If there’s two things I’ve done in the world, it’s scuba diving and becoming a father. Both are big experiences, important experiences, even, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this: scuba diving is WAY more exciting than becoming a father. 

Every man remembers their first, I mean who wouldn’t? It was the Christmas break of 2014; I was a few dozen feet underneath the waves of Molokini Crater off of Maui. Tears were dripping from my eyes and clouding my goggles as I saw the miracle of life play out before me. Silver sharks and emerald eels flew feet from my flippers, crabs as big as plates danced around thorny urchins, fish dived and ducked through pink coral. Breathtaking.

Compare that with having a kid! Which I shall now do.

It- sorry, HE came out of there and I’m not ashamed to say that I wept. I wept not because I witnessed a beautiful baby boy being brought before my eyes, I wept because I realized what this homunculus was taking from me. This little, wet, salamander-colored life-form, by his own existence, took from me my passion. My wife made me get rid of the scuba gear, you see; she didn’t want me to “get some awful fucking decompression sickness and have [my] guts pop out through [my] eye sockets” and leave her with our son, William, all alone. William, more like, Will-I-Ever-Be-Free-Again?

I’ve heard lots of new fathers are filled with questions after their first born. I have a few. Questions like these. Good divorce lawyers near me? Will I ever be able to scuba again? How’s the diving in Palau this time of year? If I can’t scuba, what am I working toward?

So, yeah, my life is a little up in the air at the moment … when I want it to be under the waves. I don’t want to be mixing formula; I want to be in Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, Bahama, Key Largo, Montego, or somewhere off the Florida Keys, a place called Kokomo…