so I’m trying to bring that to Sandro.
Rex is a tinkerer. He loves to make stuff, and he says the thing he’s most looking forward to is teaching Sandro can build things, too. He wants Sandro to ask him questions. And although Rex might not have all the answers, he’ll always be there letting his son know that it’s OK to ask.
“Modern Love” is produced by Elyssa Dudley, Julia Botero, Christina Djossa and Hans Buetow. It’s edited by Sara Sarasohn. This episode was mixed by Dan Powell, who also created the wonderful Modern Love theme music.
Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nell Gallogly, and a special thanks to Anna Diamond at Audm. The “Modern Love” column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.