A newspaper article detailed the high numbers of men in their 40s having their first children, and how Seattle and Portland, Oregon have some of the highest rates of such men in the country.

The article focused on one such man. He only wanted one kid, he said, because he didn’t want other kids making fun of how old he was to his kids.

Being a newspaper article, this point was presented without an opposing viewpoint, with every indication that this is a common and respectable viewpoint. So, is it? So, it is.

But so it so, so isn’t!

As someone who just had a second child in his 50s, here’s my meandering reasoning as to why.

How old was your Dad when you were born?

As one’s mind consults the archives and lays the groundwork for the math…. As one’s face registers the immediate emotions entailed by the implications of such a question…. As you try to anticipate where this line of questioning is leading, one is distracted by the instantaneous assertion that such a question is not terribly relevant to who you are and what type of relationship you have had with your Dad.

Although it’s true that one day you stumbled across the enlightening exercise of ascertaining how old was your father when you were born, and how does that inform your sense of self as you approach or pass that same age?

Took a long time to get to that question in my case. I was in my 20s when I began to wonder how old my Mom and Dad were when my siblings and I were forced kicking and screaming into this vale of tears.

Anyway, it was a long time ago. Was it like we were using the same technology, like we wanted the same things from life, and expected the same future for the world? Not really.

We had the bedrock belief that, since the ’60s, the world had changed and it had become much harder for the twain of the first half of the century (i.e., our parents) and the twain of the ’50s onward to meet.

Now, the ’60s and ’70s– that had nothing on the ’00s and ’10s we’re witnessing nowadays.

The gap between my parents and their children was a pothole compared to the washed-out bridge between the likes of newspaper-reading, 6:00 evening news-watching, CD-playing, letter-writing, used bookstore-shopping me and people just a little (say, 20 years) younger who do not read newspapers, watch TV shows when they come on without a thought to taping them, and read e-books.

Twenty years, nowadays, is far more than long enough to establish a decisive difference between the world I have lived in and the world my kids will live in. I will know that from experience, as a fact, but my kids will recognize that in their bones and blood as a deep existential reality, a deeper level even than experience.

They will know how old I am, and, as children, in their childish minds, they will find it hilarious and ridiculous. If I was 30, it would be all that. If I am 50 or 60, it couldn’t be much more humorous, on the same level of humor as my old-fashioned hair and clothes and the bizarre stories I’ll tell.

Trivia– that’s all. Being 50 sometimes seems like a big deal to me, because I know where I’ve been and I know what it means, but my kids aren’t going to be interested in that for a long, long time.

Why should they be the first kids to take a keen interest from a young age in the individual lives of their parents?

The age of the father is just another minor piece of trivia to a child, not a decisive factor as to whether someone should ever have been born or not.

They will have their own lives and their own world to preoccupy them first and foremost. Then, maybe someday, in a quiet moment, they’ll think about what it might have been like for their parents to have reached the point where they decided the time had come to take their place between generations and place their hope and trust in their children who would be as unique as they are, as uncannily the same, as unimaginably different.

The exact age differences in a family might have seemed important once, to someone, but as the years go by, the trivial numbers fade and disappear.