The Fear of Fatherhood – The Reprieve

      To say I was traumatized when I learned the facts of life would be putting it mildly. This new eye opener did two things however; it relieved my guilt that I had been harboring perverse urgings.

      I felt relieved that Carleta and I had not committed our souls to damnation.

However, this new knowledge filled me with a new dread. I thought back to the afternoon with Carleta and I felt the terror of becoming a father. I sat in front of my mother and Jake and they thought the look on my face was from me trying to digest the facts of life.

They did not see me visualizing in my minds eye my being a father at the age of twelve.

      I thought that I would have to drop out of school, and I in my mind’s eye, I was getting up and the crack of dawn dressed in blue-collar clothes, wearing work shoes, carrying a lunch pail and thermos to some factory holding a pipe between my lips, (I figured that’s what working dads did). I pictured myself with a heavy mustache because, well… that’s what having family would do for you is give your more facial hair.

      I was filled with the dread of realizing my life was now ruined.

      It took me awhile, but finally I approached Carleta, to ask her how she was feeling. Finally after beating around the bush, I told her that she did not have to worry, that I would work hard and be a good father.

(I vowed that I would not desert my family and that I would be there for my kid).

      Carlita laughed until tears ran down her face. “You are just so sweet,” she said in her beautiful lilting Cuban accent. Between fits of laughter, she told me not to fear…that she was not pregnant. She told me that her parents had her on birth control. (I have often reflected and wondered how her parents reconciled birth control and Catholicism).

      I didn’t really know until later what birth control pills were, but Carlita’s assurance that she was not pregnant filled me with a sense of relief that flooded through my body so strongly that it nearly made me faint.

I felt like a prisoner on death row that had been given a Presidential pardon.