Recently, my partner and I had a frank discussion about our personal and individual views on parenthood. I say “partner”, although what I mean is my girlfriend. My girlfriend calls me her partner, not her boyfriend. I use the term, too. I say “partner” in her presence and I also make an effort to use it when I am alone. When I am not in her presence. But it is confusing to me. It confuses others, too, I can see this. And when I think of her in my mind I call her my girlfriend, not because I think of her as a girl and not a full-grown woman. I am not a sexist.
No, it is not resistance to progress. I call her my girlfriend because we are not married. I simply feel that the term “partner”has a severity to it. There is a certain implicit legal rigidity. Two lawyers sharing a firm, say. Or else a pair of television detectives investigating crimes gruesome and obscure. To me, “partner” implies a certain matrimonial designation and import that has, in fact, not fully transpired yet. It jumps the gun. It hops the gate. It heightens, shall we say, the circumstances. The given circumstances. There is nothing tragic in saying, for instance, “My girlfriend and I had an argument, so I went out and saw the bank robbery movie by myself.” Whereas, for instance, “My partner and I had an argument, so I went to see the bank robbery movie by myself” sounds almost dire. Like something has gone horribly, if quietly, wrong. This would be after a courtship, a ring, a registry, an Ikea adventure, a wedding, a reception with “Uptown Funk”’s raunchy dancing.
It seems like a turn in the story. But it isn’t. It isn’t a turn in the story. It simply means a disagreement ensued after a candid discussion between two people and then I went to the cineplex and watched the bank robbery movie—the one my girlfriend didn’t want to see anyway—and I filled up on popcorn and Milk Duds and so I didn’t eat any dinner.
It isn’t tragic. I didn’t need dinner. I was not hungry.
The disagreement came about after our frank discussion on the subject of parenthood. Our viewpoints, it came to pass, differed. I thought it was a good discussion. I thought it was refreshingly frank, and that, being in the spirit of candor and speaking directly, it could only be good. It came about from recounting an amusing anecdote. I have many colorful anecdotes and I employ them as kinds of fables when I feel it might add levity and spirit to some of life’s harsher truths. My anecdote was about sitting around on the evening of my birthday some years before. I was with my friend Katherine at my old friend Duncan’s Northside apartment. We were drinking watermelon beer he had been brewing for a hobby. After a few watermelon beers, I revealed my then-partner might be pregnant. I let slip that I was, possibly, a father-to-be. Both friends were dismayed. They nearly spit out their watermelon beer mid-sip. Was I terrified? Was I excited? Would there be an abortion?
I explained I was not worried, sipping my watermelon beer. I said, because of my partner’s mood disorder and, in fairness, my own mood disorders and our respective psychopharmacological plethora, that surely the most it would amount to was a miscarriage. Katherine and Duncan, some old friends of mine, at that time, found my sardonic viewpoint funny. At least a little funny. They had chuckled while shaking their heads, and we had continued drinking and watching the traffic moving far down on the street from Duncan’s window. My partner—that is, my current girlfriend—did not find it funny. In fact, my current girlfriend found it so dreadful she fell silent for a whopping, uneasy slab of time.
We sat there. She on one side of the little wooden table and I on the other. Neither of us spoke. And then the frank discussion about parenthood flared up.
Did I not, she asked, even a little bit want to be a parent? What she meant was a father. A parent, again, I think, implies something beyond or behind the framework of the world at large. There are books on parenthood. There are courses on expectant parenthood. There are yoga classes. There are endless appointments. There are meetings at schools for parents when their children are children. But I would not, I gently explained, have been a parent. I would have been the father of a child. This smacked of semantics to my partner, who, again, is only my girlfriend. But I held firm.
She felt differently, about the language, and also about parenthood. I offered that with motherhood it’s different. It must be. Nobody really needs a father. And, I said, at best, any man is uneasily acquiescent to the enterprise. Out of, surely, love for one’s partner.
This was not the viewpoint my girlfriend held. I, she asserted, was generalizing. I was putting my own reticence to the whole human endeavor into the minds and the mouths of all those male-identifying partners and partners-to-be and would-be partners. I did not think so. I said as much. Biology was then invoked. The evolutionary and the social kind. Parenthood was fundamentally different for women and for men. And, in fact, the entire notion of parenthood bled of the sexes was only good in the examples seen above. This viewpoint was not shared, and examples were hurled at me by my partner that defied my chauvinism. Same-sex couples. Single fathers. Chimps who befriended kittens in sub-basement university laboratories. There, far from the prospective freshmen tour, these interspecies bonds shifted paradigms and brought funding to new, grant-enabled heights. One imagines, anyway. One…hopes. One, I suppose, can hope. If not reason. Or, only reason speciously.
This all went on for a time, until finally I was accused, by my partner, of staring a little too longingly at my wristwatch. I explained I nevertheless was listening carefully. I was listening and simultaneously checking the time, fearing our frank discussion would make us late for the start of the movie. Important though our frank discussion was. Important, if not more important. Certainly, in the grand scheme, more important. Though, it had to be said, this discussion was hardly bound by the same confines of time as the cineplex.
Some frank words were exchanged. It became clear I would be going to the cineplex alone. Did I really want to see that idiotic movie about bank robbers?
I did. Yes, I did.
And, I learned, my girlfriend did not. Her heart had never been in it, but now, thanks to our discussion with its frankness, she felt a new liberty to reveal her feelings about going to the movie. The candor brought forth from the larger topic could not, she fairly felt, be bottled again. But there’s nothing so tragic in it. It’s far from a Richard Yates novel. A boyfriend goes to the movies alone. That is not a Patsy Cline song on the lonely jukebox in a dive bar where the lovelorn weep into their watery highballs. It’s not, surely, “The End of the Affair”, when some tidbit from one’s rushing mad twenties falls flat in the retelling. It was not even a prurient tidbit. It wasn’t transgressive. In-your-face. I was not making light of, as it turned out, an actual terminated pregnancy. Or an unwanted child. Or a girlfriend—a woman—abandoned in an hour of need. It was not villainy. I was not drinking Duncan’s watermelon beer while flogging a Contessa, counting my gambling-hall winnings. No one had to ride along in a damp truckbed to Montreal to flee anybody else.
It is not tragic. But give it some time. Something, surely, will be.
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Nile Arena has contributed essays and fiction to The Bull, Canvas, the Grasping Hand, and Hidden Horror 101. His weird fiction journal, Success Stories, is available now at some of the places books are sold.
New Critique 