Mantalk: Men too have baby fever

Baby fever: That strange phenomenon when out of nowhere, a seemingly normal, functioning woman suddenly gets hooked on the baby train as if some alien has activated a womanhood code against her will.

Next thing you know, she's snuffling baby heads, smuggling tiny baby rompers into her bag, making googly eyes at babies stranded on their mom's backs, sharing cute babies’ images online while bombarding you with pictures of your future offspring, courtesy of generators drawn from your faces combined.

That's when as a man you run.

Men? If anything, they're trapped into wanting to be fathers. It is not something natural for men, just like expecting them to scream with excitement over a shoe sale on black Friday. If they even have a biological clock that ticks, they obviously can't hear it. Right?

Not quite. Men do crave babies. I will use my recent experience. You see, a little while back, I met the daughter of someone.

Somewhere between pandemic dates, nights, strokes, texts, and calls, I've got really comfortable with the 'someone.'

As with all talking phases, you move from small talk to discussing their exploits when they were five, and soon you are into the deep of things. At some point, in a random conversation, we broached the topic of children and wanting children and I joked about how I definitely want children and asked her if we should start having them immediately.

At some point, I had to hold myself back because of a strange realisation. I was making light of it and joking but I did want to have offspring. What in the hell was happening to me?

Maybe it was the side effects of Covid-19, I reasoned. Or I was suffering from an undiagnosed illness? Perhaps, it was a tumour that manifested in delusional thoughts because what was this? If I am honest, I had been inflicted so since mid-last year and I just brushed it. I pushed it off as lonely thoughts brought about by the uncertain times, melting of the polar ice caps, the ongoing massacre in the Tigray region in Ethiopia, and any other excuse which could lend itself to my cause.

I am in the prime of my hunting phase and finally earning more than two thousand shillings. Suddenly, imaginary children are here to take all my money and sleep away! Sigh.

Like clockwork, I went online and a friend and fellow writer, Magunga Williams posted about having baby fever and I just rationally concluded that it's something that is in the water and it's affecting men around the age of 30.

I even went online and Googled this malady and I came across a study that didn't help my case. Men can get all goo-goo-ga-ga too. It's a real thing. From the outset, it does sound like a logical argument—that human beings just like any other animal would have the instinctual need to propagate offspring. The study showed that men's baby fever increases with age and one possible answer was economic- as men grow older and earn more income, the cost of having a child diminishes relative to the cost.

The study also noted that the desire for a child for a man didn't even need a partner who wanted them. It was possible that their 'biological clock' is powered by "the need to assert their masculinity, a part of the male identity that researchers say needs to be proved regularly—providing, protecting, and procreating are three core cultural dimensions of masculinity, after all."

This, by extension, meant that baby longing is a pretty masculine emotion. I still don't know what to do with the developing feeling. How exactly do we, as men move from the need to party every weekend and travel to the ends of the earth to think about having little terrorists who will be your unemployed best friends for almost a lifetime? My dad had me just around my age but I thought that was just because they lived in a generation where you raced to get married as quickly as possible before famine-hit or before lions ate you in the wild.

I didn't think that it's something that happens to young men or men like me. I am puzzled. What happens next? Do I start wearing formal pants with sandals or watching TV while standing really close to it with my hands crossed behind my back? I'm still not quite sure what to do with this feeling but I'm hoping that I can shake it off, pray it away, get medicines to treat it, or have a witchdoctor chant it away. Whatever it takes!