'Lizards at my House'

Posted

I am 38, and childless.

I am completely fine with this. I am, indeed, enamored by a life surrounded by a multitude of nieces and nephews, real and adopted. I have no qualms that “there will be no one to take care of me in my old age,” as breeders are quick to point out.

No, I can know what love is without procreating. I can know what love is without holding my own progeny in my hands (how narcissistic is that, anyway?).

No, I’m not going to wake up one day at 60 and change my mind and adopt Himalayan whistlekids.

How do I know? I don’t like what goes into children: The mess, the noise, the repetitiveness is all just too exhausting. For someone who takes a good two hours to get ready to go to dialysis - and I wear pajama pants and old dress shirts there - I think it’s best that children are left to others.

I didn’t like children when I was a child. I don’t like them now. I won’t like them tomorrow. I do not like them, Sam I Am, I do not like green eggs and children? Um ...

But everyone around me is having them. I look at these people like they have 22 heads and are completely and utterly insane: Girl, you really wanna not be able to drink for nine months? It’s not really nine. It’s more like 24, because if you breastfeed, you can’t drink. Boy, you really wanna give up going out and having a beer because you’re being solid with your girl in not drinking while she can’t imbibe herself? Tell me that couples don’t guilt one another into this.

Why am I focused on drinking? I have no kidneys. I miss beer today. Maybe ask yourself why you’re focused on my being focused on drinking? How do you like that?

I tell Leigh Ann repeatedly that there are no more babies in her future, and I will literally push her down a flight of stairs - she will pull a literal Scarlett O’Hara - to make her miscarry.

We have too much other stuff to do to be worrying about baby. Woman out here trying to run a newspaper, make-up store and going to school all the while driving me nuts with her anxiety every morning. We are not adding a baby to that.

I look at some of my friends who have children and still see that 5-year-old girl in pigtails who couldn’t put the top on the crayon box properly in kindergarten; or that 8-year-old boy with the hair obviously “cut” by his mother running on the playground and tagging girls as “nuns” and thinking that was the funniest thing for some reason.

I see that 12-year-old boy who broke his collarbone three times in a row - literally right out of the cast each time - because he couldn’t stand to turn down a dare. I see the 14-year-old girl who carried her sandwich ingredients in separate bags because she liked to put them together at lunch instead of hours before.

What I rarely see is a responsible adult who can help a being live past an embryonic stage.

Yet, many of my friends have. Shay Skey has had a successful career as a paralegal while raising two children, a daughter who I think is 11 and a son who is 6. I don’t know their ages. Don’t judge me. Mandy Holbert has an 11th grader! That's crazy, and I never use exclamation points. But I think that deserves one. Megan Mincey Abbott started her own family 3,000 miles from home, but now lives in Lexington with her husband, John, and their son, Nolan. I think he’s 4.

Look, if I don’t see them or pictures of them for a while, they don’t age. I know my oldest niece, Whitney, is 21 this year and that my youngest niece, Alaina, is 10. My great-nephew, Davon, is 1 and his twin brothers are 2 months’ old. That’s all I can keep up with.

Two of my friends entered parenthood this year. Devon Soderberg Jeffers and her husband, Michael, were the longest married of the couples from my class (Michael was older, though). It’s been almost 20 years, and they finally had their baby boy, Asher, just a few months ago.

They seem to be doing well. Devon is pretty responsible, so I think Asher will make it past potty training at least. She can cook, so I know the child will eat well, at least. (There won’t be an update; I ca't be wasting all of my organ failure time writing about children).

One of my oldest friends, someone I lived with in college - actually three times, I think, because we moved in together, and then he moved out and moved back in and then I moved out and moved back in, or something like that? - recently became a father.

Joshua Dale Hunt and his wife, May, only recently got married, though they’ve been together for a few years. They had baby Dax - a boy - earlier this month. I have not seen them in person. It’s weird enough seeing Josh holding a baby in pictures.

But, yet, when I look at it, something about it is right.

I don’t know what to tell you about Josh. He is an enigma, wrapped in bubble gum, tied up in crepe paper and dropped off the Gervais Street Bridge …

Josh is just different. He’s the type of guy to bring up the different ways Marie Antoinette could have saved her head during the French Revolution while you and your friends drink Everclear slushies at a bar playing way-too-loud techno music.

He’s the type of guy to use words like “indeed” and “forsooth” with actual meaning.

I guess the best thing I can tell you about Joshua Dale, the one thing that immediately hits me and tells me exactly who he is - perhaps because I’ve known him so long - is this:

Josh once had a photo album on Facebook that was titled, “Lizards at my House.” This album was exactly as it reads on the tin: It featured pictures Josh had taken of lizards around his various homes in Columbia - and a few at his parents’ home in Sumter.

With wide-eyed wonder, Josh had taken it upon himself to chronicle the reptilian life outside of his various living establishments. There were, like, 30 pictures, maybe? I didn’t count them.

Josh is one of those people that looks at things a different way. And when he finds something interesting, he’s going to tell you about it.

What Josh would be quick to tell you - because he, indeed, finds it interesting and thinks you should, too - is that he and I have nearly the same eyeglass prescription. He’d tell you we have for some time, and that the only difference is I have astigmatism in both eyes.

I’m just a little bit more blind than he is. By like a smidge. It’s nothing to be proud about. Nobody wants the gold medal in the Blind Olympics.

What he won’t tell you is that he drove an extra pair of glasses to me from the other side of Columbia after a long day of work because I lost my only pair. They would be the glasses that I wore to my father’s funeral. He wouldn’t tell you that either.

So, now that I look back on it, more than half of my graduating class of 18 have procreated. In fact, it’s probably easier to tell you who hasn’t had children out of the 18 of us at this point.

Josh is the latest, and now that I look at the layout of the class, he may be the last.

But I believe he will be one of the best. Congratulations, buddy.

Robert Joseph Baker is the former editor for The Manning Times. He worked in journalism for 17 years before his kidneys turned against him, became freeloaders and quit working. Now, he just makes organ failure jokes, goes to dialysis and sometimes goes bowling.