In fact it was so much like that, that it’s not clear to me whether that actually happened in the dream itself or if it was merely the sensation that I experienced. I do not think that I knew with any specificity whether it was a boy or a girl. My girls and I have certainly talked about how it would be nice to have a little brother, and I have thought about what it would mean to me.

I don’t think I realized what having another child, especially a son, meant to me until it was something that was already beyond my ability to grasp. It was something whose significance hadn’t yet occurred to me or dawned on me as any sort of instinctive knowledge. Instead it was something that dawned on me gradually, as its reality came into focus as it receded behind me.

Maybe it would have been better if I had never gained this knowledge. For the first time in my life I knew the actual instinctive desire to have children that I had never really had before, but had approached instead on an intellectual and practical basis, expecting that the feelings would emerge once the reality was present.

And I was right; they did come. In time I learned what it meant to have children and what it meant to me. And without ever having really given it any thought or spared it any concern I suddenly had insight into what having a son would have meant for me. The way in which it would have taken me beyond my own natural Instincts and feelings and prejudices into something bigger that I was a part of, the continuity a fatherhood. And I knew what I had missed. Forever.

And I suddenly felt regret I never knew I could have. And I heard a voice inside me bargaining with me, trying to find a loophole, thinking of how I might amend this wound through changes and escapes from my choices, physically and relationally. I realized that I had cut myself off from a source of freedom and opportunity that was a special inheritance, maybe even a special duty or compulsion. The ability to try again to expand my family to create new pads into the future, new lines of opportunity throughout my life.

And I felt a voice I had never known calling to me, speaking to me, and asking me to invite it to become a part of my actualized self. And it struggles with the other parts of me, the parts that made the choices that led me to this place, and it tortures me with pain and regret. The promise of lost opportunities that could be recaptured. But we only have one life, and I have invested much in the life that I have, and kept it only by the grace of God.

But I certainly understand now the madness that overtakes men as they approach midlife. I have greater sympathy for the needs that drive them in desperate and unreasoned action that disrupts everything they have built in the lives they have. There is a ticking of a biological clock that I never knew I had ringing in my ears. A deep drive that persists and still goes unfilled, despite all that I have and all that I am thankful for and all that I have preserved and worked for. And isn’t that a strange thing?

My oldest daughter asked me the other night when we were talking about having children whether I ever wished that she was a boy instead of a girl. And I laughed. Because the idea had never crossed my mind before, in fact I had always been rather relieved at having a girl, and rather delighted. A boy had always seemed to be a more scary and difficult and unfamiliar prospect. I have always had so much more to do with girls and women in my life instead of men and have always felt more comfortable with them. I wasn’t sure I knew how to be a dad of a boy, much less a man.

My daughter thought about my response for a moment and then asked me, did you ever wish that you had had a son instead of having me? And my response was that of course I’ve never, ever wished that, and nothing would ever convince me to give her up for anything. I don’t think her questions had any hidden motives, but were simply honest and curious. And my responses were equally candid and uncrafted and honest. I didn’t have to think about them; there was no distance between my instinctive response and my speech.

But, I told her, I had realized eventually that it would have been nice to have had a little boy too, and that I would have appreciated it for both myself and for her and her sister. Even though I could never wish for any part of what I had to be different than what it was, I still had some regret and some unfulfilled longing for opportunities missed and possibilities unrealized.

And I felt again the pain and loss of some power that I hadn’t known I’d had that I had given up, the ability to call forth possibility from unbeing or from mere potential. To take the infinite fertility of pluripotency and press forward, sparking it into specificity. And I never knew what that was worth and what it meant until it was lost. And some part of me still wants to schedule a reversal for my vasectomy, while I still perhaps have time. But I have to let that go. I have to accept that that chance has passed. That it wasn’t mine to have. I have to let that idea go, let that precious thread of meaning never be spoken into reality. But my heart sheds hidden tears over it, and I feel the pain of it as that golden thread slips knife-like through my hands.

That was what woke me from my dream. To feel that pain removed, to feel it transformed. Like the whole shape of the world had changed. Another child. Another constellation in the sky. A new land sighted across an empty sea. And all my being leapt inside me. And I awoke and could not sleep again for some hours.