I’ve constructed fantasy children in my head three times in my life, with three different partners. Each time the focus of the exercise was slightly different. The first time was in college with a girl I loved but never dated. We talked primarily about what kinds of silly outfits we would dress our children in. I was highly partial to the idea of pre-emptive blackmail and planned to dress our future children as dinosaurs and transvestites, being sure to take lots and lots of pictures. She seemed more invested in collecting a diverse cache of cute animal costumes so these hypothetical babies could move freely and easily through a series of disparate wildlife scenarios – polar bears one day, snapping turtles the next, hummingbirds on Fridays. It was fun and it was frivolous – we never talked about what we’d tell these pretend kids or how we’d raise them, we just used their suggested existence to riff with each other. It wasn’t really about the future, it just an extension of the now we were living in then. Instinctively I think we both knew that now was all we were going to have, so why get bogged down with the serious stuff?
The second time I imagined children as part of a relationship they were unwitting pawns in a regional rivalry; allegiances to be fought for and won and lorded over one another. Here there was a cursory discussion of how they’d be raised (to be open-minded, to be inquisitive, to hate the Montreal Canadians), but really it was about what they would become and how that would reflect on us – but not us as a pair, us as two individuals with insecurities and needs that merely existing wasn’t taking care of. Those fictional children, quite frankly, were walking into a trap and as much as I think they would have navigated it just fine I’m glad they never had to. I don’t really know what children should or shouldn’t do (especially make-believe children) but validating their parent’s life choices and justifying a relationship they had no say in probably goes in the “shouldn’t” category.
My last fictional child almost had a face. It didn’t exist to justify anything other than the simple act of being. I think we knew, as best we could, what we would try to teach him or her and what we could and couldn’t control. We’d dress it in whatever (what passes for decency with a baby seems to be pretty easy to achieve) and tell it to root for whoever (…as long as they never bad-mouther the Bruins in my presence). We’d almost certainly argue about the finer details and I’m sure that would have been a daily struggle. And it might have been more than that, I suppose. It might have been more than two people who thought they knew each other (but couldn’t prove it to themselves or each other) could handle.
However it might have turned out, the truth is that that fictional baby did exist, if only for the briefest of moments. It existed long enough to buy secondhand baby books and panic about finances. It existed long enough to develop a face in my imagination; no imagined baby had ever had a face before. And even though that face was vague, made of simple, shadow characteristics from my face and hers, it was there.
But then it was gone. I’ve never quite known how to feel about something that shifted so quickly from was to wasn’t. At the time everything had happened so fast it all whirred past me like a screaming meteorite passing by on the freeway. It didn’t seem real, even though it was.
I don’t see much value in thinking too long on the diverging paths of our lives. There really aren’t infinite possibilities, as far as I’m concerned. There’s what happened and there’s what you plan to make happen next. So I don’t know why I’m thinking about this now; I’m not sure what it serves me to think about the son or daughter that was and then wasn’t. That was a variation of my life that never happened. No take-backs. No do-overs. And maybe someday I’ll imagine myself another child dressed like a wallaby, or maybe someday that walla-baby will be real and not imagined. But once there was a thing that was mine and someone else’s and it was real. No matter how briefly so, it was real, and when you’re real, you’re real forever.