My one-year-old nephew was up while his father was at school.
Everyone kept on saying what a good baby he is. The best: good-natured, even-tempered, a regular little effing angel.
You know what? A good baby is still a baby. A good baby is still prone to shitting, peeing, puking, and drooling.
That's why I teach high school. A good teenager is polite, friendly, hard working, and just might change the world.
A good baby can't even change his own diapers.
Whilst the little cherub was here, I caught a lot of subtext from my family about the superiority of women who have children over women who don't. Just little rancid whiffs of bias.
Just enough to make me a freaking basket case when I was tapped for baby-sitting. I had a panic attack while feeding the kid- convinced that I had cut his food wrong, not only wrong but into the optimal size and shape for choking (he lived).
When he started crying and wouldn't stop, I was certain his baby spidey sense had picked up on my childlessness state, and my lack of motherhood had broken his good nature into a thousand pointed shards.
So I started crying with him.*
Eventually he stopped, and when my other brother arrived to take over baby duty, I told him what happened, and he said, "Yeah, he gets moody."
1. Those were some of the sweetest words anyone in my family has ever said to me.
2. Would've been nice to know that.
3. See? Perfect babies are still drags.
*I was having a hard week, but no one believes that someone who's on summer vacation can have a hard week, and while I don't ask people to sympathize (because pretty much the rest of the world doesn't have two months of vacation), I do offer that even if I were on summer vacation and spent the whole time riding a unicorn and getting hickeys from Ryan Gosling, I would still get the blues.
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