I know I want to raise children and be a father. But I know it about as much as I know about falling from a roof or dunking a basketball or getting into a car crash. There are experiences that make the fiber of humanity effable, attached to a sensation, but that I still can’t imagine because I haven’t had them. They are the event memory of taking a plunge, of gravity hooking the bottom of my stomach and trying to pull it through my lungs to teach me a lesson about believing in greater forces.

But my greater psychological difficulties have delayed my fatherhood journey, as I’ve written here. For one, I have felt alien to my own father, a man who feared rearing children so much, he ran to another country, a strange city after siring all four of us. So I’m ingrained with the thought that something about parenting is unnatural or weakening or unsettling. Except for when I teach. When I have the opportunity to teach, to give gentle care to young minds, to open myself to their original and ancient thoughts, I am floored and want to be around it all the time. I also want to be a father when I remember the moments I would’ve wanted a father to cheer me on, to show me a route, to resist me physically as I tore up the world and its plans.

My first memories in Jamaica are of walking barefoot on hot stone roads in Portland parish. My cousins, fully acclimated to the solar heat frying their every step, only engaged in our play naked from the ankles down. I could not manage, stubbing my toes bloody during rounds of foot races from blistering afternoons to humid nights. I would try, though, sliding off my rubber dollar sandals to test my soles on crabgrass and white hot crags only to look like a hoppin’ John, knees and shins vaulting up from the ground for any cool air to be soaked up between burns. I imagined my father then, telling me I had nothing to be afraid of, to put my feet down like a man and that I could be strong. My Uncle Clive was gentle with me, his sister’s grandkid, his niece’s son, showing me I could put on shoes and still go play.

He was enough, but not the one I wanted. The Dread, my life’s first ghost, existed as a phone voice, telling me evils of the world, but not of mundane hazards. Like hot tender feet from wearing shoes too much. Like looking directly at anyone for too long, how it could invoke a voodoo that would make them take you into their spirit forever, like a voluntary cage. Like running too fast after a girl who would be your best friend, and being so excited to catch up you knocked her over, ripping her dress. Like cold cereal on an empty stomach worsening your motion sickness. Like any amount of small dangers that were still longer than my spine and bigger than my shadow.

I want to father a child through their first cracked tibia and their first layoff. Their rejection from college, their heartbreak at the one they get into. Their dorm fees. I want to father her through the period that comes during the snowstorm and sends her reeling to the nurse for a change of panties. I want to father alongside a mother, or a partner, or both. I want to father through divorce, through treachery, through misunderstandings with their mother, the kind that judges, lawyers, Godmothers, aunties and uncles cannot solve.

I want to father her through the apocalypse, where it might be that the promise of Earth depends on how I father and still makes no difference in total. I wake up thinking of this self-centered, completely bullshit fantasy fathering, the fathering they will read in my essays and go on to expose me as anything but that level of father and still have to admit I tried. I may not father every moment on the checklist but I turned myself into the main one worthy of the title.

I am writing this to their mother as much as anyone. Toni Morrison said, in response to the notion that we “didn’t ask to be here” that we, in fact, did ask. I’m writing this for cosmic permission, from their mother and from them, to allow me the opportunity and capacity — give me the space to father you. Give me the closeness too, I want more of the closeness than anything but I will stop shy of crushing you with my expectations, my projections. This turned into a letter and I didn’t mean it to, but if you’re reading this:

Thank you. For letting me help will you into existence. You were a request and a wish before you got here. I was lucky enough to ride my wish to this point, and now I can grant you that. Although it’s certain my sturdiest, surest promise is that I’ll disappoint, be aware that I will surprise you with my willingness to try. I will awe you with my ability to be unembarrassed in my love for you. I will captivate you with my shameless and often clumsy desire to protect you from breathing wrong. I vow not to freeze in fear when it comes to you, when it comes to me and mine. I will traffic in fear sometimes and nevertheless swim in it for our sake.