Words. Labels for things, for people. We spend our whole lives making sense of them, I guess. Figuring out which one is the best, most accurate choice.

So many words become insider jargon in families: We are the only ones who know that “black toast intolerant” means “lactose intolerant”; that “minimisize it” means “minimize it,” which big pot is the “pasta pot.” These special languages that families create are another way they are individualized, that a family becomes a unique organism of its own.

Of course “widow” cannot apply to me. That word applies to little old ladies in fairy tales or someone who lives far, far down the street. My daughter cannot be identified forever by this one event.

But she is, and I am a widow, and in the months immediately afterward, we preferred life in the anonymity of Philadelphia over our small South Jersey town where even going to the convenience store means acquaintances’ pseudo-counseling, or others who steal quick looks at us, then look away, as if we are contagious.

We spent weekends in Philadelphia, and even though we live 15 minutes away, we slept on the floor of my brother’s one-bedroom, three-story walk-up, rather than in our own beds in our own four-bedroom, three-story home.

The kids learned that word, “walk-up,” and the phrase “wiz wit,” to get cheese sauce and onion on their cheesesteaks, and though they already knew what a contortionist is, and what break dancing is, and what a bong is, they get to see all of these things in Rittenhouse Square Park,  mere blocks from my brother’s place.

They learn these words because I could not sit my children down and say, here are words that changed your life: PICC line, ascites, carcinoid.

When Don was in and out of the hospital, and I learned more and more about his disease, its treatments, their side effects, I thought about language a lot, how I now knew all these words I had never even heard before. The gastroenterology team had to be updated about what the oncology team had said, and the interventional radiology people needed to know his newest albumen levels. There was a note in Don’s chart, “Ask the wife.”

“The wife”: my old label.

I would sit in the hospital and think about when we were first looking to buy a house, and how I was so proud when I could “speak real estate.” We would go out each evening with our real estate agent and look at six, seven houses a night.  I sat on the window seat of one home, nursed our baby Allison, and Don did a slow walk around the perimeter of the yard.  He came in and saw us there, and said, “Oh, so this is the one.”  And everything felt right and rich and I wanted to go to sleep right there, on the bare wood of the empty house that just that moment had become our home.

Once the house was ours I would wander around Home Depot and marvel at the language spoken there, how I felt like some mole who had just come up from underground to discover a whole other world going on above. The “wife” label, the “mother label,” the “homeowner label” all new; none felt generic, at least to me, they were points of pride and exactly where I wanted to be.

About two months after Don died, the kids and I were at a friend’s beach house and we watched the new version of “Freaky Friday.”  In it, a widow remarries, much to the teen daughter’s (initial) dismay.  When the movie was over, Hayley, 11 years old at the time, said, “Mom. You can get married again. In three years. Don’t get married again for three years.”

Allison stood up and just started yelling at Hayley. “She can’t get married again in three years. She can’t get married again ever. I’m not going to have a stepdad.”  Christopher, only 5 years old, said, “I would like a dad, Allison.”  Allison yelled at him, too, and soon I was saying, over and over, “We don’t have to talk about this right now.”  And none of us could understand what the other was saying.

When Allison was 5 or 6, the boy from across the street, a year older and therefore much wiser, took it upon himself to teach her how to properly pronounce “yellow.” She said “lell-o” and I hadn’t had the heart to correct her. The charm of her mispronunciation mattered more to me. I listened from the kitchen as he broke it into two syllables and made her repeat, again and again, “Yell-oh, yell-oh.” I wanted to rush in and stop him but knew that I couldn’t, that it was time, that it was natural and organic and even lovely that another child would teach her.

In other words, I couldn’t stop her learning, like I can’t stop this, can’t take away this label, this horrifying application of the word “widow,” of the phrase “my dad died when I was 13.”

Life went on and when I’d be out with the kids one or the other would say, when it seemed like all the other families had a mom and dad, “I hope people don’t think we’re divorced.”  Divorce implies decisions, and no choice had been made in the shape of our family.  The use of “we” was endearing to me, and only made my heart break more.  We would go places with my brother Steven and waitresses or ride attendants or whomever would assume that Steven was my husband/their father, make some kind of reference like, “You’ll have to ask your father” when a child asked for more Coke; none of us corrected these ignorant strangers.  The kids were simply more comfortable when we had that male figure with us, when we looked “normal” to the outside world.  They needed my brother as a placeholder for what was missing.

I have my label and the kids have their phrase, “my dad died when I was 13,” or 11, or 5. I fill out forms and I get irritated when the choices are “married” “single” or “divorced.”  But when “widow” is an option — even now, seven years later — I think of that first day and Allison’s horror at the term. The kids are now old enough that they have to sometimes fill out their own forms.  They tell me they sometimes write “deceased” and sometimes just cross the father’s info section out. I didn’t know when to take off the wedding ring or what to do with it when I did.  I don’t know when the transition happens between being a widow and being widow-ed.  The label is the label no matter the verb tense.

I have been dating someone for five years and I still choke on the word “boyfriend.” I could not even bring my tongue to the roof of my mouth for the word “love.” I asked my therapist why, when friends all around me profess love within the first two weeks of a new relationship. “What is wrong with me; why can’t I say it?” And she said, “Because you know what it means.”

I never thought I would be the type of person who would risk public scorn to get her roots touched up. I’ve grown increasingly granola-y over the past few years, and my forays into investigative journalism have made me wary of certain chemicals in cosmetics and other personal care products. These days, I consider myself dressed up if I leave the house wearing deodorant, let alone mascara. But that was before I was initiated into the world of upper-middle-class American pregnancy with all its hysteria and paranoia, and began feeling the urge to rebel.

This is a world where having a baby can feel less like participating in an ancient biological process and more like taking on a high-stakes independent research project. The goal of said project? To produce the most intelligent, healthy and successful offspring possible, preferably one who will attend an Ivy League school. The women in this circle — highly ambitious and well-educated themselves — consume massive amounts of pregnancy and parenting literature long before they conceive, paying particular attention to creating the ideal womb environment for their future prodigies.

It’s a club whose membership comes with an ever-growing list of things to avoid for fear of harming the developing fetus. In addition to the usual suspects — alcohol, caffeine and soft cheeses, to name a few — there are nail salons, antiperspirants and all but the most natural (and expensive) makeup. And, of course, hair dye. The complete list would likely be several hundred items long.

Some of these recommendations are based on sound scientific evidence, and some are not. That doesn’t necessarily mean the assumptions behind them are incorrect; researching the link between a particular substance and its effect on a fetus is a tricky business. There are strict ethical guidelines surrounding the use of pregnant women as study subjects, and animal experiments don’t always translate to humans. Long-term data on the effects of low-dose exposure to a substance over time is expensive to gather and difficult to analyze. Wary of lawsuits, the pregnancy press and medical professionals alike shy away from espousing the safety of products and behaviors that are even remotely controversial.

Unwilling to accept this vagueness when it comes to their pregnancy, many women take a “better safe than sorry” approach and avoid certain things altogether. And why not? Unless the mother is avoiding some nutrient essential for proper fetal development, the worst-case scenario is inconvenience. Besides, when it comes to things like hair dye and makeup, isn’t there a feminist in all of us who cheers at the thought of escaping the death grip of the beauty industry, if only for a few months?

But there’s something else going on here, too, and it ain’t pretty. More and more, when I see my peers wearing their sacrifices on their organic cotton sleeves and foundation-free faces, I see how pregnancy can mark the beginning of an identity loss that is never fully recovered. For me, and I suspect many other women as well, the pressure to strip a personal routine down to its barest incarnation seems to come with a parallel pressure to strip one’s concept of self to only one’s role as an expectant mother.

The thing is, I’m not just an expectant mother. I’m a journalist who doesn’t want to worry about sweat stains around my armpits when I’m interviewing a source. I’m a wife who likes to feel feminine when I go out to dinner with my husband, and sometimes that means wearing makeup — not the natural kind. When I grab a cup of chai with my non-pregnant girlfriends, I want to be able to focus on the conversation and not the fact that my grays make me look about a decade older than they are. These roles and the others that comprise my identity are not dependent on the beauty products I use, but they are supported by them.

I realize that I will not be able to fully comprehend how all-consuming motherhood can be until I give birth to my own child later this spring. But I hope that even in my most absorbed moments, I will be able to hold onto the conviction that while being a mother may be my most important role at the time, it is not my only role, and that is OK. And I take comfort in the fact that when I finally meet my son face-to-face, he will be greeted by a mother with lovely, shiny chestnut hair.

“Yeah, I figured that out,” I said.

“You did?”

“Of course!” I gulped. “Jessica and me aren’t just friends, either, you know.”

“I had a feeling about that.” She nodded with a faint smile.

Mine was the most amiable coming out story I knew. If only the experience of my early sex life were so breezy.

In our small Cape Cod junior high school, I didn’t know a single openly gay teenager. As a 13-year-old feminist who didn’t shave her legs, I was the closest thing most people got. Before my best friend, Jessica, and I started kissing each other, most of our classmates assumed we already were. In truth, all of my early sexual encounters were with men: thrilling and frightening interactions, marked by my inability to say no. I had the body of a 20-year-old before I even got my first period, and being mistaken for sexually precocious by my peers became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My early exploits with older boys garnered me a reputation as a slut in middle school. Compared to that harassment, it was easier to let people assume I was gay. Being a slut implied an unwieldy desire, an essential vulnerability to sexual need. Whereas being gay just implied a rejection of men. But kissing girls came with its own complications

Bisexuality made sense to me, in theory, before I ever kissed a girl. And this was pre-Madonna kissing Britney Spears, pre-“Girls Gone Wild” (at least in my house, where we watched only PBS). My conception of girls kissing girls was not defined by a male gaze; I grew up with books like “Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism” on the shelves. My mother was a Buddhist therapist, and I had known before our landmark conversation that she not only identified as bisexual but moreover understood that being one was largely unremarkable. It seemed logical to me that people were bisexual until proven otherwise.

My brother and I lived in a house where sexuality was treated with no aura of shame, no tinge of the illicit. There was never any reference to the proverbial “birds and bees,” but our lexicon did include words like “fallopian tubes” and “ovulation.” We were both born at home, and I was even present for my brother’s birth. If I had been a different sort of 4-year-old, I doubt my parents would have allowed this, but in the pictures, I am far from traumatized by my mother’s cries. I am strutting around the birthing room, a toy stethoscope dangling from my neck, and perched between the midwives, attempting to take my mother’s pulse.

Unfortunately, this wholesome experience of the human body couldn’t prevent me from hating my own. By fifth grade, the attention that my precocious figure attracted from men scared me, but it was better than feeling freakish and fat, which was how I’d come to see the C-cup chest I’d exhibited before any other girl my age. And my pulse whirred to the feeling of breath on my neck, hands on my waist; I liked being wanted. Everything that followed those flirtatious entreaties, however, left me numb and ashamed. After a year of crude gestures and loud whispers in school hallways, exploring my nascent attraction to girls seemed a safer path.

In junior high, instead of Katy Perry’s early ’90s equivalent, I was listening to Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.” Like Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics — Rebel girl you are the queen of my world … I know I wanna take you home / I wanna try on your clothes — my desire for girls was, at first, more romantic than erotic. My lust was meshed with other kinds of longing, with the devotion of friendship and admiration. Jessica and I had a more intimate relationship than any I’d known, and I’d always had intensely intimate friendships with other girls. Kissing seemed, in some ways, not a far leap from cuddling.

And when Jessica kissed me, on the sunlit bedspread of my childhood room, I felt the same delicate churning in my abdomen that I had when the older brother of a friend pressed his lips against my bare shoulder and squeezed my hip with his broad hand. I wished I was gay, that I could elect to direct my body in that seemingly less perilous direction. But when Jessica wearied of being different from everyone else at our school and started spending more time with the soccer team than with me, I wished I didn’t miss her so much, that I could believe a boyfriend was the solution to my heartache.

Instead, I found a solution in Lila — my first official girlfriend. A couple of years my senior, Lila had ceased attending our local public high school in favor of what appeared to be a liberally defined home schooling. She had short, messy hair; didn’t wear makeup; and introduced me to Otis Redding and Kristin Hersh. Years later, I discovered girls who dressed like boys, and thus discovered my true type, but at the time, she was a revelation. When my little brother starting dating Lila’s little sister, Maya, the four of us would spend afternoons riding ramshackle bicycles down the rural miles between our homes, cooking vegetarian meals, and then making out in our respective bedrooms.

If this post-’60s Rockwellian teenage vision makes my hometown sound like some kind of East Coast Berkeley, it is a misconception. Our town was a liberal one, relative to other small towns, but we were the exception, not the rule. I was tired of feeling like an outsider in my school, and tired of school altogether, which I’d already decided was not the quickest way to become a writer — my plan since childhood. I officially dropped out after freshman year, and replaced it with my own reading list, and Lila.

But if I’d thought that removing myself from the mainstream would solve my sexual conflicts, I was wrong. Lila had conflicts, too. Under the covers of her bed, I grew to know a certain shadow that would fall over her face — a look that often preceded tears. Neither of us ever fully articulated those doubts, but I knew that something in our sex scared her. I thought I recognized the tinge of shame. Perhaps the teenage girl secure in her sexuality is a chimera altogether, but being queer in a homophobic society tends to present special challenges, regardless of your background. The fear I felt kissing Lila in public caught me off guard. There was a part of me that wondered if I wasn’t really just straight. Did I have a choice? Was being straight the easier choice, in the long run? How much had my mother’s experience influenced me? When not dry humping each other’s legs to Tori Amos, Lila and I were often crying, without really knowing why.

But despite the drama that infused our relationship, there’s no way I can dismiss it as experimentation. What part of love is ever not an experiment, however high the stakes? And I was in love. Being with girls was a safer place to explore my feelings, partly because they also seemed to have a lot of them, but it was also sexually exciting. There were so many prescriptions for how to love men, and how to screw them. Or rather, be screwed by them. The sexual passivity that I had been surreptitiously socialized in did not apply to sex with women. In my childhood bedroom, I had lifted Jessica’s T-shirt, moved my mouth down her chest, squeezed her hips with both hands. Lila and I might have had a maudlin relationship a lot, but we also spent most of our time together in bed. The excitement that had always been cut short by actual sexual contact with men went on for hours with her. Looking back, our love seems almost chaste — no toys, no talk, incidents of head I could count on one hand — but it was my first introduction to a desire that my body was able to consummate. I didn’t orgasm with a lover until the girlfriend after her, but it was with Lila that I first experienced my body (and hers) as a pleasurable place to inhabit.

It was also a lot easier to convince my dad to let my girlfriend sleep over on school nights.

My father is a sea captain, and so would often return after a three-month voyage to find me considerably changed. After one such return, he pulled into his driveway (my parents had split years before) and turned up the radio. “I Kissed a Girl” — Jill Sobule’s folky precurser to Katy Perry’s club hit — filled the minivan: I kissed a girl, her lips were sweet/she was just like kissing me.

“So,” drawled my dad, with an awkward smile. “I hear you’ve been doing some of that lately.”

“Daaaaad!” I rolled my eyes, and unclasped my seat belt.

I was mortified, having no clue how lucky I was. A far cry from disturbed by my broad view of potential romantic partners, my father seemed to find it somewhat charming. Though he never knew the sexual harassment I suffered as a result of my earliest sexual experiences, it’s easy to see how much safer Lila must have appeared than the sketchy older boys I had a penchant for. Also, I think he probably associated me with my mother, whose bisexuality he also found unthreatening. Understandably, I think he’d have rather seen both of us with women.

To that end, I’ve been asked more than once if I think it’s hereditary. I don’t. I try not to be offended by the suggestion. On the Kinsey scale, my mother and I probably both hover near a 3. Of course, it’s not for me to exclude a genetic component with any certainty; I’m a writer, not a scientist, though I strongly suspect that it has a lot more to do with nurture than nature.

Since those days, I’ve been in love and lust with close to an equal number of men and women (not excluding a few who identified as somewhere between the two poles). At 31, I spend very little time entertaining definitions of my own sexuality. Thank god. I do not miss those early days of wishing I could be one thing or another, of wondering if I had an obligation to push myself in either direction. There was an important moment, a few years later, when I came to the startling understanding that I fell in love with people, that individuals’ personalities, pheromones and even fashion sense were more compelling to me than their gender. This is a cliché, of course. But I came to it on my own, and in the vacuum of my own experience, it was a true revelation.

Arriving at such a revelation, at such an age, and greeting it with the happy satisfaction that I did, requires a freedom that I had the privilege of taking for granted as a young person, though I know better now. Most of us circle back around to the models we were given in our formative years — not in terms of who we love, but how we love. It sounds stupid, but I am good at falling in love. That is, I do so with abandon, free of any reluctance born from shame. I feel entitled to love whomever I do, and as an adult, I have always fallen in love fully and frequently. Perhaps this is an innate human quality; I suspect so. But it is also a delicate, malleable impulse. We love as we have been loved, and as love has been shown to us. And I was loved with great abandon, and earnestly encouraged to love whomever my heart called for. And I know whom to thank for that.

I had so many other questions to ask: What did he do for a living? Did he have other children? Was he married? Did he drink coffee? Was he happy? Were there pictures of me — a smiling, chubby baby — on the walls of his home or was it easier for him to forget I ever existed?

But I could not ask him any of this, because we had not actually met in person. At the age of 27, I saw my father for the first time when I found him on Facebook.

Up until a few months ago, I didn’t even know what he looked like. Years earlier, I had scavenged my mom’s old photo albums for evidence but didn’t find much — just his name, pictures of his parents and another child from a previous relationship. (Apparently, he had chosen to remain in my older half-brother’s life.) I also found our one remaining picture together. I’m an infant, my mouth wide open in anticipation of the spoonful of food his hand is preparing to deliver. It’s just his hand, though, nothing else. For nearly three decades, that dark, strong hand was the only image I had.

There wasn’t much else to be found. My mom met him in college and they’d married young. Since I was never told much about him, I made up my own romantically tragic stories: They married early because I was on the way; their interracial relationship threw my mom’s Archie Bunker-like dad into a tailspin, one that ended their relationship when I was just a year old. The only thing I ever knew for sure, though, was something my maternal grandmother told me when I was 10 years old. “He walked away from both of you,” she said. “When he and your mom got divorced, he told her he never wanted anything to do with her or you ever again.”

Then, earlier this year, I got a Facebook friend request from a young man with the same last name as me. Without thinking much about it, I paged through his profile trying to place how I knew him. Just before I clicked “Not Now” on his request, I was struck by who he might be. I froze in place: He had my father’s last name. This was a brother, a cousin, someone from my dad’s side of the family. I confirmed our friendship, and then I devoured every inch of his profile. I searched for faces that looked like mine, searched for hands that looked like my father’s. But this young man kept his profile sparse. So I typed my father’s name in the search bar. He came up immediately. Everybody’s parents are on Facebook these days.

I wondered if he could see me, if he had seen me already. Perhaps the cousin had told him about me. I wondered what I would look like to him. Did I resemble his son? Would he see familiar parts of himself, maybe something I had missed? As I looked closer, I could see that we did have the same eyes and the same full, dark lips. I wanted him to think I was beautiful. But I hoped that wouldn’t be the only reason he might want to be in my life. I wanted him to think I had turned out well. I had often wondered if he regretted leaving behind the baby that turned into this young woman.

I had the urge to change all my privacy settings, enabling anyone online to view my photos. I wanted to show him every part of me that he had missed. I wanted him to notice that I’d been promoted recently, that I had gone to a good school, that I had jumped out of a plane in New Zealand recently. I knew he’d see that I was engaged, and I hoped he’d be curious about the young man who would be marrying his daughter, taking the protective role he had long ago relinquished. I wanted him to see that, unlike and in spite of him, I had maintained healthy relationships with the important people in my life, that I was happy and adventurous. I hoped he’d feel pangs of regret for not having been there, for having nothing to do with the way I turned out. I had made it nearly 27 years believing I didn’t care whether or not I knew my father, and now, here we both were, on Facebook together, and all I could think about was how I might get him to like me.

I went back and forth in the days that followed. Some days I would make my profile public, allowing everyone to read my wittiest thoughts, peruse my best pictures, see all of my friends. On other days, I felt he didn’t deserve this. For years he had made no effort to find me. (It would not have been hard. I lived in the house where my mother grew up, and I had his last name.) Why should I make it so easy for him now?

And then, there is the worry that his friend request might never come — that he simply does not want to know me. If the past is any indication, I certainly can’t count on him to reach out. I’m not sure I want him to reach out this way anyway. Facebook — this artificial, flat universe of human relationships — is not the place where I want to start anew.

The complicated tangle of feelings I harbor for my dad moves far beyond what can be contained in a casually cheery Facebook message or a 160-character wall post. I am still angry, curious, hurt, anxious – and I’m sure I can’t properly convey all of that, period, ever, far less in a two-dimensional social media network where everyone is watching. But a Facebook friendship is the lowest-stakes form of friendship, easy as a click of a mouse. And it stings that he can’t even manage that. He has been given yet another opportunity to be a part of my life — I am right there in front of him — and he’s rejected me all over again.

I have always been close with my mother. I often tell people that I was blessed with one parent who was as wonderful as two. She is a beautiful, brown-haired, olive-skinned beauty, and grocery store clerks often flirtatiously ask if she is my sister. She laughs it off, but I love the insinuation that I am anything like her, whether in appearance or character. She has taken her responsibility as my protector and guide in life with total seriousness. A testament to her grace, she has never spoken badly of my father. She never speaks of him at all. I have always wondered what she was trying to protect me from.

My fiancé is also a pillar in my life. Kind and honest, he is quick to remind me of my permanence in his life and, even more important, his faithful permanence in mine. When I share these thoughts about my father with him, he is perplexed. “Why do you even want him in your life?” I understand why he asks. For so long, I hid behind the idea that I was fine without him. Maybe it’s because my mother was so strong and independent without him. Maybe mine was a defensive posture — he abandoned me, so I abandoned him. But I am embarrassed to discover that, however illogical, I do care what he thinks of me. I don’t know that I want him in my life. But I want him to want to be in my life.

In the movie version of my world, he would send me a message and he would simply say he was sorry. It wouldn’t be enough, but it would be a start. I would respond, coolly but kindly. He would realize that I am no longer a child, that he must now form a relationship with an adult whose heart he has broken. But he won’t run. He will be too curious, he will persevere out of the voltage of his affection. He will ask questions about my job, my travel, my fiancé. He will even ask about my mom, because it will be so clear to him that she is everything to me. It will be awkward and it will be slow, but that is how some relationships unfold — slowly and carefully, beginning with a Facebook message.

In some dark moments, I believe that if he reaches out, it couldn’t have been my fault that he left 27 years ago. Even in my most rational, lucid moments – in those moments when I know an infant is never the only reason a marriage ends – I wish he could give me some kind of confirmation that it was all a big mistake, one that he’d take back if he could. I wish he would jump at the chance to know me, even if only through a computer screen. I still long for his approval.

But I suspect this confirmation will never come. He has not looked for me for nearly 30 years. Why would he start looking now?

For most of my life, I didn’t much worry about this. It was easy to pretend that if only he could see me, it would be impossible not to love me. He would see that I had worked hard for straight A’s and straight teeth. But Facebook has ruined that illusion. He can see all of these things. I have posted them for him and the world to see. He can see my best self, displayed in its pixelated glory, and he still won’t claim me. I worked so hard to do it all right, and somehow I’m still all wrong for him.

I won’t add him on Facebook, and I doubt he’ll add me. That wouldn’t make it all better anyway. But I’ll continue to do the hard work of all abandoned daughters. I will forgive because I cannot fill the hole he left with the anger and self-pity that will only prove to destroy me more. These are the dangerous emotions that will ruin the relationships in my life that I still value – my closeness with my mom, the trust I have in my fiancé – and I refuse to dwell on them. I will grow and move on; and I will continue to prove that, in spite of his absence, I have turned out all right.

It turns out I was asking the right questions. We needed a new car and a new house; we got Ford’s least-monstrous SUV and a three-bedroom rental that cost as much as my old Brooklyn one-bedroom. And then, in the final weeks before our son arrived, we started watching “Game of Thrones.” By the time our boy was born, I didn’t want to swaddle him; I wanted to thrust him to the heavens on top of a parapet and declare, “All this will be yours!”

“Game of Thrones” cares about children. Children are heirs. There’s no hemming and hawing about how they’re desensitized to violence or they cost too much to send to college. They’re a blessing — in many ways the only blessing — and even the evil ones have parents who love them.

I tried to remember this as I changed my son’s diapers with the DVR paused and him screaming his head off. If I were Ned Stark, right-hand man to the king and Season 1′s exemplary patriarch, I wouldn’t dare to complain about him. You’re so strong! I thought as he kicked me. A hale and hearty lad! A darling babe at the breast! If Wildlings ransacked the house, they wouldn’t kill you. They’d raise you up to be King-beyond-the-Wall! It helped, and when I unpaused with my wife, I attempted to learn some lessons from “Game of Thrones” about being a dad.

1. If you’re not kicking ass for your family, your son should do it for you.

“Your Baby’s First Year for Dummies” (which is a great book) explained that no matter what I did, I could never prepare for the moment when I brought home a little creature who was completely dependent on me. That’s true, but the good news is it goes the other way. When Ned Stark is shamefully ambushed in King’s Landing, Theon Greyjoy urges his son Robb to take revenge: “It’s your duty to represent your house when your father can’t.” I fully intend to use this line on my son if I ever get arrested.

2. Wean your kid.

Young Robin Arryn’s breast-feeding was voted “Most WTF Moment in GOT” at Fanpop, and it’s easy to see why. There’s something unnerving about breast-feeding to begin with. Oh sure, it’s beautiful and natural and it saves money on formula, but it’s a fundamental repurposing of a woman’s body: What was once A is now B (and maybe a little bit of A if the kid’s asleep). The hijacking that starts in pregnancy continues until — well, for Robin, it appears to have gone on way past my wife’s rule: “If he’s old enough to ask for it, he’s too old for it.”

3. The bigger the family, the better.

Once you have a kid, it’s amazing how quickly people ask, “So are you going to stop at just one?” (It’s the third question they ask, after “How’s he sleeping?” and “Are you breast-feeding?” Kids are like privacy repellent.) My simple answer is “no,” because there’s balance in my life right now between the time I spend with my son and the time I spend being me, but “Game of Thrones” has shown me that it’s good to keep an open mind. On the show, you have as many kids as you can. Your kids protect you. They run the castle when you’re away or dead. Little Bran Stark can’t shoot an arrow to save his life, but his sister Arya can. Father Ned smiles: insurance.

4. Give your kid a dog.

I have an issue with dogs — I can’t pick up after them. It’s nothing personal; it just makes me feel like a servant. I limit my janitorial duties to my son, but after seeing the Stark family’s dogs, or direwolves, rip into anyone who threatens their keepers, I’m thinking it might be worth changing my policy. Still: I’m only getting a dog if it’s telepathic and can sense when my son is being menaced by a home invader.

5. It’s supposed to be embarrassing when you introduce people to your father.

Tywin Lannister, father of Tyrion (the antihero dwarf played by Peter Dinklage), is one of the unheralded dads of “Game of Thrones.” He’s fiercely loyal to his children and apt to say things like, “Family is all that lives on.” But he’s tough to love — filthy rich and scary stern — so when Tyrion shows up with his running buddies Shagga and Bron, it’s not a comfortable moment. But you know what? It shouldn’t be. My father would always answer the phone in a Vincent Price voice to scare off my friends. I intend to do the same. I am not my son’s friends’ bro. I am to be feared.

6. Child-proof your house.

OK, if I had more kids, chances are pretty slim that they would fight near a fireplace and one would shove the other’s head into the flames. But those chances are a lot slimmer if I don’t have a fireplace. This is why Sandor Clegane, the fighter whose scarred face is evidence of such an injury, teaches us not only about the emptiness of chivalry, but also child safety. My wife and I noticed quickly after our son was born that there are a ton of rip-off child-safety products out there, including fences that will fall on kids and drawer latches they will choke on. The easiest way to keep your home safe is just to not have things. No pool, no fireplace, no dining-room table, not even a dining room. No scars yet.

7. Don’t cheat.

Cheat on your girlfriend and get in trouble. Cheat on your wife and end up in arbitration. Cheat on the mother of your children, though, and you’re creating a world of hurt for innocent kids — including the bastards you might sire. Jon Snow, illegitimate son of Ned Stark, is so alienated from his half-siblings that he joins the military order of the Night’s Watch, and before he enlists he cuts short his last chance to make love to a woman so he won’t sire an unwanted child like himself. Tragic! Ned tries to reassure him, “You might not have my name, but you have my blood,” but it’s really a father’s responsibility to provide both.

8. Lead by example.

Samwell Tarly, the cowardly whipping boy of the Night’s Watch, confesses that he was told by his father, “You’re not worthy of my land and title” before he was stripped of his inheritance and sent into service. Now, Sam can’t fight, he has bad eyesight, and he hasn’t really been taking care of his body — but I’d like to see his dad. I bet the man isn’t a paragon of courage or self-control. Kids learn by example, and it starts early. When it comes to food, for instance, I thought my wife’s pregnancy would let us both load up on pickles and ice cream, but she said that her condition was no excuse to turn her body into a garbage dump, and she kept me on the straight-and-narrow, too. Now our son eats Brussels sprouts and mackerel. If I go up a pant size, I feel like I’m letting him down.

9. Whatever you do for your family, it won’t necessarily be enough.

“Game of Thrones” is going to have to work hard to top the heart-wrenching death of Ned Stark, but even crueler than his beheading is the lesson behind it. Ned has a chance, when he’s brought before Joffrey the false king, to speak truth to power. He lies to save his family — and gets executed anyway. No matter what I do to keep my family safe, I could end up with my head on a spike (or, more likely, crushed under a bus), so I really should have life insurance.

10. Love all your kids, no matter what.

My favorite father-son moment in “Game of Thrones” is when Tywin Lannister says of his dwarf son Tyrion, “He might be the lowest of the Lannisters, but he’s one of us.” Of course this is a lesson about loving your children no matter how they come out, and I’d like to think my wife and I have the courage to welcome any future additions no matter what prenatal testing reveals, but it’s that “one of us” that gets me. The best part about having a kid, so far, is that I’m an “us.” I’ve managed to go from being alone to helping pilot a unit. It’s like going from private to general, from the mailroom to CEO, but oddly enough I’m less anxious than I was before. Instead of worrying about a lot of little things, I worry about one.