I just had a vasectomy. I was one hundred per cent sure I didn’t want one; my wife was one hundred per cent sure I was going to get one. As often happens in our marriage, her one hundred per cent trumped mine.

Contraceptively speaking, cutting her open and tying her tubes wasn’t an option. I wouldn’t put her through that. Besides, I don’t even know what “tubes” are or what they’d be doing inside my wife. Definitely no surgery, though. I can’t stomach the thought of her going through an operation and my wife faints at the sight of ketchup.

At times, I thought I might still want another kid or two. Other times, like last week when the four-year-old mistook my guitar case for a urinal, I wished vasectomies could be retroactive.

Finally agreeing to the procedure, I had the normal worries: no more progeny, a feeling of lessened masculinity, having my nether regions juggled by a man, the fear I might enjoy it. Typical guy stuff.

After watching my wife pass three human beings through her body over the years, I figured it was my turn to take one for the team. Or at least to limit our number of players.

My wife held my hand and drove us to the clinic. I held her hand and prayed for a car accident, although I would have accepted an earthquake, a sink hole, a plague of locusts — any of the usual wraths of God. God must have been busy, though: we made it to the clinic without incident.

A half hour later, a chirpy blond called me from the big waiting room into a smaller one where a stern brunette sat chewing gum behind a thick wall of glass.

“I notice you lock the doors and windows around here. No escape, I guess,” I joked.

“Have you shaved, sir?”

“Of course. Oh, you mean ...”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes. I shaved. Not exactly the most comfortable place to drag a razor blade. Ha ha.”

The gum-chewer stared.

“You seem a little nervous, sir.”

“I’m fine.”

“Maybe you were thinking about making a run for it?”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Not at all, sir. It’s extra if you want the doctor to wash his hands.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

“This thing’s safe, right?”

“We haven’t had a single problem.”

“Good.”

“This week.”

“Pardon?”

“Sign here, please.”

A quick scan of the sheet and I signed away my future children, my dignity, and my right to sue if I wound up sounding like a cartoon mouse.

The surgery itself went fine despite the shock at one point of seeing some kind of blue smoke rising from my groin.

Otherwise, the doctor and I chatted the whole time. We talked sports, politics, and current events. It turns out he and I both played hockey as kids and our mothers-in-law were from the same town. It would have been a perfect bar conversation if I hadn’t been lying down and if he had a glass of beer instead of my testicles in his hand.

After a week-long twenty minutes, we said our goodbyes, promising each other we’d call, and I retrieved my keys from the gum-chewer and joined my wife for the ride home. I never realized how bumpy our street was.

Once home, I hobbled inside, a broken man, an empty gun, a farmer bereft of seeds.

I squirmed on the couch, envying the eternally solid remote control with its carefree life and easily replaceable batteries.

My wife came into the living room and managed, as she often did, seemingly no matter where she stood, to block the TV. “The garbage needs to go out.”

Like it’s a dog or something. Like it needs to go for a walk.

“Can’t you take it?” I moaned.

“It’s gross.”

“So is me popping a blood vessel and dying in the driveway.”

“You’re fine.”

“I’m sitting on a bag of frozen peas.”

“You don’t expect us to eat those after, do you?”

I should mention that nearly 10 years earlier, my wife had her sympathy surgically removed by our minister in a church operation ending with a pair of “I do’s” and a lovely outdoor reception with an open bar.

Before I could get up, the kids came bouncing in.

“Horsie ride, Daddy?” the four-year-old pleaded. “Horsie ride?”

“Daddy’s horsie’s a little wiped out right now, Champ. He’s going to go lie down in some hay for a few days.”

“In fact,” I added, “let’s not even say the word ‘horse’ around Daddy, okay?” The thought of straddling a one-thousand-pound animal and bouncing around on a hard leather saddle made my stomach go funny.

The seven-year-old looked worried, but said nothing.

The next day, I discovered that at two feet tall, the two-year-old was the perfect height to inflict the most damage to the least protected places. It didn’t help that he ran around recklessly and had a dense head the size of a car battery. I took to walking around with my hands crossed in front of me below the waist. I looked like a linesman making a call in a tennis match. “Ball’s in!”

I couldn’t really complain. I’m a man, which, despite my doing most of the cooking and laundry in our house, makes me a pig by default. There’s nothing like an innocent Y-chromosome to draw the unprovoked ire of a good woman. On the other hand, I couldn’t blame them. For thousands of years, we men have indulged in barbaric Freudian acts of homoerotic violence from war to cock-fighting to Australian Rules Football.

While we’re busy tearing the world apart, women have been sitting quietly at home trying to knit it back together.

For all that, did I deserve to have a man I never met jab me in the testicles with a needle? Perhaps.

In the end, I did it for my wife. And to a certain degree for the world. We don’t need anymore me’s running around. I’ve done enough for myself over the years. Time to do something for someone else.

Vasectomy: The gift that keeps on not giving.

* * *

Malcolm Matthews describes himself as a flamenco guitar player who is able to bench press 250 pounds and writes to quell the voices.