A year-and-half ago, I wrote a column called “To Three or Not to Three.” In it, I aired out the debate my wife and I had about having a third child. Wendy felt that she wouldn’t be complete without kid number three. I was pretty much done at two and feared, among other worries, that I’d be stretched too thin if we went from “man-to-man defense” to “zone.”  Well, my wife won out. I knew she would. She frequently (always) does. And she’s often (definitely not always) right. She’s the one to see the big picture, to recognize that the shorter-term pain is worth the lifelong gain. That’s how I came to see her vision of our family life. 

 
It did take time, though, to rise to Wendy’s commitment level. Of course, the opportunity to have regular sex didn’t hurt the decision to at least attempt conceiving. But I gradually became interested in baby names and the possibility of adding a daughter to our litter or another son to form a true boys club. After months of trying (with a couple of false positives mixed in), my wife emerged from the bathroom with that little blue line shouting out a definitive result. I felt excitement swell my chest, not to mention pride that the old man still had it.

Speaking of old, the issue of age is one of the new wrinkles we’re dealing with in our third round of pregnancy. We didn’t start our family till our early 30s, which seemed young to us in this modern era of working parents. Now that we’re pushing 40, we’ve jumped to a different level. At our first important OB visit, there on the video monitor, just above the miraculous image of the tiny embryo was a label next to my wife’s name – Advanced Maternal Age.

As if our family expansion didn’t have enough issues, now this machine was categorizing my wife as elderly. Maybe that’s OK for medical students or insurance people, but it ain’t OK with me. Nobody tells me that my wife is an “old mom.” More importantly, what does that make me – “Death-Risk Paternal Age”?