Today’s advertiser is Compare.com. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $1.68.

Not quite eight years ago, while driving from Orcas Island back to Seattle on a family vacation, my wife, Jean, and I put a question to our daughters, Sasha and Sandy, who were then 9 and 5: How would you guys feel about another sibling? We were both in our early 40s then, about at the end of our healthy baby-making abilities, so if we were going to have a third kid, we’d need to decide soon. (Where that kid would actually live in our small Brooklyn apartment was something we could decide later.) It’s not like our current kids really had a say in such things, but we wanted to feel them out. So we asked.

And they answered: Hell no!

They liked our little foursome just as it was, thank you very much, and would consider no additions, not even a pet, let alone a new sibling. Then, as if it to punctuate her disgust with the idea, Sandy threw up all over herself¹.

As we pulled into a diner to clean her up and get lunch, I offered them a compromise: Instead of us having a third child, what if we had an imaginary kid?

Amid the rising smell of vomit, they pondered my pitch, then accepted. An imaginary sibling they could bear.

His name, Jean and I announced, would be that of Jean’s grandfather, James. But that left his middle name a question mark. Both our girls had birds for their middle names, but which bird would be James’s? Eagle? Ostrich? Kiwi? Inside the diner, having cleaned Sandy up, we asked our waitress for her favorite bird. Her answer — and our answer — came quickly.

Thus was born James Blue-Footed Booby Gross.

More after the ad…

From the beginning, James was special. Every day, his siblings declared, was his birthday. So far, that amounts to over 2,800 birthdays, yet he’s only a second-grader. James comes and goes when he pleases; a typical kid, he often leaves the front door wide open (and no, it’s definitely not because in the winter our door contracts and doesn’t close properly). He’s the youngest, the baby, acknowledged by his older sisters but not always appreciated — he can be irritating, and he gets blamed for everything. Still, he’s remained a one of us Grosses, providing us with family mythology if not his actual presence. He’s everything you could want from an imaginary son.

He’s not real, however, and sometimes I wish he was. Yes, I would have liked to have had another child. Maybe even two! And not just because I dream of cooking more food for more people. I grew up one of three siblings, and that number always seemed the most normal number: You had an eldest (me!), a middle child, and a baby. Three allowed for a variety of roles and relationships and experiences, both for kids and for parents. Two, meanwhile, feels restrictive². Each kid has only the other, and if the relationship hits a snag, there’s no outlet, no option — again for both kids and parents. We’ve gotten lucky with Sasha and Sandy, who are the best of friends, but, well, that’s luck for you. And as much as I believe in luck, I don’t totally trust it.

But we did not, and will not, have a third child. It wasn’t realistic, for reasons that were biological (age!) as well as economic: Kids ain’t cheap. Actually, no, that’s not it. It’s that life ain’t cheap. We live in an apartment that barely accommodates the four of us, and to add a fifth would have required us to move from the home we love. Which I guess we could have done, if my career (or Jean’s) had gone a different, more profitable direction. But it didn’t. There were limits. The real world, it felt, made a real third child impossible.

Except that that’s not always how it works. If we’d really wanted to, Jean and I could have — would have! — had another kid. We would have talked about it, made a decision, agreed to deal with the consequences as they arose (maybe trade bedrooms with the kids, so the three of them could have our larger room?), and then James — or, more likely, either Maximillian “Max” Miso Gross or Minerva “Mini” Shiso Gross — would now be a part of our household.

That sounds quite rational, doesn’t it? In the face of real-world restrictions, we’d find practical ways to circumvent them to get what we want. But it’s the wanting that’s fundamentally irrational. I want more kids because I want them, just as we wanted Sasha and Sandy because we wanted them. I can offer loads of explanations as to why, but they’re all just justifications for something that emerged from within me one day, unbidden — a Big Bang of paternal desire.

Before that moment, I had imagined that we would never have kids. I was traveling a lot, and loving it, and I had this idea that Jean and I would be the cool, cosmopolitan aunt and uncle to our siblings’ and friends’ children. We’d always be back from somewhere amazing, flush with stories and presents, and we would just do that, like, forever. We had each other, and that would be enough for a lifetime. It sounded awesome.

Until, one day, it didn’t. I was 29 or 30, and out of nowhere I knew I wanted to be a father. I don’t know what did it, a genetic switch flipped or some mysterious concatenation of external events driving my subconscious. But there it was — I wanted kids.

Honestly, it drives me crazy not remembering or understanding that moment of change. How did I get from before to after? Am I even the same person I was?

To look at me today, it probably seems inevitable. I am such a dad. I tell the dumb jokes, I fart a lot, I’m embarrassing and reliable and demanding and friendly. I grill. I have a mustache. I even used to write a goddamn dad blog. If you’ve met me anytime in the last 17 years, I bet it’s hard to imagine me as not a father. And if you knew me before, I want to know: Did I seem destined for this? Am I lying to myself that I ever had any choice in the matter?

The maddening part is this mix of rational and irrational. As we all know, I’m obsessed with trying to understand why I think the way I do, to tease apart the logical and emotional strands of my being. But here the knot is Gordian. And I imagine, when it comes to having kids, it’s that way for almost everyone. The world is understandably obsessed with parenthood: who’s having kids, and where, and how many they’re having. Countries like Italy, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are essentially shrinking because so few adults are having kids — and those are places with functional health care systems! Here in the Greatest Country on Earth™, women are far more likely to die in childbirth, or, if they somehow survive, be overcharged for the privilege, risk their jobs, and struggle to find childcare should they want to continue to work and afford their unaffordable lives. Here we are doing everything we can to reduce or eliminate the elements that would add weight to the rational side of the equation; it’s almost as if the crazy right-wingers (and cowardly moderates) of the United States want childbearing to be a wholly irrational decision, made without consideration of the options and consequences, and in unthinking obeisance to the State and its God. I would try to explain that, but how do you explain religious insanity?

Me, I’m just as insane³, minus the supreme being. I didn’t want kids, and then I did. I wanted more, but not enough to have them. When I squint, I can perceive the vague shape of those decisions, and I can catch a whiff of the logical arguments that surround them, but my contact lenses will never be powerful enough to render them in the detail I crave.

What I do know is that I have loved — and continue to love! — being a parent. What I did not know (but maybe suspected) in my first three decades or so was how well that role would suit me, how much I’d enjoy the rhythms of family life, how gratifying and eye-poppingly wondrous it is to watch these kids grow up. I may never understand how I made that decision, but I know it was the correct one.

Or maybe I’m just saying this because within a year, one of my girls will be leaving home for college, or possibly a gap year, and by the end of the decade, Jean and I will have an empty nest, one visited only occasionally by a robin, a raven, and a blue-footed booby. So clearly I’m growing soft and maudlin. It’s only rational, as one ages, to attempt to justify a life’s worth of choices, wise, poor, or otherwise. We are governed by forces we can only ever attempt to explain, and that our children, if we’ve been lucky enough to have them, will one day have to contend with themselves. None of it makes any sense for long, and so the only realistic response is to imagine for ourselves fantastical alternatives, to tell ourselves stories of fabled siblings, legendary homesteads, and lives unlived in this or any timeline. While the doors creak open and the kids come and go and eventually stay gone, we conjure up meaning to the best of our ability. And, if necessary, we will invent grandchildren to keep us company. 🪨🪨🪨