This past week, I had the tremendous opportunity to meet a pair of my newborn nieces for the first time.
My brother and his wife had a daughter about four weeks ago. I had the chance to hold her on Mother’s Day and she was absolutely precious and a model baby, easily falling asleep in my arms.
My sister and brother-in-law had their baby just this past week, and with softball games getting canceled due to poor weather, I was able to visit them at the hospital and meet my newest niece for the first time as well. The amount of love that poured out of me was a bit overwhelming, both for my siblings and my two new nieces, but I also had another nagging feeling that I was a bit ashamed of.
Did I blow my chance to experience this for myself?
I’m the eldest of my siblings at 38 years old. They’re both married to tremendously supportive and loving partners and they’re all amazing parents to a total of five of my nieces and nephews. My family has been jokingly described as “annoyingly wholesome.”
A good portion of my friends that I grew up with now have beautiful families as well.
I haven’t been quite as lucky in the love department. Sure, I’ve had my share of relationships over the years, but a big part of me feels like I wasn’t taking the dating life nearly as seriously as I should have, especially during the times when most people were settling down and taking that next step in their lives.
It took me a bit longer to mature, I think. I was a bit of a late bloomer figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, and when I wasn’t focusing on my career in either online or newspaper journalism, I was content to spend my personal free time playing video games or binge-watching TV shows and movies. I wasted far too much of my time instead of putting myself out there into the world, building new connections with the surrounding community and just plain seeing what happens. Perhaps this was just me being an over-thinker, but I didn’t even feel like I was in a safe enough financial situation to ever even think about being able to start a family until I was comfortably into my 30s.
Some of my relationship issues are self-inflicted. If something seemed particularly promising and later fizzled out, I’d spend far too long feeling sorry for myself and wallowing in misery instead of getting back on the horse and putting myself back out there again. I hate to admit it, but I also had a few relationships where I knew almost right away that I didn’t think it was someone who would work out long-term, but I wasted my time and theirs by hanging around instead of being responsible and letting us both move on. There were multiple times I chose safety and complacency over actual promise. I even had that unfortunate situation last year where I wasted over a month of my life talking to a “girl” who later attempted to scam me.
I understand that as a man, I don’t exactly have a biological clock, but the grim reality has started to sink in that even if I were to start a family, I’d be one of those “old dads.” We all had that classmate whose parents thought they were done having kids, perhaps by a decade or more.
I think I can live with that, though. I’ve been fortunate not to have experienced health issues over the years, but I also would want to be able to keep up with any potential toddlers if I were to have them someday — to be able to tire them out instead of being the one who needs a nap (or oxygen) after playtime. That means I really have to take better care of myself with my diet and exercise moving forward.
If I continue to delay, I’ll be on Social Security by the time my theoretical kids are graduating high school. But at the same time, I don’t want to rush into a situation with someone who’s not the right person for me, either. That wouldn’t be fair to them and it especially wouldn’t be fair to any potential child we’d bring into the world together.
In the meantime, the best I can do is continue to put myself out there and hope some of that love that I put out into the world is reciprocated. If it happens, it happens. If not, I can learn to accept it.
In the worst case scenario where I’ve missed my opportunity to have my own family, there thankfully is a wonderful lasting legacy of my genetic code moving on through the children of my siblings. I can at least be the best uncle that I can be to two amazing nephews and three wonderful nieces.
And when you get down to it, that’s not such a bad consolation prize in life.
You are a wonderful human being. Singles can adopt. If that is what you think you'd like to do, I'm sure you'd have a whole world of people to support you!