I’m not against having children. Quite the opposite is true, in fact.

I’m delighted with the notion that, someday, in the not-too-distant future, the wife and I will have a little bundle of joy. There will come a day, I imagine, where I will be laying on the couch, re-watching “Lost in Translation”, and it will suddenly strike me with great force and importance, as I stare into Bill Murray’s sullen face and Scarlett Johansson’s soul-less eyes, that I must procreate. My lineage must be furthered, I’ll reason, and with a son or daughter, the legacy of ME will live on forever. I shall be immortal!

I’ll put on a romantic record, perhaps some Marvin Gaye, and light a fire in the wood stove. The wife will come home, weary and bleary-eyed from a long day suffering fools and before she can launch into a tirade on how Gwyneth lost the keys to the register again or how her requested time-off has been denied again, I will press a finger to her lips gently and say “Hush, my darling.”

Then, after I reset my finger that she broke for “condescendingly” hushing her, I will seductively pour us each a glass of the finest Mexican boxed wine and, with the help of a flock of birds and a swarm of bees and possibly some honey, we will commence with creating a luminous being of love and wonder in my wife’s tummy. Then, after nine months or so, that luminous being will rip my lovely wife in twain, stroll out and start demanding things like food and attention and a college education (good luck with that, baby) in exchange for giving meaning to my life and my wife’s life.

But, until that fateful day comes, the wife and I will continue to rely on birth control. Pills. Stork poison, you know? We’d been dodging bullets (as my wife puts it) for a few months, about a year ago, by not using any sort of preventative measures, but I told her she had no reason to worry. I spent quite a bit of time in my teenage years standing in front of the leaky microwave at my local 7-11, waiting for corn dogs and burritos, and I’m fairly certain that what few sperm survived that radioactive fallout now swim in wide, lazy circles while thinking about a farm where they can pet the rabbits all day long. Just in case, though, we now play it safe.

My initial plan, when we got married, was that we might have a whole bunch of children, a team, enough to play a game of baseball whenever I wanted. Then, I reasoned, after a few years, you could pit them against one another, make them fight to the death, until only one remained: the strongest, the fastest, the most clever (the cleverest?), one uber-child that I might unleash on the planet, a minor deity in human form who called me “Daddy”. A boy (or girl) who’s very presence would inspire smoldering jealousy in other fathers, a boy (or girl) who would love fiercely, fight ferociously, be a fair and even-handed ruler amongst the other toddlers on the playground, and eventually bring about a new era of peace and prosperity among the people of our world and possibly a few other worlds, too.

The wife put a stop to that manner of thinking right away, though. Probably for the best.

Also, she pre-emptively vetoed the name, if we someday had a boy, of “James Bond Hoke”.

“It’s Bond,” I imagined him saying one day to some femme fatale somewhere, “James Bond… Hoke.” Now that dream has died.

Birth control strikes me as a rather interesting term for it. It’s not exactly the birth that we’re trying to control, it’s the conception. Birth control is what I want the doctor to do when we’re in the delivery room, you know, handling the logistics of the thing, the exit strategy, the miracle and such.

The miracle that will literally cleave my wife in two with his/her glorious birth…