In every house I have ever walked through, there is a room I look at first. Empty, usually, with the afternoon laid across the floor, and the agent saying office while I am thinking something else entirely. I have been doing it for years, long before I would have admitted why.
I want to be a father. God willing, more than once. I am forty-one, so I am going to be direct instead of dancing around it: this is not a recent conclusion and it is not negotiable down to something smaller. If the two of us turn out to be after different lives, better to find that out in month four than in year four. That is a kindness, and I intend to offer it before I ask for it.
A somewhat traditional house, then. Not because there is only one right way to run one, but because that is the shape I am after, and it belongs up front instead of surfacing in year two.
In practice it means I carry the income, and not so that she is prevented from working. If she loves what she does, or has built something of her own, that stays hers and I am not going to ask her to set it down. What I mean is that we should never need her paycheck to be alright, so that her hours go to the children and the house because that is where she wants them, not because the math leaves her nowhere else to put them.
The money is not mine, either. It lands in one account and we decide about it together. I have no interest in the version of this where earning it buys me the last word.
A house also runs badly when every task gets split down the middle and tallied. That turns into keeping score, and keeping score is what wears couples out. Better that each of us owns things outright and handles them. Mine would be the vehicles, the land, the repairs, the hauling, the money, and the phone calls nobody wants to make, owned so completely that she never has to ask me twice about any of them.
And what she would be carrying is not the smaller job. Raising children well and running a home is hard, it matters more than most paid work, and it happens to come with no paycheck. That says something about how we count things, not about the work.
That gets shown rather than said. In how I talk about it in front of other people, and in where my hours go once the workday is done.
Whatever we are given gets raised on the land. Loose in the trees and the creek, real tools in their hands as early as it is safe. Bored regularly, because bored children invent things and entertained children do not. Watching both of us work at something hard and not finish it that day.
Raised in the faith too, and not as a set of rules, because rules do not survive contact with being nineteen. It has to be something they watched in us instead. Grace said at the table and actually meant. A hard week that we came through without once stopping being decent to each other. Their father asking their mother for forgiveness somewhere they could hear him do it.
Three things they leave the house knowing: how to make something with their hands, how to be alone without being anxious about it, and how to look a grown man in the eye and hold a conversation. With those, I will not worry much about the rest.
They watch us disagree and stay kind, because that is the only way anyone ever learns it. And they hear us say we were wrong, out loud, at the table, often enough that changing their own minds never comes to feel like losing.
Then there is the one thing that gets done on purpose, and it is the reason this chapter exists. After they are in bed, the two of us stand in the hallway outside their door and talk quietly. Some nights about them. Some nights about each other. Always in the way two people sound when they think nobody is listening and they still speak well of one another.
They will be lying in there wide awake, certain they have gotten away with something. And they will hear their mother say she was proud of one of them for something that happened that afternoon. They will hear their father agree, and then say something admiring about her. None of it aimed at them, and all of it landing.
We will never tell them we knew. That is the entire point. A child can be praised to their face a thousand times and none of it goes in the way one overheard sentence does in a dark hallway. Praise said to their face might be a tactic. Praise they were never supposed to hear cannot be. It is also where they will learn what a man and a woman sound like when they speak lovingly to each other. Both of those land as lessons they cannot remember being taught.
I am not going to pretend I know how to do any of this yet. I have convictions and no practice, and I expect the first year to demolish a fair number of the convictions. Arriving with a clear intention held loosely still beats arriving with nothing at all.
And now the part I would rather not write, which is exactly why it goes here, last, where it cannot be skipped. This chapter is not entirely up to us. Bodies do what they do, and a great many people who wanted this every bit as much did not receive it, and it was not a failure of wanting and it was not a failure of faith.
If we end up in that country, neither of us walks through it alone. Not the medical part, not the grief, not the long stretch afterward when everyone else has stopped asking and it is still sitting in the room.
So the promise I can actually make is not that we will have children. It is that if we are not given them, I am not going anywhere, and we will walk this life hand in hand toward whatever God sets in front of us. Whether that promise ever gets tested, and what it turns into at the far end of a life, is where this book ends.
