The Desire for Sons

As I’ve posted in the past, Mrs. Goober and I are older, now 34 years old, and have one child.  We’re working on another.  As you might recall,we’ve had limited success. 

The reason I’m writing this is because I keep getting people asking me if we’re going to have another.  It has come from very odd places at very odd and uncomfortable times, and I am not sure what to do about it. 

For instance, the controller at work asked me if when we were planning on having another, and my response was “we’re working on it.” 

Which, I realized later, was more or less the same thing as saying “we’re fuckin’ like rabbits, as often as we can.”  Which made me feel creepy. 

So when the receptionist asked me the same question to days later, my reply was “whenever God see fit to bless us,” which seemed really disingenuous since, if there even is a God,  don’t think he has anything to do with whether Mrs. Goober and I get pregnant, if for no other reason than just out of practicality. 

I don’t want to get into explaining about how we’ve been trying for a while, and even lost a pregnancy back in November, because then you get a lot of people feeling sorry for you and giving you mindless platitudes for encouragement, which I don’t want or need. 

I just don’t know how to answer this question honestly, which is that Mrs. Goober and I would very much like to have another kid, and are working on that, but have so far been unsuccessful, without either sounding like a lecherous pervert, a sorrow-stricken halfling, or a  disingenuous religious person. 

To be perfectly honest, I wish like hell people would just quit asking… 

 He had always wanted a son. But what man does not want a son? What man wishes to die and leave no man to carry on, to continue the strain, the bloodline? Who wishes to waste what he has learned? Who wishes to see it die with him?Old as life is the desire for sons. Old as all life upon the planet. It is this that carries on the species, and it is necessary for each man and woman to breed. That was the will of nature. All else came after. The species must continue, it must go on.So there is deeply seated this desire, this wish. – Louis L’amour