One year on and what have I learned? I desperately love this baby, and when it is just me and this baby, I am elated. When you have a new soggy potato of a human, there is really minimal need for anything other than you, your potato, and an assortment of podcasts to keep you company. Would a therapist be useful to remind you not to form parasocial relationship ships with all the podcast hosts? Perhaps, but I would fire them pretty quickly for being wrong anyway, because obviously me and Andrew Huberman love each other and we are both super aware of the other’s existence.
Now that this baby is a toddler, he yearns for the company of others, mostly because I am not as fun as everyone else and that is absolutely on purpose, because I don’t want him to get the idea to come to me for fun, I want him to get the idea to come to me for naps, because if there is one thing I am excellent at, it is napping. But this highly inconvenient yearning of his means my perfect bubble of parenthood, my quiet and beatific year of strapping my baby to my back and going for walks in the woods, now must be punctuated with that most horrific experience of humanity, being around other people.
I already know I will not like having to go to places people hang out with their children, which I assume are parks and the parking lot of a Wendy’s maybe? I’m not actually sure where people take their kids. Given that I am hanging out in the parking lot of a Walgreens while I write this, at least one person hangs out with their kids in a parking lot, so it stands to reason I will find more dumdums doing things like hanging out with kids in parking lots. How do I know I won’t like it? Because parks are basically like dog parks, only for children. That’s why they call them dog parks, so you know they’re not for children, the same way you call someone a female doctor if you want to know who is good at being a doctor.
The dog park long was my nightmare, to the point I did not even want to take Likely, because you never know what sort of owner would be there. Would they be nice? Not nice? So annoying I would have to make up an excuse about having explosive diarrhea so they would not talk to me for fear of getting said explosive diarrhea on them? While most people go to the dog park hoping other dogs will be there to entertain their dog, I always hoped no one would be there, because you can only tell people about explosive diarrhea so many times before they start to suspect you’re lying to avoid talking to them, and then you have to start drinking Miralax in your car before you get out so as to give credence to the lie because you’re in too deep and now you’re shitting yourself at the park and wondering if it would have been easier to just talk to the person (it would not).
I feel the same way now, hoping against hope no one will be in the spaces that I am entering for the express purpose of finding company for my child who desires company, because he is young and doesn’t yet know faking an illness could be desirous to conversation. I realize that for my baby I must alter my worldview and pray people will be in these child spaces, preferably with children, so that he might thrive as a human being. But then what? You sit around and watch the kids play, and awkwardly talk to their owner while you try to gauge what level of violence is acceptable to them, and how they respond. We eye our babies and when one of them throws a spoon from the fake kitchen, the other child owner laughs and says, “Oh mine throws things too, it’s okay,” much like when two dogs run at each other and one of them knocks the other one to the ground and starts barking in their face. You have the tense moment of is this okay? And either the other owner assures you they accept the same level of violence or they fix you with a look and say they are absolutely not okay with this and you make up an excuse about how you just adopted them yesterday and you don’t know what you’re working with yet.
The dog, not the baby.
One thing is becoming clear, I can’t use the same excuses I use with the dog and also, I should keep my dog comparisons to myself. I do not believe the mother at the library appreciated it when her son ran off with a toy and I said, “Oh it’s okay, my dog does that all the time.”
It’s not that I think their kid is a dog, it’s that I really love my dog. It is actually hard to explain to people on the fly how much I love my dog, despite her addiction and general shitty judgmental demeanor.
But so much of raising a baby is easy because of how long I spent thinking about the moods of my garbage shepherd because of how much I love her and want her to be happy. NOT that she appreciates it, because she is garbage. But we just adopted her yesterday after all, so we are working on it.
The upside of all of this is that I absolutely love libraries, and apparently that is where children live. Having a baby means getting to frequent all the places you loved as a child without looking like someone who is potentially creeping on children. Finally I can play on the monkey bars in peace again, and sit in the children’s book nooks at the library and when people ask what I am doing there I point to my baby who has invariably wandered off an unsafe distance to look at things by himself even though I went through all the effort of bringing him to a place where other children are so he can play with them, and I say, “That’s my baby, I’ve got a dog just like him back at home,” and then they go and tell the authorities there is a weird woman in the corner who shouldn’t be allowed in the library anymore.