It was Memorial Day and I was visiting a friend in Reno when I got the call from my mother. “Hi Uncle Gary!” she said. “Your sister had a boy at 8:14 this morning.”

For some reason, when a baby is born everyone thinks it’s important to mention the exact minute. I’d never understood this, but at that moment I was suddenly an uncle and the minute of my own nephew’s birth seemed very significant. Instead of popping into the world at a reasonable hour, the kid thought it would be fun to put my sister through labor all night, so I guessed that he’d grow up to be the rebel type.

Two weeks later, I was in Denver to see little Richie, as well as my sister Heather, brother-in-law and folks from Ohio. On this visit, though, my sister didn’t come out to greet me as the car pulled up. She was inside with the baby, and I resigned then to swallow the bitter pill of my new “second-class” status.

My mother had told me that Richie looked like my sister. To my untrained eyes, he looked like any other baby, and I squinted to find some resemblance to her or me. I didn’t find any. My own head wasn’t nearly that large, my eyes weren’t gray and my hair wasn’t strawberry blond, except when I’d used Sun-In 10 years ago. But my nephew and I did seem to have one thing in common – we both sometimes drool on the pillow.

I don’t have a lot of experience holding babies. Over the years, I’ve gracefully bowed out of such invitations, claiming that I wasn’t qualified or that my shirts’ care instructions specifically stated “no drool.” I could barely hold onto a bar of soap in the shower let alone a baby, although that wasn’t always a bad thing.

But holding my nephew suddenly seemed to come naturally. As Richie slept in my arms, I waited for that special moment when he would suddenly open his eyes, gaze up and smile at his new uncle.

But that didn’t happen, and I also imagined that the little guy would open his eyes, take one look at me and start bawling. With that in mind, I decided not to move. My arms started to tingle, and I suddenly wished someone would take him. But my entire family seemed perfectly happy to leave me stranded, not realizing that I could unwittingly turn their cute cherub into a shrieking monster.

When that didn’t happen either, I relaxed. I even rocked Richie back and forth. I imagined myself as a father, since I seemed to be good at holding babies. I would help my kids with math, teach them to like broccoli, cheer them on at Little League or soccer and brag about them at work.

But I was kidding myself. If and when I get hitched, I’m looking forward to traveling to exotic destinations and dining with other sophisticated, fun couples, not changing diapers, packing picnics and shopping at Baby Gap. I mean, do parents really think raising kids pays off? Before you know it, they’re demanding weekly shopping money, crashing your car and sticking you with a college tuition bill.

It’s probably better to be an uncle instead of a dad, I decided.

“Wow,” my sister said, returning after what seemed like an eternity. “He must really like you. It’s been about three hours since he ate, and usually he gets cranky when he’s hungry.”

“Well, maybe you should take him then,” I suggested. I remembered that for newborns, meals aren’t baby food but breast milk. And since I didn’t want that picture in my head, I quickly handed him off.

After Richie was fed and buckled back into his fancy automated swinging rocker, we adults were free to eat and watch television. It was an odd sense of baby-less freedom that, each day for the next few years, I’m sure my sister will relish every minute of.

When I visit Richie in the future, I’m going to completely spoil him. I’ll buy him cool things, read to him, play games and take him to the park. All he’s got to do is look up at me wide-eyed and innocent, call me Uncle Gary and give me a hug.

That’ll be a fair trade. I can handle a weekend of pseudo-fatherhood every few months! The rest of the time, his mom and dad can have him back. And I’ll have the freedom to be myself: adventurous, spontaneous, sophisticated and “gay.”