Having a son when you didn't even know you wanted one

By the time my son Jared was born exactly 15 years ago today, I had already determined I was destined to have only daughters.

And I was perfectly fine with that.

Jared has two older sisters, which I guess was enough for me to assume I was biologically hardwired to produce only female offspring. I loved, loved, loved having a pair of daddy's girls to come home to every day, so a family of daughters was a nice prospect.

Which was why I was stunned when the doctor yanked Jared from the womb and announced, "It's a boy." To which I answered (this is true), "No, it's not!"

I said it the same way you would say, "Oh, come on!" or "You're kidding!" Before that moment, it honestly had never seriously occurred to me that we might have a boy.

The main reason I didn't know, of course, was that we never found out the gender of any of our babies before they were born. That surprise at the moment of birth was something I'll never forget (five times over). But just because we did it, incidentally, doesn't mean I think everyone should. Whatever you decide is cool with me.

Anyway, my attitude definitely flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which says that all fathers long for sons more than anything else. That wasn't true of me at all. I just wanted happy, healthy children. Whether they were boys or girls didn't matter all that much, truthfully.

But from the moment I became the father of a son, I loved it. More to the point, I loved him. Intensely.

My own father died when Jared was about a year old, and many times since I've looked at my boy and thought of his grandpa. When you have a child of your own gender, you start making all sorts of emotional connections between your childhood and theirs, and your dual role as both a parent and a son/daughter.

Not long after I got married and moved out of the house, my dad told me one of the things he missed was having someone around to talk to about sports. My mom roots for the Indians and Browns, but she'll never host her own sports talk show.

My dad and I would sometimes watch games together on TV, particularly baseball. He used to be a fast-pitch softball pitcher, so he had an uncanny ability to predict what a pitcher was going to throw before he threw it.

That always amazed me until he taught me how to think like a pitcher, then I could sometimes predict the pitches like him. Not as well, mind you, but pretty well.

Jared has spent some time away from home this summer at church and band camps, and it didn't take me long to miss having a boy of my own with whom to celebrate an Indians victory. He and I bond over sports. We talk about other things, of course, but sports is our common ground, as it was between me and my dad.

The circle of life, I guess. At first we're the one who's missed, then 20 years later we're the ones doing the missing.

In a few short years, my "little" (6-foot-1) boy will go away to college, and I hate that I already know I'll miss him terribly. So I guess all there is to do is to appreciate him while he's still around.

Happy birthday, big man. And, as I think we'll both agree, go Tribe.