{"id":168219,"date":"2024-08-01T10:32:08","date_gmt":"2024-08-01T14:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=168219"},"modified":"2024-08-01T10:32:08","modified_gmt":"2024-08-01T14:32:08","slug":"i-got-snipped-notes-after-a-vasectomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/08\/01\/i-got-snipped-notes-after-a-vasectomy\/","title":{"rendered":"I Got Snipped: Notes after a Vasectomy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From Five Paintings<\/a><\/em>, a portfolio by Olivier Mosset that appeared in The Paris Review<\/em> issue no. 44 (Fall 1968).<\/p><\/div>\n

Popop, who came home to raise me after his release from Holmesburg Prison in \u201988, would have never let a white man in a white coat lay a hand on the D, let alone the vas deferens, had he the context to differentiate between the two. He never mentioned any experiments either. If he had, he wouldn\u2019t have seen the wanton use of his body as some epic reveal of treachery but another quotidian instance he might describe by way of an exasperated sigh, shrug, or \u201cDuh, dickhead\u201d hurled at some scholar with the \u201creal\u201d details, or social reformer come to reimagine us in their image, to correct our supposedly devious sexual habits before it was too late, which often meant well before our twelfth birthdays. Given the early onset encroachments of power, that old black adage on suspicion and physicians was never an abstraction at home.<\/p>\n

I got snipped anyway.<\/p>\n

And I was late, by any reasonable measure, thirty-two with too many kids climbing up my leg, three boys and one girl whose temperaments have long since broken and rebuilt me in their images, the first of whom arrived too soon after his mother stopped taking birth control and forgot to tell me. And I\u2019ve never met people more averse to independent play. Shouts of \u201cDaddy!\u201d and \u201cDada!\u201d puncture my every attempt to think, coming on as tickles or itty-bitty terrors between each typed word, and so I write this from two worlds at once, where promises of the near future\u2014the local pool or doggie park, Rita\u2019s Water Ice, the school track, the bike trail, or playing Diablo<\/em> and Super Smash Bros.<\/em>\u2014defang the demands on my attention\u00a0<\/strong>for ten or so minutes at a time. The interstices allow collective laughter over new word enunciations\u2014a six-year-old\u2019s \u201cfeastidious,\u201d or a question of the utmost importance: Who taught the twins to say \u201cFresh to def?\u201d My daughter, twelve, takes credit, and my oldest son, two years her senior, is above it all until we remind him how the ticklish remain so, even chin hair deep into puberty. It\u2019s there, between the laughter and all my pleading\u2014\u201cStop, no, don\u2019t\u201d and \u201cPut that dog down!\u201d and \u201cStop chokin each other!\u201d\u2014that I give myself over to thought, which is writing, and in this case or every case, correlated with what the children mean to me, and what I might mean to them, and what it meant to ensure that I might conceive children nevermore.<\/p>\n

The doctor was quite brown, if that counts for anything in this context, and not one of those people whose entire personality is dedicated to the hatred of children, who seem to be multiplying on every blunt \u201cside\u201d of the political spectrum. Gentler than most lovers, he cupped my testicles and said that everything would be all right. And in this man\u2019s supple embrace I drifted off into a blissful nondream of future agency.<\/p>\n

My homie Drake\u2014no, not the former child actor with the slimthick sandworm sex tape, but a real person\u2014had already sworn by it as a matter of ideal if not yet action, watching and waiting for some of us to go first before sliding into the VA hospital with his trademark gusto. In his episode of Hot <\/em><\/a>&<\/em><\/a> Single<\/em><\/a> last year, it was the second bullet point on a little red billboard advocating his potential fuckability:<\/p>\n

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