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Biology 101
Happy Father's Day! Father's Day is the one day of the year particularly suited to this column. And, as you may have noticed last month, I was away becoming a father for the second time in 19 months.

Father's days are kind of like birthdays--they come once a year and mark a passing in time--so it seems natural for a father to take a moment and think about the past year. You know, sort of take stock of what he's done, learned and accomplished, and how he might apply any gained knowledge to the year ahead.

Well, for me, with the birth of my second daughter, I've been thinking about biology. Not of infants, but of adults. Specifically, parents.

My wife and I are in our 30s; not an uncommon age for new families these days. But uncommon or not, I was struck with a lightning bolt of a realization recently about our ages and the advancing ages of so many new parents out there. Basically, we've got it all wrong.

That's right, all wrong. As modern people we believe we've got it all figured out, that we know what's best, that anyone who has come before was just flailing for answers. We live in the information age, after all. Answers to pretty much anything are just a Google search away. But the one thing we haven't overcome, no matter how advanced we may be, is our biology. Here's what I mean.

When I was in my twenties, I regularly stayed up late. Night after night, weekend after weekend, I would never go to bed early. Why would I? There was stuff to do, people to hang out with, movies to watch. It didn't matter if it was a work night or not, I would stay up late and be up at 6:30 the next morning ready to take on a new day. Besides, if I was a little tired after a while, maybe I'd just turn in a little earlier one night and I'd be all set and ready to roll.

As I cruised into my late twenties and into my thirties, my energy levels declined. I found I wasn't quite able to consistently stay up late, especially if I was going to work in the morning. The thought of spending the wee hours of the morning doing anything more than sleeping became increasingly difficult to comprehend. I'm not trying to suggest that when I hit thirty I became an old man. I'm just saying that I began to feel nature's limits, and as time marched on the limits felt closer and closer.

So what does this have to do with being a father (or a mother)? Let me put it this way: the people in the olden days had it right. You don't have to go back very far to realize that people were younger when they had their children. My mother was barely into her mid-twenties by the time she had her last kid, which meant that by the time she was my age my brothers and I were big! Put another way, the whole time I was a whining, crying baby, keeping my parents up at night and fussing about going to bed and needing almost-constant attention, they were in a place, biologically speaking, that was more capable of dealing with it. Then, when my brothers and I started chilling out and sleeping through the night and began growing up, my parents were moving into the biological phase that I now find myself in. Except I'm just beginning to deal with all the drama and sleeplessness of early childhood! Like I said, we've got it all wrong.

I mentioned this thesis of mine to New Town Crier's editor one day and she agreed for the most part with my argument. She did counter with the point that while it may not be biologically ideal, as a father surely I have more to offer my kids--more maturity, more wisdom, that kind of thing. I thought about this, and I think that as humans we try to make the best of any situation, and that being a little older might lend me more insight compared to when I was a younger man. But I can't help thinking that fighting biology is ultimately a no-win situation. As a society we spend so much time, effort and money trying to be forever young, yet we constantly fail. Or, rather, we continually succeed in getting older.

At the end of the day, there's nothing I can do about my age and there's little really that I'd want to do anyway. And I definitely wouldn't want to change anything at all with my two beautiful girls, even with the exhaustion, sore muscles and all. I just realize that I'm fighting an uphill battle against a force infinitely larger than myself. But, like anything good, the sacrifice is worth it.

 

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