My Dad on Choosing a Wife

Start with a wish list. Make sure in includes the prerequisite birthing hips.

When young and impressionable, the adults seemed intelligent and rational. There’s an order to things; one must observe, learn, and eventually join that order.

Along the way, you’re exposed to life’s little messes- aberrant human behavior that is difficult to explain. These observations help reorient a young boy’s life to allow for behavior differences among people. The piano teacher had an alarm clock in his trench coat placed there by his wife to go off when he is to go home. An undefined mutual animosity existed between two classmates, resulting in bloody noses in the schoolyard. On the TV were images of physical conflict caused by racial animosities. It was 1968, and the images were in color. Once, mother was so angry with father that she spit a colorful four-letter word and spun the tires as she left in a huff.

Slowly, we begin to see that life is also lived at some emotional level: anger, fear, envy, hate, all comingled with this thing called ‘love.’ But ‘love’ is surely based on some cold logic- right, Dad?

Dad made it sound so rational when explaining why he chose my mother as his mate. He listed all the reasons as if he were checking it off from a list he found in Readers Digest, right down to her having the prerequisite birthing hips. Birthing hips?

Of course, my mother had her own cold, hard, rational reasons for marriage—she had eggs waiting with six empty photo frames to fill. Beyond that, he was funny, owned a car, and, despite his smoking, appeared healthy. My parent’s parents feared something else: wicked, evil, sin-inducing passion hormones. The wedding date was moved up because, well, you can expect the rational to stay dispassionate for just so long. Good thing. Just nine months later to the minute, the first was born. Let the ‘frame fillin’ begin.

Contemplating your being based on your origins is scary stuff. One must consider the motivations of the procreators. I once pondered, but only once, that my purpose, the reason for my being, was to fill a picture frame by a woman who had ‘good’ birthing hips and was impregnated by a man who saw procreation as an entirely rational affair- or so he claimed. But it’s just as well that way. The alternative is being brought forth on the sweaty wings of ‘passion.’

Having survived sliding down the birth canal with a cord around my neck, I did my best to fill that frame by smiling when asked. Having fulfilled my purpose for existing at such a young age, I spent the rest of my youth thinking about the future. Is it possible to have more than one purpose in life?

This was the 60’s. The world was still free of the Internet. Phones hung on walls. The four TV channels could only be watched at certain times. If we appeared bored, we were told to go outside. We’d shoot some hoops or sit on the porch. We’d get lost in our thoughts and imagination. We had lots of time to ponder new notions, life’s little messes, and the sometimes strange ideas we were exposed to. Like, what did Dad mean by ‘birthing hips.’

Imagination is a good thing, but it won’t answer every young boy’s many questions. And sometimes, imagination can lead you down paths into dark, hairy caves and over soft pink cliffs. Leaving the notion of ‘birthing hips’ up to my imagination only led to more questions. Who was going to answer them?

Without the Internet, we had only two ‘search’ engines: Mother and the library. One always answered my questions with a bit of a filter. Mother was as smart as an encyclopedia, but she would curate her answers based on how much she thought I could handle. She was, at times, conflicted by wanting to both protect me and educate me. If she were busy, I would have to wait to ask her- much like having a slow Internet connection.

But the library, with its many thousands of books, was foreboding. It would perhaps take hours to find something relevant to my current curiosity. I had time, so I biked to the library to pursue my search. How else was I to discover what ‘birthing hips’ meant?

Having been to the library many times, I was well acquainted with that mean-looking spinster of a librarian with a gray bun with which she had stuck a couple of knitting needles. Rather odd, I thought, but no more so than the town’s piano tuner with an alarm clock in his overcoat pocket. But how she pawed and stroked the books made me think she was more a lover of leather and solid stitching and embossed titles and words than kids. She’d check each returned book to ensure it hadn’t been defiled. If a page had been dog-eared, she’d frown while carefully, if not intimately, using a little moisture from her tongue to soothe the injured page before placing it with a stack of others. Once satisfied, she’d curl a little smile and exhale before trotting off to return the books to their proper location. I think they were her children.

I watched her go down the aisle, paying close attention to her hips. Research, I think. They swayed ever so slightly, like when a horse pulls a wagon. That hip sway perhaps inspired the lyrics to an old song that went something like “…the ole gray mare ain’t what she used to be.” Did Ms. Bun have ‘birthing hips?’ Was it based on hip sway or hip size? But it was hard to imagine Ms. Bun giving birth to anything but a set of World Books.

I continued researching by visiting a long row of old oak file drawers. Organized and cross-organized, one, if lucky, could find books containing something close to what you wanted to know more about. Arranged alphabetically and numerically, I looked under ‘B’ and found many books willing to teach me about ‘birth.’ Some even claimed to be colorfully illustrated. I picked one of those to go look for.

The indexing system worked like a charm. The book was right where it was supposed to be, surrounded by other books of the same genre. But something disturbed me. Perhaps I shouldn’t be in this section of books. There were books with ‘sex’ in the title. But a young boy is anything but curious, so I picked one off the shelf and started to browse through it.

It may have been minutes, hours, or even the entire afternoon. I don’t remember. Time ticks differently when completely engrossed. I learned things I wasn’t probably ready to learn—things my mother would have never included if I had asked her. I eventually learned that ‘birthing hips’ are related to the size and shape of the female pelvis. If described as having ‘good’ birthing hips, you likely have a gynaecoid pelvis that is both wide and narrow, allowing for easier childbearing. My dad sure was smart when it came to picking a mate.

Eventually, even libraries close, sending the librarian around for one last walk-through. Totally lost to the world, Ms. Bun found me- I never heard her walk up behind me.

She never said a word. She didn’t have to. I followed her slightly swaying hips to the door. As I biked home, the world looked different. My head was spinning. It was more complicated than I had ever imagined.

Happy Father’s Day!

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