Human society has had a lot of ideas about parenthood since we've begun recording our thoughts with language. It started out as something we just did––an atavistic, non-linguistic, unquestioned impulse that ensured the survival of our branch of the primate lineage. Over the millennia it has been variously conceived as a duty to God and to country, and as a social norm that we clung to so that we wouldn't appear, in the minds of our conforming fellows, to be freaks. 

But now that we're "all grown up" as a species (or like to think we are) we've come in Western culture to think of parenting as a choice that reflects nothing but individual desire. According to this worldview, I didn't have to become a parent at all. No forces beyond my own will influenced my decision; if I felt such forces, I must have invented them in order to talk myself into following through with my decision. I made a personal choice to bring two people into the world through no will of their own, and I did it to please myself. 

It's the logic of our day, as cold and clean as a stainless steel execution table. Plenty of people these days view parenthood as completely selfish (and if you don't believe me, do a web search for "parenthood" and "selfish" and see what they're saying), and this feeling is only going to get more prevalent as fewer people in Western cultures reproduce. So for the sake of such ultra-logical people who've forgotten that the drive to reproduce is responsible for their existence on the planet, I'd like to explore a crisp, reasonable, and completely selfish explanation for why I became a dad:

I needed guinea pigs.

I felt like I had no weapons in the battle to figure out my own complex relationship with my father, and could only fight that battle through surrogates. Only by becoming a father could I overcome my own confusions about what fatherhood meant, so I had two children I could experiment with. This is why you've here on earth, my sons––at least according to the concept of enlightened self-interest, which is the only thing people seem to believe in these days other than money, power, and entertainment.

Despite the evidence, kids, I still think you're miracles whose very existence is beyond the scope of human comprehension. But I'm a dinosaur. I didn't buy modernity hook, line, and sinker. I'll go to my grave questioning its cold, clean executioner's logic and believing that this whole labyrinth––this maelstrom that includes Thomas J. Wingate and Steven N. Wingate and Lucas V. Wingate and Landon D. Wingate––is about vastly more than myself and my choices.