Daddy Issues

I try to make myself inapproachable on the train. I put my head down and read a book or the New Yorker [address label removed] and keep my earbuds in and turn them off. Or keep them on and lose the book, making sure the music is playing at a volume that will not bleed out into the car because, for some inexplicable reason, I am physically unable to skip over that Taylor Swift song and really like Rockapella's rendition of Canon in D. I am not sure how either of these songs got on my iPod, but they are there and they aren't going anywhere.

I do this, put up my New Yorker wall, because the first week I was here, I didn't. I was riding the train to the park to journal and be around people and try to figure out why the guy I was dating at the time was all of a sudden having "phone trouble" whenever I wanted to talk and to figure out where all of my money went. This is when a homeless man touched my face. He just grabbed it, after asking me numerous times whether I thought he should shave his beard or leave it. And when I finally responded, staring straight ahead, that he should keep it, worried that if I encouraged him to shave, he would whip out a razor right then and there and take it to my ear or throat, he grabbed my face and asked me didn't anyone ever teach me to look at someone when speaking to them? This was with the hand that he had just been twirling in the beard in question. My earbuds have been in ever since.

They were in on the day when a very Park Slope-y couple got on the train with their Trader Joe's bags and running stroller and sat down next to me and I felt something on my leg. I looked down and it was a baby hand, straining and reaching and landing on my leg. The hand was attached to a baby body and a baby face and it was baby smiling at me. I like babies, I am not one of those people who try to amp up their street cred by saying how much they hate kids. I like kids. I don't know how to talk to them, I talk to them like they are little adults and, shockingly, most babies don't care about the documentary I watched on my friend's Netflix Instant Queue last night, but I do, as a general rule, like them. The mother began to apologize like mad and I told her it was fine, because it was. The dad stayed quiet. He looked like one of those hipsterguys who just cannot be bothered to talk unless it is over some pretentious cocktail or imported beer and only then if it is about the new "sound" of so-and-so's album [IT SOUNDS LIKE MUSIC!] or the aesthetics of post-modernist anti-transcendentalist screen printing shit. We got to talking and the baby kept reaching for me, smiling, grabbing my leg. It is exactly the way you want a first date to go and exactly the way you don't want a train ride to go.

This conversation ended with the mother asking me if I ever babysat, presumably so that she and her husband could go to some vegan independent press book release party, and I said ... uh, yes, because I am poor and have managed to make it twenty three years without killing any humans yet. She asked me for my number and I gave it to her. I have not heard from them and secretly hope not to.

I was my telling my friend Carrie this, as we were riding the train to the Brooklyn Flea, which I like but can be oppressive with the amount of people who would have lots of things to talk about with the Park Slope husband. Once we got there, I was crouched down on the floor, admiring a pair of boots that 1) would never in a million years fit me, and 2) if they did, would probably cost as much as I spend on groceries in any given month, when I felt a familiar weight on my shoulder. It felt like a baby hand.

This time the baby hand was accompanied by a baby voice and it said: DADA!

I turned around and even after the kid saw my face he kept lurching at me, asking to be picked up. His mother, to her credit, followed closely behind saying "no no no no," and apologizing and telling me that I looked like her husband from behind, which I am still not entirely sure how to take.

And now, on the subway yesterday, a kid ran across the car calling out the familiar DADA and lunging straight for me. It is like there is a magnet or something, drawing these kids in my direction. I don't feel old enough to be a dad, but if there's one thing I've learned from 16 and Pregnant, it's that that feeling is wrong. Guys my age could, technically, have kids entering middle school. I still feel terribly young, still get offended when the spindly salesgay at Uniqlo calls me sir [moreso because I don't believe that anyone shopping at Uniqlo deserves to be referred to as an adult].

I want kids. Someday. In the very future tense. Abbey's brother is having a baby and already talks to his wife's stomach asking the baby for confirmation that he or she hates Obama. Abbey said she wants to take the baby aside, early, and let him or her know that he or she is loved and that they can be whoever they want to be and do what they want to do even if that means smoke a little pot and not vote Republican all the time. She wants to tell them that it is okay if they don't want to wear a dress or if they don't want to wear pants and that it is okay for them to love whoever they love. She wants to let them know that it will all be okay. I want my future kids to know the same things and also, to know that I will understand if they run across trains or reach out there hands to strange men and say DADA as long as, at the end of the day, they know who their real dad is.