Babies Are Not Ready For Prime Time

It's truly impressive that any of us survive to adulthood.

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On September 23, 1999, nine months after launch, a 1,407lb space probe called the Mars Climate Orbiter lost contact with NASA's mission control, never to regain contact.

That November, a group called the Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board released its findings into why the $327.6 million program failed, and discovered that the teams of programmers at Lockheed Martin--which manufactured the probe-- used a different unit of measurement than the standard unit NASA--which ran the mission--uses, thus making every calculation the probe fed back to earth incorrect and causing the probe to attempt to enter the Martian atmosphere at the wrong angle--either ricocheting off into space or burning up entirely. (Guess it's time for everybody who grumbled that they'd never need to convert units of measurement in the real world to apologize to their sixth grade math teachers!)

Lately I've been playing this new game called Solve The Mystery of What's Wrong. It's a puzzle game my infant daughter plays against my husband and I, wherein she screams until the two of us can figure out What's Wrong and fix it. It's not a very fun game, but it's a game that every parent plays with every infant, because human infants aren't exactly ready for prime time when they enter the world. Pregnancy is a miracle and birth is a marvel, but babies are not a well-designed product. They are the Mars Climate Orbiter of mammalian offspring.

The other morning at a time nobody should be awake unless they're getting on an international flight, I was trying to get my infant daughter to calm down enough to eat so that everybody in the house (including the cat) could go back to sleep. (I wasn't prepared for how much of parenting involves having my nipples screamed at by a person who cannot speak. I feel like I'm in a scene cut from a Lars von Trier film.)

I didn't expect Juniper to explain string theory or win a logrolling competition, but the sheer number of things that she-- and all babies her age-- are incapable of doing is something I never grappled with until I had to take care of a baby myself.

First of all: when they come out, much of their systems operate like they weren't even tested before they were released to the market.

For the first couple of days after we brought Juniper home, each eye sometimes seemed to operate independently, like Muppet eyes. They were closed more often than open, and only in the last week or so have started to focus on things in tandem. I know this isn't possible yet, but sometimes she looks at me like she's judging me.

In addition to their eyes being offered to the consumer while still not quite ready, their digestive systems can't handle anything besides human milk and science's best formula approximations of human milk. Baby stomachs aren't big enough to hold much food, either, which means that those who drink breastmilk must eat every two to three hours, for anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes at a time. Which means that somebody has to wake up and feed them every two to three hours, for that variable amount of time. (If it's breastmilk, it's probably Mom.)

Then they need to be burped, lest they puke up their thimble-stomach full of milk all over themselves, necessitating a change of pajamas and potentially another feeding. And-- apologies in advance for the poop talk; I will try to keep it to a minimum here-- there is nothing about baby poop that is not absurd. The color, the frequency, the consistency, the way they have absolutely no qualms doing it immediately after being changed, or while eating. Baby digestion is a disaster. Whoever decided that this is how it's done should take another pass.

Newborn breathing patterns are both funny and scary, like most things about parenting an infant. When they're born, babies don't yet know how to regulate their breathing, and so they'll do cute things like breathe really fast for a minute, pause for ten seconds, gasp for air, and then spend half an hour making grunting noises that make them sound like a dinosaur hatchling. Other times, they'll breathe so quietly and softly that I will have to physically put my hand on my daughter's chest to make sure she's still alive, which sometimes wakes her up.

The American Academy of Pediatrics makes a few recommendations that seem designed to torture parents as effectively as possible, and one of them is the recommendation that a baby sleep in the same room--but not the same bed--as their parents for the first six months, and up to the first year of life. Here's the thing about that, though: newborns aren't good at sleeping, either. They sleep loudly, with the dainty sweetness of a squadron of desert javelinas. They sometimes let out a loud baby yelp in the middle of a nap, a yelp loud enough to wake everybody else in the room but somehow not loud enough to wake themselves. And they wake up a lot, and when they wake, everybody wakes. All this is because babies don't have the ability to tell the difference between day and night until they're several weeks old-- another bug that should have been fixed prior to release.

Babies have zero emotional regulation. I have witnessed Juniper cycle between facial expressions that range from "angelic chill" to "murderous rage" in a matter of seconds, and backtrack from shrieking to calm attentiveness seconds later. I do not know what makes her happy and what makes her angry. It seems like everything in the entire world could cause any emotional reaction. She screams when she's having her diaper changed. She yells when she's being picked up from one surface to be taken to another. She shrieks when she's having clothing put on, or taken off. Sleeves in particular can go fuck themselves.

Sometimes I look at my daughter and I wonder what she was doing while she was camped out in my uterus for the last nine months-- because it certainly wasn't learning any skills necessary for survival without multiple adults putting their lives on hold in the name of making up for lost time. I guess that's why the newborn stage is breezily called "the fourth trimester."

When I was pregnant, "I cannot believe that this is how we reproduce" was something I thought to myself at least once a day. Now, it's something that I think hourly. When I'm not stressed out about it, I'm in awe. Every single adult on this big chaotic space rock was at one point a helpless infant with a head full of soft spots and the manual dexterity of a carnival claw machine. Somehow, despite nature's total lack of planning, each one of us stayed alive for long enough to grow teeth, develop preferences, disappoint people, and become disappointed in people. We all made it despite the fact that when we arrived, we were about as functional as software developed by English majors who can't code. We are cartons of raw eggs that somehow survived a trip down the laundry chute. How we don't burn up upon entry is a complete mystery to me.

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