Baby

I skipped over a lot of blogging days because I had a baby. Okay, I didn't actually have a baby, but I'm not being held responsible for caring for the baby as though I had one. Though it seems grossly unfair apparently people now expect me to continue to care and love this little thing for eighteen years and perhaps even longer.

I'll eventually cover the first few days, which mainly involved rushing up and down stairs and making sure that s wasn't suffocating herself by smashing her nose against my chest too tightly. I want to cover that most sacred of baby stories, why the nanny in Britain shook the baby.

As it turns out, at least for me, this is apparently not true for S, a baby screaming at the top of its lungs for ten minutes or so is not the greatest thing in the world. However, when they start to take it up into the thirty minute range it's fairly easy to start harboring all sorts of rather unspeakable thoughts about one's child, like, I wonder if anyone would notice if I just dropped her back off at the hospital, or let's be honest, much worse.

The real question is what you do in those times of near homicidal rage at this supposedly sweet little child. I learned to cope by turning my music up to insane levels and breathing deeply three times, and then trying to achieve some sort of Buddhist like peace with my place in the world whilst my child screams at the top of her lungs for reasons beyond my understanding.

I believe that what I'm experiencing is just a microcosm, accelerated perhaps, of the general human experience. Such as, the seeming dichotomy of inflicting the most pain upon those we love, which would seem to imply that love is perhaps transient. Ie, if s were to come out of a crying fit and immediately smile at me, the reverse is far more likely, I would be experiencing, near simultaneously, one of the greatest highs (yes folks, she's smiling, and has been for more than a week, which I'm pretty sure is advanced for a kid her age. And even if it isn't I don't really care because it's just so damn cute) followed by one of the most annoying sounds in the world, lil s crying. It is seemingly incongruous that I could kind of desire tossing s out a window when she can just as easily make me talk in a baby voice and dote and beam with joy and do all those sorts of annoying parent things that I swore I wasn't going to do.

Perhaps this isn't indicative of the human condition, perhaps it's just parenting. And sometimes, you just sway to the music and wait for her to go to sleep, or to turn her blue eyes to you and open her toothless mouth in what is either the world's best smile or merely a cute smile interpreted as something far greater by a first time parent.