Daddy dilemma

Piper believes that we -- or at least she -- can be plenty happy if it's just us. Time was, you had to have children -- more hands on the farm and all that. Those days, and that necessity, are long gone. Our fortress can stand on four legs. It's a logical, yet relatively unspoken idea, especially coming from a woman. In fact, more and more women feel this way -- but the reality remains that we're talking about very recent history versus the way things have been for the last 40,000 years or so. Piper has no problem saying: I love kids, but maybe I don't need to have one of my own.

When the rest of the world demands to know why you don't want kids, Piper's response is that people should know why they want them, not why they don't. And if you want them, can you handle it? Are you ready? More specifically, she wants to know, am I ready? Am I, in her words, "emotionally prepared"?

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Although my fiancee's official party platform states that she desires no kids, this "emotionally ready" bit is interesting. She'll consider kids, she's said for a few years now, once she's convinced I have a more nuanced grasp of what I'll be getting myself into. But as the years go by, the "emotionally ready" gap closes (if slowly). I'm older and calmer and -- yeah -- wiser than I used to be. I'm smart enough to know just how much I have to learn. I'm experienced enough to realize that people rise with the celebration or calamity they're confronted with. Nobody is ready for landing the winning lottery ticket or surviving a tsunami, but when it happens, you just deal. Into this sociological stew comes the math: Piper's being 30 percent in favor of something is a long way north of zero. The womb, it appears, is ajar.

In the end, I know I'm just a chicken. I'm as afraid not to have children as I am to have them. I've got a nagging feeling that life could be passing on by, a worry that my experiences are not, when this Smith's smoke clears, going to equal total fulfillment. I don't want to be the guy who is so focused on his career and pursuit of what I have traditionally found to be pleasure that the rest of my life happens passively in the background. But when is it ever a good time to mess with a good thing if you've got it? And given that if we do have kids, it will kind of have been my idea, there's no way I'm going to not be majorly involved in raising the thing. I'm all for taking over traditionally female responsibilities like play dates and poopy diapers, but shifting my career into neutral, or worse, reverse? I want to be Zen about the future and invoke the poetry of Joseph Campbell who writes, "We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us." Problem is, I'm not sure if I need to abandon my original plan (a family) or the alluring new plan Piper puts forth (an infinite table for two).

There are reams of data available on women's choices, and next to none on men's. In one of the few official looks at male decision-making on having babies, a University of Montana study called "Men's Experience of Making the Decision to Have Their First Child" found that men talked mainly about their fears of what they would lose if they had a child: freedom, independence, and intimacy, for starters. "I was really struck at how little difference there was in how they talked about these potential losses, whether the man was 18 or 40," says study co-author Dr. Andrew Peterson. So there you have it: when we think about fatherhood, we don't think about what we'll gain, but what we'll lose. That's one sad statement. One that sounds awfully familiar.

It gets worse. Keep drilling down and a cost-benefit analysis of children doesn't yield a net gain. Kids are expensive, a constant cause of worry, and -- if all goes well -- will be completely crushed when you croak. "It's hard to understand why you would ever do this," says a new mom who went through a similar soul search before the rabbit died last year. "Then you see your child stand up for the first time, and..." Yes, yes, and it's the Greatest Thing Ever. I'm sure I'm at once too cynical and thinking too hard. But how will I find closure to such a huge choice when, after weighing outside factors -- family, history, biology, economics, my pals and peers, Piper's commitment -- I still find myself in a very real internal struggle? I keep waiting for the magic moment to happen. Trouble is, this moment ain't arriving via Ofoto, one of many Web sites I'm alerted to by my rapidly spawning friends eager to share the latest drippingly adorable candids of their kids. It won't come from the many preachings of my older sister (two young boys, one newborn girl, and one hopes a vasectomy to be named later), who enjoys cornering Piper at family gatherings and declaring, "I just want you to know if you have a child out of wedlock, that's OK." It's not arriving on the plane in which I write this, trying to drown out the truly awesome shrieks of the two-year-old a few rows behind me. Maybe the eureka moment will arrive if Piper decides it's something she wants to do (or at least moves her percentage north of 50 percent). She may joke about that mythical 27-year-old waiting to procreate with me, but when I toss it back at her wanting to know what she'll do if I decide I must pursue a daddy destiny, she sighs and admits, "Oh, you'll probably convince me to do it."

But I don't want to if she's not totally on board.

I'd probably love having kids. The question is: can I live without them? I've done a pretty good job of living without them so far. Trouble is, no matter how much the world changes, despite all the technological progress we've made, when it comes to kids, there's still exactly one way to find out.

Coming tomorrow: Salon checks in with Larry and Piper. One year later, are they closer to solving their "Daddy dilemma"?

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