When I was a kid, our extended families were all more like siblings to us. My mom's family was all over the town we grew up in, and that meant four cousins in spitting distance, plus a very young uncle who served as a big brother/bad example for myself and the other cousin in my age group. This was the family makeup: Myself and two sisters younger by two and four years. My mom's sister, who is insane, had three children as well, and they essentially matched the ages of my sisters and myself. Another sister of my mom's had a child about in the age category of the youngest of these two trios. The young uncle was about five years older than me and three older than the other oldest cousin.

Every family gathering was a reunion of this octet. We played stupid games, pretended to be detectives and airplane pilots, watched each other suffer indignities and learn to swear, smoke and grow apart.

But at the time, we were inseparable. My very idea of paradise from childhood was staying over at my cousin's for a night or two during the weekend. They lived in different houses, but the one I remember was a sprawling monstrosity built into the length of a hill alongside a massive sideyard, anchored at its base by a massive toby tree. The yard must have been two hundred feet but it felt like a square mile. I learned to fake fall from a fake gunshot running up and down that hill. I played made up tag-type games with sticks and floating homebases in that yard, running, screaming, laughing and exploring. A few hundred paces from the house, a skuzzy creek passed which seemed like the most amazing place for a ten-year-old to visit, under a railroad overpass and littered with pig-iron that looked like overgrown buckshot. Clamber down the rocks and you could see the swamp rat that lived under the overpass, where the yellow-brown water passed through a beaver-looking den that I think was probably just a pile of trash and storm run-off.

The house had an incredible smell. Three stories and all of them gamy from three kids, a mom and a dad (!). The dad was still a foreign concept to me, since my memory of life with a father in the house was at the time filed under distant dreams and lost pasts. But this particular father (my aunt and uncle are now divorced, and I have no idea where the uncle is; the aunt, who is insane, has become addicted to barely-medically necessary weight-loss and plastic surgery, and has alarming orange hair) wasn't really there. I don't even remember him in their other houses, the funny one with the doorway twenty feet below the street, or the creepy pre-fab number on the hill overlooking town.

The point of all this digression is that I've got a little child brewing in my wife's belly, and I don't have any cousins for him. I don't have a fantastical place to visit, where I can ignore the sadness because I was having such a great time. I don't know whether children today even have this life. Who do kids ride bikes with today? Whose house are they dying to stay overnight at?

I know I'm panicking, but this is what I'm good for, I've been told. Panicking and reaching high things in our house. This baby is going to be here in a month or so. Tonight I felt him pushing on K's stomach and I pushed him back. He responded with another poke, and I realized I was communicating with this little creature who will make demands on me like nothing in the world. I'm not ready, not without some serious help. I spent three weeks drilling four holes in a wall, for god's sake. I spent twenty minutes looking for two screws I had carefully placed in my own pocket while building some insane baby furniture Sunday. I can't do this alone.

Where are my cousins? Where is the support universe that holds young Americans in careful moderation, ensuring that they don't fall too far, don't make bad decisions, do have somewhere for their kids to spend the night? K and I have friends in this city; we've lived here for more than a decade. But I don't see that house, those kids. K's family served as a landing pad for a lot of kids who had problems and whatnot while she was growing up. In the south, a lot of the things you didn't talk about got taken care of when the nice family down the street let you stay for dinner, and sit in on their family gatherings and pool parties. In my life, through a divorce and much more, the living we kids did as a group allowed us to become the unique and complex adults we are. We grew apart, but our bond will always be that we were raised like a pack, like a brood.

Are there broods our kid can join in a couple years?