At 39 years old, freelance writer and poet Duane Francis has had ample opportunities to become a father – some of them proffered all too eagerly.
But Francis is not yet a father, and that is a choice he has made.
“For the most part, the women’s approach was too direct and head-on. They bring it up when you just meet them. You just think OK, this is not conversation for the third date,” Francis told The Sunday Gleaner.
“I usually run like crazy,” he added while laughing.
So, while the three women he can remember, who told him early in their relationships, “I want somebody to get me pregnant”, went on to have children with other men, by choice Francis has not yet become a father.
“I always wanted what I grew up in for any child I should have. It’s not a case where father lives one place, mother lives one place. I was picky about who I got involved with.
“I kinda set a thing where, if I like a woman enough to marry her, she is the one I have kids with. And I have met only one who I liked enough to marry,” he said.
That ‘one’ is Marsha: the couple exchanged vows in October 2009.
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Francis can remember being teased only once about not yet being a father.
A taxi driver asked, “how you no get no youth yet?”
“My reply was, ‘can I check you for money when I need to buy diapers and feeding?’,” Francis said.
The man started talking about how costly children were and how he would have done things differently in fathering his children.
Francis added: “I don’t know if it is because I don’t look my age, but people assume I have nuff more years. Not that I am old!”
The Sunday Gleaner asked if he plans to have children soon, and he was quick to respond, “Hell, yeah! Definitely! Give it a year or two. More like a year.”
Then, Francis thinks, Father’s Day will have even more personal meaning.
“I think it is one of those things, no matter how much in high esteem you hold it, when you actually experience it, the expectations can’t measure up.
“To see it from one side is one thing; to live it from the other as a father is a different thing. I will see it differently,” Francis said.
He has not had a deep longing for fatherhood, as “it was just something I knew, one day when the time was right, it would happen”.
Francis has wavered before and considered fathering a child, but, “as luck would have it, you see some major character flaws in the person and you say, ‘I don’t think so'”.
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