There comes a time when a guy has to put his balls on the line.

I know my limits. I know I can handle two kids, and I also know that three would break me. Two kids are four times the work of one, so who knows what kind of screwed up exponential increase in parental slaving is required when a third child enters the picture. I’d learned how to work the parental “man-to-man defense,” but the idea of being outnumbered and switching to a zone defense scared the crap out of me.

It took me a while before I could effectively communicate this concern to my lovely wife.

When trying to convince my wife that two kids was plenty I took the wrong tack. See, I have this spending gene I inherited from my mother. Money used to burn a hole in my pocket, but my wife beat it out of me. Well, she didn’t “beat it,” she convinced me in nicer ways. Anyway, I’m a pretty frugal guy now, and I learned from the master of home financial management.

That’s why when discussions about adding a third trouser trophy to the Fell household came up I started quoting all sorts of financial statistics about how we’d need to buy a mini van, buy a bigger house, pay more for education savings plans, pay more for other child-rearing costs, pay more for vacations, more for childcare… it’s a really long friggin’ list of shit you need to shell out for to raise a kid these days. It’s not like a couple of centuries ago when you booted a five-year-old out the door every morning to go work in the fields and care for the livestock. Back then kids actually came in handy rather than just pointing at the plastic crap in a toy commercial and saying, “I want that.”

I thought the financial approach was a winning argument. I was wrong.

When it comes to squeezing out a human being women get kind of weird. I thought my financial analysis of the situation would be sobering and convince her that two was good. We’ve got a boy and girl – the million dollar family (still waiting for the check) – so why screw with our perfect little arrangement by sucking money out of our savings account in exchange for another two-and-half years of toxic-sludge-filled diapers, sleepless nights, and puke?

She didn’t buy it. Deaf ears. Totally.

Fuck.

I’m not one for giving up easily. I wracked my brain and came up with a new argument.

“Honey, I love our family. We have a perfect family and I feel like I can be a great dad to two kids. With just [boy] and [girl] I’ve got enough time and energy to raise them properly and teach them things and play with them and all the other stuff that good dads do, but I just don’t think I could do all that if we had a third child. If there was a third one then I’d be stretched too thin. I’d go from being a good dad to a maintenance dad. I don’t want to do that to the two wonderful kids we have.”

She bought it. I booked my vasectomy the next day.

It took months to get in to see the guy because my wife wanted me to use “the best guy in the city.” To be honest, I wanted to have the best too. We’re talking about my nutsack here, and I didn’t want some drunken, twitchy hack surgeon who graduated at the bottom of his class from the University of Fuckupistan taking a sharp instrument to my primary reason for being.

Sometimes I wonder if vasectomy docs only get their hands dirty on Fridays, because I’ve never heard of a guy that didn’t have one done at the end of the work week. The drill is: get it done Friday, spend the weekend moaning and feeling sorry for yourself, then finally suck it up and go back to work on Monday.

Now comes the part where I try to make this “getting in shape” related. In order to see the nominal degree of abdominal (rhyming unintentional) definition I do have it requires rather careful monitoring of my dietary intake. However, there are regular exceptions, which is another word for “binging.” For example, I’m always gluttonous on ski days because I go so hard that my total energy burn for the day approaches 5,000 Calories, so my metabolism can handle buckets of greasy food and several beers.

Well, I wasn’t going to be burning too many Calories this time, but I figured a guy doesn’t get his vas deferens severed and cauterized every day so I was going to make it epic. I saw no reason to look at the procedure as a melancholy experience, so the day before I made three stops:

• Liquor store: Duh.
• Video store: Six movies all containing acts of unspeakable violence, including sharp implements severing various appendages, bullets ripping through soft tissue, repeated punches to the face, other general mayhem, and shit getting blow’d up.
• The grocery store: This one takes some ‘splainin’.

I’m the grocery shopper in the family and I know my way around the local market. I also know all the hot checkout girls. I’m a dirty old man and so, all things being equal, I always choose the aisle of the hotter chick who is paying her way through university rather than Rosanne Barr incarnate with the disposition of a saltwater crocodile coming off a meth bender.

I’ve been shopping there for over a decade so everyone knows me pretty well. They also know that I am a health nut and the vast majority of my purchases reflect this. However, the day before Mr. Happy’s next door neighbors were scheduled to get sliced was not a typical trip to the grocery store.

My basket included:

• Nacho cheese Doritos
• Ms. Vicky’s salt and vinegar potato chips
• Two pints of Cookie Dough Dynamo Hagen Daaz (I only needed one, but I didn’t want my wife bogarting my supply so I got one for her too. Oh, and it was the kind with “extra” cookie dough, of course.)
• A box of fudgesicles
• Donuts

I was heading for the checkout when I realized that I didn’t want to ruin my reputation with the hot checkout girls, if you consider “dirty old man who buys lots of fruits and vegetables” a reputation worth preserving.

I headed for Attila the cashier instead.

Damn, too late. Someone with a cart full of crap beat me to the old hag. Then probably the hottest checkout girl of them all waved me over. “I’ve got room here.”

What a bitch.

I hung my head in shame and start putting my purchases on the conveyor, hoping she wouldn’t take note. No such luck. “Uh, this isn’t usually the sort of stuff you buy, is it?”

“I… I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Hmmm… okay.” Great. Now she thinks I’m premenstrual or something. James is NOT having a happy period. I hauled Homer Simpson’s grocery bags out to my car and went home, feeling pensive.

Let’s fast forward to after the main event. Suffice to say that it was no fun and I almost chickened out.

I got my prescription and penquin-walked down to the pharmacy to get my much deserved Tylenol 3. It was a small corner store affair, and it was also empty. “This will take about 20 minutes,” the pharmacist said.

Twenty minutes? I’ve got a date with a bag of frozen peas and I want to wash those pills down with a half dozen beer. Seriously, did the guy feel a big crap coming on or something? Why was it going to take 20 minutes?

Maybe aggravated fidgeting would hurry things up. News flash: it didn’t. The bastard took over twenty minutes and I started to think he knew that any middle-aged guy who waddled into his store on a Friday morning was post-vasectomy (the doc was just up the stairs) and Jonesing hard for some narcotics. I bet he was a sadistic bugger who got a good laugh out of making guys like me wait. Jerk.

I’d probably do the same thing if I were him. I can see how it would be pretty entertaining when you’re not the guy who feels like he just got neutered by a wolverine.

When I bought the drugs I also got a $1.75 can of Diet Coke from the pharmacy to wash it down. A buck seventy-five? I told you the guy was an jerk. I went to the car and was grateful that I had recently sold my five-speed Acura to buy an automatic Infiniti because the thought of clutching wasn’t overly appealing at the moment.

I made it home just as I was starting to feel a little mellow from the pills, cracked a beer, grabbed a bag of chips and some frozen peas, popped in some high definition violence and glued my ass to the couch for the next several hours. The wife had even trained the kids to wait on me for the day. If I’d had a piss jug I never even would have had to leave the couch. All in all it was a pretty good day, as long as you skip over the scalpel to the balls part.

The next day I felt almost 100%. However, my wife had already made plans to take the kids somewhere to give me another day of lazy codeine, beer and junk-food fuelled luxuriating in an expression of gratitude for electing to be the one to go under the knife. Unfortunately, I got bored after an hour; I could only handle so many movies and I started to get a little antsy.

Our kids were a fair bit younger than they are now, so of course the house looked like Mötley Crüe’s hotel room. Therefore, to occupy myself I decided to crank the tunes and do some tidying. Before I knew it three hours had passed and I had cleaned almost the entire house. When my wife got home she thought I was superman. She even wanted to reward me, but I wasn’t quite feeling up to that. I blame the codeine.

The next day I was not 100%.

The next day my balls hurt like a mofo.

The next day I was miserable and beer and codeine didn’t help. The next day was Sunday and the doctor was not in. My physician wife examined things in an exceedingly clinical manner and asserted that everything looked fine and she couldn’t understand why it hurt. There was no swelling or signs of infection, so it was a mystery. I should note that she doesn’t perform vasectomies.

The following Monday things were no better, so I arrived at the doctor’s office upon opening and bitched up a storm. Being that I didn’t have an appointment the nurse made me wait for a while, but eventually the doctor saw me and pronounced everything as “perfectly normal.”

“Then what’s with all the pain?”

“My guess is that you overdid it with the housework and got some minor internal inflammation which is pinching a nerve. It isn’t serious, but it can be painful. Ibuprofen will help with the inflammation which will reduce the pain.”

The lesson here is that housework is bad for your nutsack.

Feel free to quote me.