I know what you’re thinking, and I’m not going to do it.
"Smits didn't do shit last year," you're saying to yourself. "He's just going to take credit for his wife shitting out a couple of babies. What a chump."
It's not fair for me to talk about how I watched my wife nurture my seedlings to life over the course of the longest nine months of our lives. How I rubbed her swollen feet on the couch every night, because that's all I could do to ease some of the pain in her aching body.
It's not fair for me to talk about the emotional turmoil I went through in the weeks before my seedlings hatched, about how I took stock of my entire childhood and wondered whether I could give my nippers the same memories I cherished while avoiding the regrets that I still carry with me.
It's not fair for me to talk about the emotions in the car ride to the hospital with my wife, knowing that we'd never never ride in the car again as a family of two. I don't remember what we said. I don't remember if we said anything at all.
It's not fair for me to talk about how I was brought to tears when the doctor held up two healthy babies from the other side of the operating curtain. And then the horror I felt as my wife passed out on the table due to rapid blood loss. Baby A and Baby B, as they were known to everyone else in the operating room, cried for their mother after the trauma of birth, yet she could not yet hear them. I tried to comfort them, but my callused hands were no substitute for a mother's warmth.
It's not fair for me to talk about the first week after we brought the little mites home and our comfortable, bohemian lifestyle was obliterated by heaps of shitty diapers, a carpet saturated with projectile vomit, an tsunami of baby toys, and a bad case of acid reflux in Baby B.
It's not fair for me to talk about the joy of watching the babes grow, if even for a time period as short as 4 months by the close of 2015. No words can adequately describe what it feels like when you come home from a grueling 11 hour work day to see your own younglings' faces light up with joy as you walk through the door.
It's not fair, and I'm not going to do it.
As you know, I'm not a religious man. But I'll be damned if it isn't some sort of small miracle that I can stand before you today as the patriarch of the Smits clan, family of four. I entered the year 2015 as a strapping, formidable powerlifter well on his way to squatting 500 lbs, a rare feat for a 181 lb mammal. By mid-summer, I was broken both physically and emotionally. I questioned my ability to rise to the occasion in any endeavor. Am I capable of raising two tadpoles? Can I successfully navigate them through life over the next 18 years? Will they respect the weakened, damaged shell of a man I feel I've become?
My burning questions cannot be answered for years to come. But like a rose which grows from a crack in the concrete, the resurrection of my manhood has begun. I'm ejaculating onto my wife's bosom once again, a few stray droplets flinging up on her cheeks and onto the comforter. I'm stacking paper like a motherfuckin printing press. Middle class style.
The American dream is still alive. Get married, have kids, get house. One and two are in the bag. I spent 2015 putting in work, so that one day I will jizz all over number three.
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