By Eric Weinberg

My son Benjamin is three and a half.  He’s an unbelievably sweet, smart, Spider-Man-obsessed kid who wakes up smiling, and goes to bed asking me to lie next to him in the dark and tell him the story I made up about a monster who uses lemons and oranges and cherries and grapes and blueberries to make giant rainbows in the sky.  (And sure, it occurs to me now that I’ve been sending my son to bed every night dreaming of an artistically-inclined gay super-icon, but there’s really no way to put that genie back in the bottle.)  We’re not religious people, but I think I can speak for my wife, Hilary, and I when I say we feel really blessed to have Ben.  So, that said, I want to talk about my second favorite son, Julian.

Just so you understand, I say “second favorite” only because I don’t love Julian as much as I love Ben.  And I say “son” because he’s not a daughter, which is what I really, really wanted.  Badly.  And I say “my” because I stubbornly choose to believe I helped produce him, despite the fact that he’s almost a year and a half old and resembles me about as much as a slice of cheesecake resembles Jeff Goldblum.

When I say I don’t love Julian as much as Benjamin, I’m really saying I don’t know him as well:  He’s younger, his personality isn’t as well formed, we haven’t spent nearly as much time together.  Plus, his head looks like a lightbulb.  To be fair, it’s not like the day Ben was born I loved him as much as I do now; I mean, I’m not crazy, or his mom.  Point being, if I’m throwing a party, Ben gets an invite before Julian.

But back to how Julian’s the wrong sex and probably not mine:  See, whenever I thought about having children, I imagined a boy and a girl; it just seemed normal to me.  For instance, I’m a boy and my sister’s a girl.  And, sure enough, Hilary’s second pregnancy felt different than her first one.  Hil and I had this great idea—well, copied this great idea—of having our doctor reveal the sex of our baby to us on a card, which we’d open over a romantic dinner.  (Our romantic dinner was eaten at home, half-standing at the kitchen island while we went through junk mail, but I’m not saying that’s mandatory.) Anyway, we opened the card to make it official, and it said, “Congratulations—it’s a boy!”  And, just like that, all the air left my body.  Not in a farty way; I mean I was devastated.  We had a boy, we had a great boy, what did we need another boy for? 

Now, I’m no psychiatrist, but I am Jewish.  So I’ve obsessed over this long enough to know that my desire for a baby girl probably goes back to me feeling a tad screwed-over by my older sister while I was growing up.  (For the record, we’re friends now, which I hope is encouraging to eight-year-olds everywhere.) As a kid it made me wish I had a younger sister, who I’d be far nicer to, and as an adult it made me wish I could have a little girl of my own to cuddle, to counsel, to connect with in the way that other fathers – my best friends, in fact – do with their daughters, just as mothers do with their sons.  See, people always talk about that special relationship between a father and daughter; what they hardly ever talk about is that special relationship between a father and someone else’s daughter.  And, sure, I get that it’s no one’s idea of a classic May-December romance, but there’s a certain bond you have with someone whom you’ve known since she pronounced that word “Dethember.” 

Of course, when Hil was actually giving birth to Julian, all I was thinking was, Just be healthy.  And maybe have a vagina.  Not in addition to a penis, because… anyway, just be healthy.  And he was healthy.  He looked nothing like me, but I blew right past that until I had to tell the doctor my blood type, and he said, “Well, either you’re wrong, or he’s not your child.”  I blew past that, too, and as the weeks and months went by, I kept waiting for something, anything, familiar to show up in my second son.  Instead, he just kept looking like some odd combination of my wife and… someone too ugly for her to have slept with.  “Maybe you should get a blood test,” Hilary would joke with me.  And we laugh, awkwardly.  Friends trotted out something like, “He really has your, um… expressions,” because it’s a nice thing to say, like, “I love your house,” or “I didn’t realize you were that old.”  Yet, oddly, over time, I’ve grown accustomed to Julian’s face.  Sometime last year I said, “Hey, handsome,” and then he and I both did a double take when we realized I wasn’t being sarcastic.

So, the upshot is, I have two boys.  The Weinberg boys.  As in, “Mom, can the Weinberg boys come over?”  Or, “No arrests have been made, but local police are questioning the Weinberg boys about their parents’ disappearance.”  And the thing is, Julian is such a boy:  He grabs fistfuls of hair out of your scalp, he gashes himself over his eye and doesn’t blink.  And whereas when you pull Ben’s hair back he almost has a pretty girl’s face, when you pull Julian’s hair back he just kind of looks like… well, suppose Andy Richter had chemo. 

The truth is, love comes in all sorts of ways.  With Julian, well… I don’t want to brag, but he pursued me.  Big time.  He made me fall completely in love with him.  And it’s not just a crush, it’s the real thing, I can feel it.

Excerpted from  "The Other One," by Eric Weinberg. Weinberg is just one of several very funny - and honest - writers sharing true stores and parental confessions in  "Afterbirth: Stories You Won’t Read in Parenting Magazines," edited by Dani Klein Modisett (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).