This thing about being a dad . . .

Last week my oldest daughter Melanie turned 9 years old. Her little sister Kristen is still 4.

I’m 57, and if you said I’m too old for kids that age, you wouldn’t be the first. Both girls were born in China, both joined our family by adoption.

Melanie’s birthday reminds me how much my life changed when I was 50 and met her, my first child, when she was 12 months old. Now I am in touch by e-mail with many other families going through the adoption process, and when I hear a man, especially a middle-aged man, talk about becoming a dad, I wonder how much he knows, and how much he thinks he knows the changes coming in his life.

As men we tend to mentally plan and analyze such things, even though many of us do it quietly, some of us thinking fanciful thoughts about toddler belly jumps and butterfly kisses, thoughts we would never speak out loud no matter how much our women want us to talk about it. And while the school of hard knocks has taught us some things are not linear, not predictable, that doesn’t stop us from thinking we know what will happen when we become a dad.

But we don’t.

We think we will need to plan more carefully to schedule our golf outings to make sure Mom has some time off, too, but we don’t realize our priorities will change and golf might be less frequent or even fade away just because it takes too much time away from our family.

Being realistic, we realize it will take sitters and maybe trading off baby-sitting with friends to keep up with our outdoor activities, theater and dining interests, but we don’t yet understand our interests will change, and that humming the score to “Phantom of the Opera” will soon be replaced with Barney’s “I love you, you love me ...“ not because we like the song but because our child follows Barney with wide-eyed wonder.

We cannot yet imagine Bananas Foster cooked flambe tableside and served on a white tablecloth will be gladly swapped for a popsicle on the porch with our kids.

As the protector of our family we know intellectually we will let no harm come to our child. But we don’t yet know the unfamiliar potion that will pump throughout our body in a nanosecond, making us able to bite through steel, lift cars and stop bullets when we see terror on our child’s face and hear the plead of “Help me, Daddy!”

We don’t yet know the depth of love that will make us pray to God, please, if a terrible situation ever arises, please, please, please, take my life and let her live.

We silently anticipate the fun in teaching a 3- or 4-year-old to skip or whistle or how to wink, and later showing them how to throw a ball and swing a bat. But we don’t yet know the softest thing in the world, her breath on our cheek as she sleeps in the warmth and safety of our arms, her face angelically perfect, even though we have discovered she is part angel and part devil, just like the rest of us.

We know when our baby is growing up she will date boys who are someone else’s baby. But we might not yet realize the intensity with which we will unreasonably examine such young men for the same intent we had when we were young, and how strong our wife will have to be to stop the interrogation we will try to undertake while sharpening a Bowie knife and letting Sonny know her curfew is not one stinking minute after the deadline.

We take pride in our achievements and reputation, and like to present a respectable image in public. How could we know strangers will stare and giggle at us in the grocery store until we look down at our legs beneath our shorts to discover a patchwork of colorful Big Bird Band-aids applied by tiny hands with loving care while we napped on the couch. We don’t even know yet that it won’t matter, because you can’t embarrass a dad about his kid.

We know it is our job to plan for the financial security of our family. But the smell of our child’s skin might turn our thoughts like nothing else to our college savings program, and we might become inexplicably obsessed, lying awake at night staring at the ceiling, until the life insurance protection we know our family needs is safely in force.

We don’t yet know when our fishing buddy calls about a great three-day trip he is planning, we might skip right over thoughts of time off work and promises to the wife to make it happen, to think if it works out how much time can we stand to be away from our little angel and how eager we will be to return home.

If all this makes me sound virtuous, I am not. The truth is maybe I don’t deserve the blessings of a dad because I am sometimes a grumpy dad, a very imperfect dad, impatient by nature, a neatnik trapped in a kid-messy house but too lazy to clean it up myself, longing now and then for the trappings of my old kid-free adult life, wallowing in the occasional luxury of a day or two of solitude.

But as I am reminded by my kids’ birthdays, by the sound of an empty and silent house when they are gone or by their eager exclamation of “Daddy!” when they return, the greatest gift of my life is being a dad.

Of course every dad already knows this, and every dad-to-be will learn on their own. But they don’t know it yet.

How will a new dad know when his change is complete? I think it is a slow process difficult to see while it is happening to you, hard to recognize until looking back at the old you.

But you will know.

When you plan your family vacation, if you instinctively skip over a week in the Bahamas to check out the kid-friendly hotels at Disney World and spend hours on the phone trying to arrange breakfast with Cinderella in the castle, that is a good sign you have morphed from a man into a dad.