Chapter One: And So, it Begins
WARNING: The Surgeon General advises that sex may cause children.
Sex is an appropriate starting point for our consideration of fatherhood. After all, this is where the journey begins.
By the very virtue of the fact that you are reading this page, let’s assume that you have already passed this initial but crucial (and hopefully thoroughly enjoyable) test. With flying colours. In the interests of good taste, I shall therefore refrain from elaborating any further on how much fun you had in the process and ‘Was it good for you too, m’lady?’, etc.
But we get the message. While you were lying back in a haze of post-coital euphoria – like they do in the movies (with the sheet pulled up over your waist, but strangely up to your wife’s shoulders), an armada of a few hundred million of your sperm set off from Port Penis on the first leg of their marathon swim through all that female plumbing, the names of which I can never quite remember.
(I will probably never come to terms with all those bits and pieces of the female anatomy. As a teenager, sitting in a Personal Development class at an all-boys’ school, I was always perplexed by the textbook cross-sections of women’s insides. You know the picture I mean? Yeah, the diagram of the one-legged woman. I could never follow all the bulbous squiggles and wormy channels with the funny names. In fact, it was only years later that I discovered that the cross-section diagram was in fact a side view, not a top view. [Here’s a tip: the top view looks like a Rorschach ink blot of a bat spreading its wings.] Maybe I should have paid more attention, instead of sitting up the back of the classroom with Adam Armstrong trying to stretch sample diaphragms over our heads like swimming caps.)
Anyway, while nothing to you, those several centimetres from the tip of your penis to their intended destination in your wife’s uterus are an Olympic endurance event to these little tadpoles. They will only survive for a few days, so there is no time to waste. Like salmon battling upstream, they have to swim from the vagina, north through the uterus (or womb), and climb up one of the two Fallopian tubes to where an egg (more correctly an ‘ovum’, having begun its existence as a less well-known ‘oocyte’) is hiding, or soon to arrive.
Now, let’s just pause to reflect for a moment on what’s happening here. Before your child is even close to being created, this is already an amazing feat. To scale it into human terms and dimensions, think of it like this. Imagine you (representing a sperm) are competing in a biathlon. Along with the entire population of Brazil, you and all the other sperm are shot down a five-kilometre urethral chute at around fifteen times the speed of sound. You splash down into an unpleasantly acidic subterranean ocean, in total darkness, and have to locate and swim for a kilometre through a secret tunnel that is only fifty or so metres wide, before emerging into, well, let’s say Sydney Harbour. And then the race is really on. You’ve still got ve kilometres left, still in total darkness.
Swimmers around you are dying by their tens of millions, just exhausted, or victims of aggressive antibodies, or swimming off somewhere lost and never to be seen again. It’s utter chaos. A couple of hours later, there are only a few thousand biathletes left.
At the far end of the harbour, there are two tributaries heading off in opposite directions, and you have to decide which one to swim up. It’s a big choice. Only one of them will contain the treasured prize – an ovum, which to you is an orb about the size of a double-decker bus – and, even then, only if your timing is just right and you happen to arrive at that exact moment each month when it happens to pass by. And so you and the last remaining few hundred of the strongest swimmers head off, desperately hoping that it’s all been worthwhile . . . (It’s amazing, when you think about it, that humans exist at all.)
Post-intercourse, while you are going about your ordinary life (making breakfast or posting a selfie or snoring or heading back to work after your ‘lunch break’), you and your wife are both probably blissfully oblivious to all this mysterious and wonderful action taking place inside her body on a microscopic level. And the ovum hasn’t even appeared yet!
The ovum is the smallest cell in the human body that can be seen with the naked eye . . . although I can’t really imagine a situation where this would eventuate. Being about the width of a human hair, it makes the full stop at the end of this sentence look like a beach ball. The point is that it is very, very small.
The ovum has undergone a journey of its own. (Women as babies are born with over a million ova but by the time they reach reproductive maturity at puberty, less than half a million of these ova remain stored, of which only about 500 will be ovulated in her lifetime.) Each month during ovulation, a mature or ‘ripe’ ovum leaves its sisters and bobs on down one of the Fallopian tubes, like a little planetoid wondering if the strange aliens with the tails will perhaps come and visit.
It’s a pretty narrow window and time is critical, because this ovum has a ‘use-by date’ of only about twenty-four hours. Either it arrives and waits to see if any sperm turn up, or the sperm are already there, hanging around impatiently. They could have been there for a few days already, although after seventy-two hours they are really running out of puff for the second stage of the biathlon.
By now, there aren’t too many sperm left. (One book I read described it as ‘just a handful of sperm’, a mental picture that I could have done without, thank you.) To return to our human-scale analogy, out of the original field of a few hundred million, it’s now down to you and the final fifty swimmers, now surrounding the bus-sized orb, desperately trying to get inside first. Because that’s the point. There can be only one. Only one prize. First one in, is the winner. The rest just swim off and die.
The sperm all find a spot on the ovum they can call their own, stick their heads down and start spinning around and around like fence-post diggers. Picture a tennis ball swarming with animated alfalfa sprouts. The winner is the first one to break the ovum wall and get in.
And when one does, two things immediately happen. The tail breaks off from the head of the successful sperm and the ovum gets coy and undergoes a chemical change, which instantaneously creates a force field that shuts out all the other contenders. It’s a bit of a disappointment for them, I imagine: getting all that way, beating all those odds, only to be pipped at the post in the last second.
Sad, really.
Anyway, at that specific moment, what you have there is your child. Sure, it’s only a single cell, technically and unromantically referred to as a ‘zygote’, but your child nonetheless, sitting in its own little dark, warm universe. You can almost imagine the USS Enterprise zooming past through this microscopic universe with Spock at the view-screen musing, ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’
And there you have it. If it were a movie, a glorious shaft of light would beam down onto the sperm-ovum, accompanied by an angelic chorus. The wheels of fate have spun in their diurnal course and, although you don’t know it yet, the rest of your life just massively changed direction.
In short, you’re going to be a dad.
This is the miracle of life. The miracle of sex. And it is a miracle. It’s almost inconceivably unlikely and an infinite wonder that any of us exist at all.
God really was very clever to have thought it up.
This child of yours is unique in the universe. You and your wife are the only combination in history who could have created it. Think of it this way: your wife has about 300,000 ova. You have about 300 million sperm per ejaculation. Let us assume, for the sake of argument and mathematical convenience, that you have sex once a week over a ten-year potential conception period. Your child could be any combination of any single sperm and any single ovum. So, if my mathematics serves me correctly (which it might not, considering my grades at school), then that makes your child one of 47 000 000 000 000 000 (forty-seven quadrillion) possible people combinations . . . and that’s just from your wife and you alone. If you multiply that out under the different circumstances that you could have partnered with any of the other billions of women on the planet (or at least, many of them), then that makes the mathematical probability of your unique child ever existing somewhere in the vicinity of . . . well, I can’t actually work that out. But it’s a lot. Well over a nonillion. And my brain just exploded.
This is a humbling thing for a dad to contemplate. Without getting into too deep a philosophical contemplation, it’s kind of awesome to think about the incredibly complex and infinitesimal beginnings of human life – the beginnings of the life of your child. What is at this point an indistinct speck will grow to be a person whom you will know and love intimately – a person, I might add, who will change your life and take you into a world you could not have possibly imagined.
You will see this infinitesimally small spot learn to crawl and walk, and you will teach it how to speak and read. It will keep you up at night. You will spend countless hours on the floor with it playing with blocks and books and watching Disney Pixar cartoons and playing peek-a-boo. It will create bizarre, abstract drawings for you to stick on your fridge, and say great stuff like, ‘I love you, Daddy,’ and, ‘Why aren’t I a tree?’ It will get dressed up as a giant cheese for school play night. You will tie its shoes and make thousands of sandwiches and carrot sticks for its lunch.
On Father’s Day, it will make you cold tea and burnt toast and present you with artwork made out of pipe-cleaners and pasta and the most aesthetically unappealing hand-painted coffee mug in the history of humankind, and yet you will be strangely proud of it and treat it with the utmost respect and value. For years. You will carry this now infinitesimally small spot on your shoulders around a zoo and find yourself making daft animal noises for illustrative purposes. You will feel hopeful as you launch it on its bike for the first time without training wheels, exhilarated as it pedals off manically into the distance, concerned as it suddenly veers off and disappears down an embankment, and sheepish as you explain to your wife why your child now has four stitches in its forehead. You will spend hours throwing balls and kicking balls and hitting balls together at the park. Expect that on several occasions, your own balls will also cop a clobbering. You will teach it to drive a car and struggle not to grab the steering wheel every time a corner is taken too widely, and you will lie awake at night because it borrowed your car and is two hours late in getting home. You will treasure the photo you have of you and this spot on top of a mountain on your camping holiday. This little thing will take you to the peaks of pleasure (‘I love you, Dad.’) and to the depths of despair (‘Dad, I just backed the car into the water tank.’).
And then, one day, that microscopic cell will leave home and you’ll wonder what you ever did before it came along.
WARNING: The Surgeon General advises that sex may cause children.
Sex is an appropriate starting point for our consideration of fatherhood. After all, this is where the journey begins.
By the very virtue of the fact that you are reading this page, let’s assume that you have already passed this initial but crucial (and hopefully thoroughly enjoyable) test. With flying colours. In the interests of good taste, I shall therefore refrain from elaborating any further on how much fun you had in the process and ‘Was it good for you too, m’lady?’, etc.
But we get the message. While you were lying back in a haze of post-coital euphoria – like they do in the movies (with the sheet pulled up over your waist, but strangely up to your wife’s shoulders), an armada of a few hundred million of your sperm set off from Port Penis on the first leg of their marathon swim through all that female plumbing, the names of which I can never quite remember.
(I will probably never come to terms with all those bits and pieces of the female anatomy. As a teenager, sitting in a Personal Development class at an all-boys’ school, I was always perplexed by the textbook cross-sections of women’s insides. You know the picture I mean? Yeah, the diagram of the one-legged woman. I could never follow all the bulbous squiggles and wormy channels with the funny names. In fact, it was only years later that I discovered that the cross-section diagram was in fact a side view, not a top view. [Here’s a tip: the top view looks like a Rorschach ink blot of a bat spreading its wings.] Maybe I should have paid more attention, instead of sitting up the back of the classroom with Adam Armstrong trying to stretch sample diaphragms over our heads like swimming caps.)
Anyway, while nothing to you, those several centimetres from the tip of your penis to their intended destination in your wife’s uterus are an Olympic endurance event to these little tadpoles. They will only survive for a few days, so there is no time to waste. Like salmon battling upstream, they have to swim from the vagina, north through the uterus (or womb), and climb up one of the two Fallopian tubes to where an egg (more correctly an ‘ovum’, having begun its existence as a less well-known ‘oocyte’) is hiding, or soon to arrive.
Now, let’s just pause to reflect for a moment on what’s happening here. Before your child is even close to being created, this is already an amazing feat. To scale it into human terms and dimensions, think of it like this. Imagine you (representing a sperm) are competing in a biathlon. Along with the entire population of Brazil, you and all the other sperm are shot down a five-kilometre urethral chute at around fifteen times the speed of sound. You splash down into an unpleasantly acidic subterranean ocean, in total darkness, and have to locate and swim for a kilometre through a secret tunnel that is only fifty or so metres wide, before emerging into, well, let’s say Sydney Harbour. And then the race is really on. You’ve still got ve kilometres left, still in total darkness.
Swimmers around you are dying by their tens of millions, just exhausted, or victims of aggressive antibodies, or swimming off somewhere lost and never to be seen again. It’s utter chaos. A couple of hours later, there are only a few thousand biathletes left.
At the far end of the harbour, there are two tributaries heading off in opposite directions, and you have to decide which one to swim up. It’s a big choice. Only one of them will contain the treasured prize – an ovum, which to you is an orb about the size of a double-decker bus – and, even then, only if your timing is just right and you happen to arrive at that exact moment each month when it happens to pass by. And so you and the last remaining few hundred of the strongest swimmers head off, desperately hoping that it’s all been worthwhile . . . (It’s amazing, when you think about it, that humans exist at all.)
Post-intercourse, while you are going about your ordinary life (making breakfast or posting a selfie or snoring or heading back to work after your ‘lunch break’), you and your wife are both probably blissfully oblivious to all this mysterious and wonderful action taking place inside her body on a microscopic level. And the ovum hasn’t even appeared yet!
The ovum is the smallest cell in the human body that can be seen with the naked eye . . . although I can’t really imagine a situation where this would eventuate. Being about the width of a human hair, it makes the full stop at the end of this sentence look like a beach ball. The point is that it is very, very small.
The ovum has undergone a journey of its own. (Women as babies are born with over a million ova but by the time they reach reproductive maturity at puberty, less than half a million of these ova remain stored, of which only about 500 will be ovulated in her lifetime.) Each month during ovulation, a mature or ‘ripe’ ovum leaves its sisters and bobs on down one of the Fallopian tubes, like a little planetoid wondering if the strange aliens with the tails will perhaps come and visit.
It’s a pretty narrow window and time is critical, because this ovum has a ‘use-by date’ of only about twenty-four hours. Either it arrives and waits to see if any sperm turn up, or the sperm are already there, hanging around impatiently. They could have been there for a few days already, although after seventy-two hours they are really running out of puff for the second stage of the biathlon.
By now, there aren’t too many sperm left. (One book I read described it as ‘just a handful of sperm’, a mental picture that I could have done without, thank you.) To return to our human-scale analogy, out of the original field of a few hundred million, it’s now down to you and the final fifty swimmers, now surrounding the bus-sized orb, desperately trying to get inside first. Because that’s the point. There can be only one. Only one prize. First one in, is the winner. The rest just swim off and die.
The sperm all find a spot on the ovum they can call their own, stick their heads down and start spinning around and around like fence-post diggers. Picture a tennis ball swarming with animated alfalfa sprouts. The winner is the first one to break the ovum wall and get in.
And when one does, two things immediately happen. The tail breaks off from the head of the successful sperm and the ovum gets coy and undergoes a chemical change, which instantaneously creates a force field that shuts out all the other contenders. It’s a bit of a disappointment for them, I imagine: getting all that way, beating all those odds, only to be pipped at the post in the last second.
Sad, really.
Anyway, at that specific moment, what you have there is your child. Sure, it’s only a single cell, technically and unromantically referred to as a ‘zygote’, but your child nonetheless, sitting in its own little dark, warm universe. You can almost imagine the USS Enterprise zooming past through this microscopic universe with Spock at the view-screen musing, ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’
And there you have it. If it were a movie, a glorious shaft of light would beam down onto the sperm-ovum, accompanied by an angelic chorus. The wheels of fate have spun in their diurnal course and, although you don’t know it yet, the rest of your life just massively changed direction.
In short, you’re going to be a dad.
This is the miracle of life. The miracle of sex. And it is a miracle. It’s almost inconceivably unlikely and an infinite wonder that any of us exist at all.
God really was very clever to have thought it up.
This child of yours is unique in the universe. You and your wife are the only combination in history who could have created it. Think of it this way: your wife has about 300,000 ova. You have about 300 million sperm per ejaculation. Let us assume, for the sake of argument and mathematical convenience, that you have sex once a week over a ten-year potential conception period. Your child could be any combination of any single sperm and any single ovum. So, if my mathematics serves me correctly (which it might not, considering my grades at school), then that makes your child one of 47 000 000 000 000 000 (forty-seven quadrillion) possible people combinations . . . and that’s just from your wife and you alone. If you multiply that out under the different circumstances that you could have partnered with any of the other billions of women on the planet (or at least, many of them), then that makes the mathematical probability of your unique child ever existing somewhere in the vicinity of . . . well, I can’t actually work that out. But it’s a lot. Well over a nonillion. And my brain just exploded.
This is a humbling thing for a dad to contemplate. Without getting into too deep a philosophical contemplation, it’s kind of awesome to think about the incredibly complex and infinitesimal beginnings of human life – the beginnings of the life of your child. What is at this point an indistinct speck will grow to be a person whom you will know and love intimately – a person, I might add, who will change your life and take you into a world you could not have possibly imagined.
You will see this infinitesimally small spot learn to crawl and walk, and you will teach it how to speak and read. It will keep you up at night. You will spend countless hours on the floor with it playing with blocks and books and watching Disney Pixar cartoons and playing peek-a-boo. It will create bizarre, abstract drawings for you to stick on your fridge, and say great stuff like, ‘I love you, Daddy,’ and, ‘Why aren’t I a tree?’ It will get dressed up as a giant cheese for school play night. You will tie its shoes and make thousands of sandwiches and carrot sticks for its lunch.
On Father’s Day, it will make you cold tea and burnt toast and present you with artwork made out of pipe-cleaners and pasta and the most aesthetically unappealing hand-painted coffee mug in the history of humankind, and yet you will be strangely proud of it and treat it with the utmost respect and value. For years. You will carry this now infinitesimally small spot on your shoulders around a zoo and find yourself making daft animal noises for illustrative purposes. You will feel hopeful as you launch it on its bike for the first time without training wheels, exhilarated as it pedals off manically into the distance, concerned as it suddenly veers off and disappears down an embankment, and sheepish as you explain to your wife why your child now has four stitches in its forehead. You will spend hours throwing balls and kicking balls and hitting balls together at the park. Expect that on several occasions, your own balls will also cop a clobbering. You will teach it to drive a car and struggle not to grab the steering wheel every time a corner is taken too widely, and you will lie awake at night because it borrowed your car and is two hours late in getting home. You will treasure the photo you have of you and this spot on top of a mountain on your camping holiday. This little thing will take you to the peaks of pleasure (‘I love you, Dad.’) and to the depths of despair (‘Dad, I just backed the car into the water tank.’).
And then, one day, that microscopic cell will leave home and you’ll wonder what you ever did before it came along.