Let me set the scene for you: I was talking with some unidentified friends in a farmhouse that vaguely resembled my boyhood home. It was evening, and the topic of conversation naturally turned to Islamic wedding ceremonies. To settle an argument, one of my friends thumbed through her handy copy of the Koran but couldn’t find a section on weddings. I told her I could probably dig up the information downstairs in the library. I went down by myself (always a mistake in dreams or horror movies) and quickly found what I needed. There it was, a thick reference work on Islam, along with matching volumes on the other great religions. I pulled the book off the shelf and turned around to head back up the steps. Then I saw it, the horrible thing: the baby from hell, a three-foot-high demon in a diaper standing at the top of the stairs, blocking my path. I had dreaded this moment, for the evil reputation of this infant had somehow preceded him. I knew the kid was a killer. From the top of the steps he glared at me and bared his little sharklike teeth. In the most hideous voice imaginable, he hissed, ‘NOW I’ve got you!’ -- and flung himself furiously into the air, down the steps, directly at my face.

I had ample time to yell before Anne shook me awake. When I told her about my dream and asked her for an interpretation, she said, ‘This one’s obvious: you’re terrified of having a kid.’ 

She was right, of course. Although killer babies are still relatively scarce in the real world, veteran bachelors like me have learned to live in fear of their kind. What is it about kids that fills some of us with such abject dread? It’s not the little tykes themselves that panic me: after all, I like children almost as much as I like dogs. They’re generally cuddly and playful and touchingly innocent, at least until the age of four or five. They invent their own nonsense songs and games, believe in elves and dragons, express their instincts freely and insert crayons up their noses. (Like the bull market of the 1990s, kids are full of irrational exuberance.) I harbor absolutely no antipathy toward the little folks. I loved BEING a kid. It’s the prospect of HAVING kids that turns me into a quivering mound of flavorless gelatin. They’re fine as long as they belong to somebody else. But when you actually have to raise them from scratch, from the first gaseous belches of infancy -- well, you can never again enjoy what the sages (most of them childless, no doubt) call ‘peace of mind.’ Never again. EVER. Your offspring become your full-time vocation and preoccupation until you die. Their fevers are your fevers; their heartbreaks are your heartbreaks; their tattoos are your tattoos. When you become a parent, you implicitly agree to surrender all hope of tranquility for the rest of your natural life. Parenthood vexes and perplexes you like a 24-hour-a-day job, with this one vital difference: you can never take a vacation from it.

I’ve been kidless for roughly half a century, and I’ve grown accustomed to a merry abundance of personal liberty. Like most single males without heirs, I’ve been able to maintain a spectacularly unsanitary environment, eat peanut butter out of the jar, collect rocks and baseball cards at will, stay up until 3 a.m. and sleep the untroubled sleep of the self-indulgent (except when I have nightmares about killer babies). In short, I’ve been living the kind of life most little kids dream about. I find it sadly ironic that if you want to have a kid, you have to stop being one. You have to set guidelines, create motivation, supervise activities, provide feedback and administer punishment when necessary. Against your will, you become that most joyless and reviled of creatures: a boss.

Unfortunately you don’t get paid like a boss. More often than not, you divert your discretionary income so that your little underlings can grow, thrive and eventually become somebody else’s boss. But that’s part of the undeniable beauty of being a parent: you’ve danced in the circle of life, you’ve fulfilled your biological destiny, you’ve raised an heir, you’ve passed along whatever wisdom a chronically frazzled person can still impart. You’ve tossed your genes into the ring and fought the eternal fight to keep them humming for at least another generation. 

Though the hours are extreme and the pay is nonexistent, you can’t overlook the benefits: the spontaneous hugs, the bursts of gleeful laughter, the tenderness of bedtime, the rare opportunity to shape a new mind, the look of adoration in the child’s eyes. So what if we spend ourselves in the process? So what if the kids suck the life juices out of our aging hides? When I think about the potential for joy, I can almost forget the sharp-fanged little imp who flung himself down the stairs and made me yell in my sleep. Almost. I can’t tell you if Anne and I will be blessed with children. But if we are, you can bet I’m taking a good look at their teeth.

Cynic's Pick of the Week

The Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid known for its sensational stories about alien abductions, Elvis sightings and 90-lb. babies, published a purported ‘death photo’ of condemned terrorist Timothy McVeigh on its cover. Evidently they hadn’t heard that McVeigh’s execution had been postponed. I’m suspecting that their readers hadn’t heard, either.