My dad was just a few weeks shy of age thirty-three when I was born, and until I hit that age in 1997 I was emotionally dead set against the idea of fatherhood. Oh, I accepted it as an abstract "someday" possibility before then, and even talked about "someday" with one woman I loved. 

But from the aftermath of my divorce until I hit the magical age of thirty-two, I steadfastly refused to entertain the idea of entering into fatherhood willingly. I would become a father only if I knocked some woman up. 

It would be out of my hands, sort of. I'd never been a fan of abortion, and wouldn't want to be party to one, and the idea of running out on one's child disgusts me. So if this girlfriend/lover of mine ended up pregnant, we'd just get married and have a baby and make do!

Option A: it would turn out to be so much better than I'd ever imagined. 

Option B: it would turn out to be miserable, but I could blame my misfortune on fate, like my father did, and thus complete the circle. 

But it had to be fate. I couldn't enter into it willingly. Knocking somebody up is a hell of a lot easier than picking the right one, isn't it? And since human beings so often pick wrong, why not let fate do the choosing for me? Spread those wild oats and see where they grew, you know? And so I began––at first secretly and then not so secretly––to want to impregnate every woman I slept with so that my fate in life would be sealed.

If you and I were lovers between 1991 and 1999, and this is news to you, then I apologize for not being forthright at the time....  

So with a few desperate and brief exceptions, I only slept with a woman if I could imagine a child between us––even if we just shared custody. Heck with the marriage thing! Hey, as long as I recognized the child as my father and participated in its upbringing in some way, then that was okay by me. I wanted to be a wandering sailor type, with a girl in every port, and a child by that girl in every port, too. 

Of course now that I'm a father I can't imagine doing a woman or a child such an injustice––treating fatherhood so casually. But looking back, I'm not going to flagellate myself for thinking like such a prick. In truth, imagining the girl-in-every-port scenario led me to the husband and father I am today. It helped me see the possibility of parenthood with a lot of different women (those I slept with and those I didn't). That meant not only seeing a lot of possibilities for who I might make babies with, but also seeing a lot of possibilities for who I might be as a father. 

I swear, if I hadn't gone through that phase, I would have had a pitifully limited imagination of who I might be as a father, and it would have resembled my own father quite closely. Instead I got to imagine being a father with dozens of different women, if not hundreds (no, I didn't sleep with that many). Every single imaginary journey into parenthood helped me see other fathers I might be who weren't like my dad. 

So let that be a lesson to you, gentle reader. Before you chastise yourself for your shameful past thoughts, first make sure that you didn't later correct them and mold them into something good. If it happened to me, it might have happened to you. And might still.