Fatherhood, Part Trois

Today’s post is part of this month’s Blog Exchange and is written by PunditMom. You can find Amanda over at PunditMom’s place today as part of the exchange. Amanda, thanks for letting me hang out here today. I’ll try to finish with a wink!

By the time I met the man who would become my husband, he thought he was done having children. Soon it would be time to kick back, wind down and get back to the adult life he vaguely recalled.

But life is funny, and sometimes things happen that you don’t see coming.

Fast forward a couple of years, and that man was the divorced father of two teen daughters and dating me – a thirty-something professional who knew her biological clock was ticking.

There was no question we were compatible on a thousand different levels. It was stunning to us how much we had in common in light of our extraordinarily different backgrounds – city boy and country girl, competing religions and an age difference of a decade.

When things got truly serious, we knew the one major issue we had to iron out was what is often a big one for any couple – whether we would have a child together. I was ambivalent, but sensed I would have a need to be a mother.

But my guy was almost done – with one daughter in college and one in high school, he could see the light at the end of the parenting tunnel. And he was looking forward to that.

He knew in a way I could not what was in store for him if he became a dad for the third time and he wasn’t sure he wanted to get back on that merry-go-round.

But he did.

For me.

Willingly and joyfully, because he loved me.

It wasn’t an easy ride. At 37, I thought I still had some prime reproductive years left. I was wrong.

At 39, I was done with the relatively short journey we took down the fertility path and started plowing through reams of information and paperwork about adoption.

He could have said at anytime that in agreeing to father child number “trios” he had not bargained on all that would eventually be entailed, including a trip half way around the world.

But he didn’t.

Because he also knew how much joy he continued to get from his first two children, even as they embarked on their own journeys into adulthood.

As he became a father for the third time, he embraced all that that entailed and hasn’t looked back.

When I married him, I thought that there would never be a day when I loved him more.

I was wrong. Because on the day he became the father of our daughter, number three for him, I could feel my love growing even more for him.

As it continues to grow every day when I see him with our daughter. Our number three.

Don’t forget to check out all posts on fathers and dads from the other Blog Exchange participants, too!