© 2003 Brian Hodges - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

auren and I weren't two weeks back from the honeymoon before our family started grilling us about the next logical step in our married life. "How come you two haven't sent out your thank you notes yet?" We could practically hear the fingernails tapping as the elderly family members checked and rechecked their mailboxes, debating whether or not to send us a present this Christmas. Seven months later (still under the one-year wedding-etiquette wire), the thank you's are finally mailed, allowing everybody to now start asking us about our sex life. Or more specifically, their expectation of an end product of our sex life.

Actually, Lauren and I are lucky enough to not have families who view a wedding as the grand opening of a brood factory. Nobody has asked, "So when are you two going to make us (insert familial relation here)?" Nobody has given us baby bonnets "for inspiration." In fact, our parents have the same logic as ours (well, my logic more so than Lauren's) which says wait until Lauren is done with grad school before we go fertilizing any eggs.

That buys me exactly eleven months to come up with another plausible excuse.

It's not that I'm scared of having kids. Not in the abstract anyway. But I do have very specific - and I think very valid - concerns.

First of all, I'm afraid that I won't know any better if we end up with an ugly kid. We're always gushing over my niece Erin. How cute she is. How precious she is. All the while, I see a lot of cross-eyed toddlers being wheeled around by parents who probably gush over them. It makes me wonder, are they looking at Erin and saying, "Yikes." Is Erin really cute and precious, or are we just biased? Am I going to be one of those parents who coos, "You're just the cutest thing in the whole wide world," to my W.C. Fields lookalike while others are gasping, "Good Lord, did the doctor drop it?"

Ugly or not, Lauren and I are absolutely screwed if we have a boy - which leads me to believe that we're going to have like twenty of them. We just can't agree on any boys' names. We have enough girls' names that we both like to fill a softball team. Neither of us wants our son to seem too ordinary, which rules out the John's, the Will's, the Bob's. But then again, we don't want him to get beaten up either, so that takes care of the Noah's, the Phoenix's and the Agamemnon's. Of the names that are left, too many of them remind me or her of some kid from years ago who smelled like eggs or who took out his thing on the swing set. Then of course, the name has to work with "Hodges" which rules out any name that ends with a K sound. I will not have my boy be, "Lu-Godges."

Not that I have any idea what to do with a boy anyway. Most prospective fathers yearn for a son. A young man they can mold into their own image. A chip off the old block who will follow in dad's footsteps as captain of the football team, a law school graduate, President of the United States. Hm… I sat the bench for three years of high school basketball, got a degree in television and work as a video technician. What kind of block would I be molding exactly?

But, I guess it really doesn't matter. Boy or girl, my biggest fear isn't that I'm going to screw something up. It's that I'm going to do everything right. I'll give my kids just the right amount of love without smothering them, just the right amount of discipline without ruining my belt too much. I'll support them unconditionally while making sure they do things my way. And in the end, they'll still end up sixteen-year-old crack addicts with clown fetishes, and blaming me for it.

Like I said. Valid concerns. And I've got just under a year to sort through all of them or at least come up with another distraction for my relatives - and my wife for that matter. Hey, if I'm lucky, maybe it'll turn out that some of those thank you notes got mailed out without proper postage.