January 10, 2012 at 8:48 pm , by Nick Shell
13 months.
Recently I saw a quiz here on Parents.com that you could take to find out if you’re ready for a second child. I didn’t need to take the quiz. With no hesitation, I thought to myself, nope.
I am still too self-centered, still too greedy with what little free time I do have in the day, and honestly, my ability to trust in God for all it would take for a second kid isn’t strong enough. I’m ashamed but willing to admit it.
My honesty here also reveals a white elephant; there is no guarantee my wife and I would even be blessed with a second child when the time does come that we are “ready.” So I don’t mean to be assuming or ungrateful that we so effortlessly received our son Jack.
But in this moment, I am sort of terrified at the thought of returning to the days of a crying baby in the middle of the night. (I trained my son to sleep through the night back when he was 6 months old and haven’t had to worry about this problem since then.)
Man, the frustrations of not having the same motherly instincts to be awoken by a baby’s cry and therefore my wife having to take the brunt of it. Then there’s the fact that instinctively, I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time with an infant anyway.
Seriously, it’s taken 13 months for me to even feel somewhat necessary in my own home.
That’s the biggest frustration for me, as a dad, that I don’t feel needed or necessary in raising an infant. And I know I’m not alone in this. This is the kind of thing that other daddy bloggers probably write about and dads who don’t blog, still think about.
I like being needed and knowing how to help. But the worst parts of those first couple of months as a dad were like being in a play where I didn’t know the lines. I was supposed to be this certain character but I wasn’t even given a script before showtime. I’m so glad that at this point in fatherhood, I can at least ad-lib my lines and make the scene work.
Like I said, I’m too self-centered for Kid #2 right now. And that brings us to the other white elephant: What other way to be cured of my greed than to be surprised by another child? There’s not.
Having a kid, and I assume having more kids, further breaks a man down to the point he doesn’t worry as much about what he will lose; but instead, he will focus on what will he gain.
I bet that’s what Jim Bob Duggar would tell me.
A few weeks ago as I was getting ready for work, I heard my 13 month-old son Jack screaming as my wife was understandably frustrated; she was trying to put a new diaper on him as he violently resisted on his bedroom floor.
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