One month ago V. proposed to me to be a sperm donor or a father. I said I had to think about it one month. Last Sunday the month had elapsed, on Father's Day in Mexico nonetheless. Vicky sent me a message in the morning, asking if I had made up my mind. I answered I just wanted to have one last conversation with my father before communicating my decision.
My father is a wise man and I take his advice to heart. The first thing he asked was if I was to be a donor or a father. I said "I have thought about it and I don't think I'd be able to keep out the life of a child who I know is mine, so I'm only considering parenting or nothing", "Good" he said "it's a difficult thing to process in life, not having a parent". He said that being a parent allows you to grow in ways which are simply not available to the childless man. He was glad to hear that V. was a stable, intelligent and wise woman but that didn't seem to matter in his advice.
Two days earlier I met with a good Colombian friend who was visiting Spain with his pregnant wife. I used to work with him here in Madrid. He's younger than me but I think there's nobody in the world I admire more than him. He's a virtuoso in several fields and has unexplainable luck. Truly, our coworkers in data science were befuddled at how he would consistently win at every raffle to the point he didn't want to participate any more because of the embarrassment of winning every time. We asked him to choose a lottery ticket in the Christmas lotto. He said that government lottery was beyond his reach. The guys at data science recommended not buying lottery despite his outlier status. Those of us who bought the number he picked got a 20x return on our investment.
Though the "lucky" part of his personality might seem like a fluke, I think it runs deeper than that. I hosted him for two weeks when he started working for the same company as me, and we were travelling together on the subway towards work. I wondered: what stations are between my home and work? I tried reciting from memory but I was missing a couple of stations. I had seen this guy was super smart, I asked him: "Sebas, what stations are between work and home?" And he recited them all in order, not having lived in Madrid before, barely one week in my home. It had been six months for me and I couldn't do it!
I recall a study in which they studied people who considered themselves lucky, and compared them to people who don't. They had them count the number of ads in a newspaper. Among the advertisements was one that said "stop counting. There's 81 ads". The lucky people were much more likely to see this notice. Lucky people seem to get more information from the environment which they subconsciously use to make decisions.
After chatting with Sebas about their pregnancy and challenges etc, I offered my conundrum. He asked many questions: who is she, how did you meet, why did you stop dating, and so on. He asked so many questions he got to the crux of the issue which I had to reveal to him, and I will reveal here much in the same way I told him. Upon being asked "why don't you simply put all your eggs in one basket, if she's good as the mother of your son, she might as well be good as your wife", I said "to answer that I will need to overshare a little bit, but I don't want to dump this on you, so I'll just leave this bit wrapped up: in my youth I suffered sexual trauma. This has impeded me from enjoying sexual intimacy much of my life. I'm making a lot of progress in this front, and I feel at the cusp of a breakthrough. I don't want to commit to an exclusive relationship but I still want to do this".
And this is pretty much what I told V. The answer was yes, that I wanted to commit to having a child together, and I imagined having an affectionate relationship as co-parents, but with no sex because that makes things complicated, and I would get my sexual needs fulfilled elsewhere. I wanted to really commit to our child together, that I was not interested in having a traditional family, and that I would probably get a vasectomy if everything turned out ok.
We crossed the gap of our physical distance for the first time since we broke up, and caressed each other tenderly. I'm content with the outcome.