Victory is especially sweet after so many defeats. Pete is going to be a father after working at it for almost two years. He was starting to get worried that he and Amanda weren’t going to be able to get pregnant. Amanda had gone to her doctor, and they had figured out that if they were having any trouble, it wasn’t down to her. So Pete had some concerns about his own virility. A couple of months ago, he called me and wanted to go out for a beer—just the two of us. I knew something was up.
“I’m worried that I’ve got mutant sperm or something,” Pete said. “Or maybe they’re just lazy sperm. What if I don’t have any sperm at all?” I could certainly empathize with him. We’ve all done a lot of stupid things in our lives, having mostly to do with drugs, drink, and debauchery. How can a man in his late thirties today not be worried that he hasn’t done some genetic damage along the way?
We tend to dismiss the shrill moral cops of our parents’ generation; the old farts who claimed that pot would reduce your sperm count were the same old farts who said masturbating would make you go blind, right? In other words, we tended to believe exactly the opposite of what they told us.
On the other hand, I seemed to recall that there was some hard science behind the claim that LSD, for example, could damage your DNA, and it was an intense and scary drug—the kind you could easily believe might screw up your genes. So, anyway, you can see how Pete was suddenly having second thoughts about the viability of becoming a father. Come to think of it, in all his years of sexual activity, he’d never had a close call with any of his girlfriends. (Despite the college drought that led to Maureen, the inflatable sex doll, Pete was no slouch.)
But what if Amanda got pregnant with some mutant sperm and they had a six-fingered baby? Pete was beginning to get very nervous. Eventually, after they’d been trying for ten months, he had to deal with the inevitable: a sperm test.
Now, Pete and Amanda had also been discussing options for a worst-case scenario. There was a whole battery of procedures, from the fairly simple (like artificial insemination) to the expensive and complicated (like in-vitro fertilization). Amanda felt strongly about being a mother, and she was adamant about wanting to adopt if it turned out that they could not be biological parents. “There are thousands of kids who need good parents out there. We want to be parents. Why wouldn’t we adopt?” she asked, reasonably.
Pete was embarrassed to admit that he didn’t think he wanted to be a parent if he couldn’t be the biological father. In fact, he was afraid to tell Amanda this, but he told me. I think I understood where he was coming from, and it seemed important to at least understand his point of view. Maybe it’s a selfish and ugly feeling. But then again, these days we’re all about honoring our biology and the imperatives of the physical body. Is there a more pressing imperative than to reproduce? Should we think less of Pete because this imperative seemed to be more literally biological than social or moral—i.e., if he couldn’t father a child, he didn’t want to be a dad? Needless to say, things would be so much less complicated, emotionally speaking, if he and Amanda could just get pregnant the natural way.
So, with these muddled feelings, Pete set off for the fertility clinic, ready to donate some sperm to find out if he had any, and if they were normal or if they were swimming in lysergic circles. Amanda had to work that day, so Pete went alone. When Amanda wanted to know how Pete had managed to perform his duty at the clinic, Pete told the truth: He had been provided with and used a dirty magazine. Amanda went ballistic and called the clinic, but when she started to chastise the nurse on the other end of the line, she was cut off mid-sentence. The nurse told her to “grow up”—and then hung up on her. Amanda was speechless. Though Pete would never tell his wife this, he counted it a small victory for Neanderthal Man, who seems to need the occasional visual stimulant, especially considering how hard it is to get in the mood at a fertility clinic. Why is porn okay for the fertility doctor’s office, but nowhere else? It’s a moot point with Amanda and Pete, now that they’re pregnant.
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