In Fertility
Chapter Three: Prescription Sex

This is it. The moment I have been waiting for. Doctor ordered sex!

I’ve never been ordered to have sex before, but I have a sense I’m going to enjoy it. In the process of having a baby, sex is, in my opinion, the single best part. We leave the doctor’s office and I start counting the miles until we get home. At one point, I even suggest we simply pull into an alley and crawl into the back seat, but the radio must be up too loud, because no matter how often I offer, Lyena doesn’t seem to hear me.

We finally get home and I make my move, which is to say I bee-line for the bedroom and take off my clothes. After half an hour or so, my wife hasn’t show up, so I wander into the living room to find her sitting at her computer. It seems she thinks I should conserve my verve (so to speak) and wants to wait until the next morning. I’m not good at waiting, but since she is pretty integral to the process, I begrudgingly relent to her wholly outrageous demands, and put my clothes back on.

Since there’s not really much else to do while I’m waiting, I spend much of the “mean” time thinking about parenthood. When I was a kid, I thought my parents knew everything about everything. They always seemed to have the answers to life’s big questions like where gum comes from and why everything tastes better when it’s candy coated. As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve realized that, as smart as my parents are, they were probably guessing, just like the rest of us. And I must admit there’s some comfort in that. I used to think parenting was an endeavor of precision and skill. Now I realize it’s more like throwing darts into the air and hoping as few as possible hit your kid in the head.

So, am I sure I’m ready to be a dad? I actually think I am (as ready as a first-time father can be, at any rate). I really want a child and I am quite looking forward to having one. Except for maybe the diapers. And the lack of sleep. And the spit-up. And the teenage dad-you’re-an-idiot-and-I-hate-you years. Other than that, I’m really looking forward to it.

From what I’ve heard from other dads, though, the downside is that you basically never have sex again. Unless it’s to have another baby. This concerns me. You see, I like sex. I want to keep having it, and not just as a necessity for the production of offspring. I try to get my wife’s opinion on this, but she keeps flip-flopping – either comforting me that it isn’t true, or confirming that it is, depending, I guess, on how annoying I’m being at the time.

This whole process, therefore, has me in a bit of a conundrum. I recognize that every month that goes by our chances of getting pregnant decrease. However, there is a part of me that wants the trying part to take its sweet time. Because the trying part is fun. So I’m torn between wanting to get pregnant quickly and, well, wanting to have lots and lots of sex.

For the moment, however, I have no choice in the matter. Doctor’s orders. Poor me.

Over the next two days, we make love. It is slow and sensuous, full of passion and romance … honeymoon love. The kind of love-making that you would be proud to conceive a child during. I’m not very good at writing about it without sounding like a trashy adult romance novel (and I’ve tried), so I’ll just leave it at this: if it’s going to be the last time you have sex, it should be like that.

The next morning, I wake up, look over at my sexy, still-sleeping wife, and wonder if that was it. Did we just make a baby? My concerns about whether or not I would have sex again drift away, to be replaced with anticipation. A smile stretches across my face. I might be a dad. And then comes the fear. Holy crap!

Up Next: The Return of the VaJedi