Oh, To Be a Baby Right Now!
She's back!
Sometimes I look at my seven month old daughter, grinning at me while clutching a pacifier in her little dumpling of a fist, a string of drool issuing from her mouth, and feel jealous.
Beyond whether or not she’s hungry, wet, too cold, or bored, she has no idea what’s going on. Whatever is happening to her will slide right off her brain as she ages into childhood. She can’t even process the news. She’ll be too young to remember whatever juvenile 4chan-level antics one of the president’s simps did to trigger the libs for the next four years. Maybe she’ll read about this period of time in history books. Maybe she’ll ask her dad and me what this time was like. Maybe by that time our brains will have sanded down the pointiest parts of this era and we’ll be able to recount it with detached bemusement, kind of like how people who once owned George W. Bush stupid quote of the day desk calendars now view him as the living war criminal they’d most like to have a beer with.
I wish I had no idea what was going on. I would come close to forgiving Jeff Bezos for all his tackiness and billionaire sociopathy if he’d fund the development of a drug that would enable me to be a safe, productive, helpful member of society for the next four years and remember nothing when it was all over. You know, like a baby.
I sit in front of the television, trying to talk myself down from the irrational rage over Melania Trump’s big dumb hat, a lower-third crawl of executive orders designed to get a rise out of people like me while at the same time fixing zero problems unless “women having jobs” is a problem, the anti-defamation league trying to explain away an obvious Nazi salute from the most tedious manchild on the planet who somehow also has more money than anybody else. A few feet away, the baby farts so loudly that she falls over onto the pillow I’ve placed behind her for back support. She starts laughing.
Seething jealousy.
My older daughter is three. Three is not my favorite age for a person to be, and even though I love her so much it sometimes sends me spiraling, she’s pretty annoying right now, and I am on edge. When she senses that I’m upset or unsettled, she acts out. It’s not a great cycle. Her brain is a supercomputer that can calculate the messiest, most unwelcome possible thing to do in just about any context; she has no boundaries between her feelings and actions, which often means I’m left impressed by her disruptive creativity. Right before the election (which happened one day before her birthday), she got a charge out of saying she loved Donald Trump because she saw how much it irritated me to hear those words coming from a child. When I started Dead Bodying that comment– telling her that how she felt about Donald Trump didn’t matter at all to me– she stopped talking about him entirely. She’s seamlessly moved on to talking about just how we’re going to get Mickey Mouse, or Spider-Man, or Elphaba to come to her school.
I wish, more than anything, that the first person I thought about when I woke up every morning was Cynthia Erivo. I wish that the worst thing that might happen to me in any given day is my mom accidentally breaking the graham cracker before handing it to me, or having my hair brushed.
Sometimes I feel guilty about bringing children into this world. Both of my daughters are still are young enough to believe I can fix anything and protect them from everything. One day I will have to let each of them down, individually. Now they are marvelous, needy little distractions. I’m missing out on a lot of pop culture, I never go to movies anymore, and the only time I’m really alone is when I’m gardening-dissociating while both the kids are napping or someplace else. But crowding can be good during times like this.
I’m nervous about the direction of the world. I hate that we’ve dropped any pretense of caring about what we’re leaving for the people who come after us. I hate that even people who are trying their hardest to coerce women into having more children are the ones who project the most radioactive contempt for women who have children. I don’t care for most men. I had to stop watching football this year, for the most part, because I did not care for seeing that many men onscreen at the same time. Haven’t we heard enough from them? Haven’t they done enough?
I’m going to take this Substack up regularly again— primarily because I’m trying to be more economical with the way I spend time on things that stress me out that I’m powerless to stop.
No more doomscrolling. My heart cannot take it, and being upset makes me a worse parent, partner, and friend.
No more being outraged or triggered; all of that only serves to give jollies to the jagoff psychopaths who have seized power in this country and the empty, pathetic losers who consider themselves “fans” of a billionaire class that despises them.
No more getting into fights in Instagram comments. Mark Zuckerberg is an atomic chud. Fighting solves nothing. Spending time on Instagram means I’m contributing to whatever look he will fail to pull off next.
This isn’t to say I’m avoiding engaging with the doom because I simply don’t want to acknowledge it; just that in many cases, federal government histrionics are not my circus, not my monkeys. (However, if the federal government does come for my monkeys, I will unleash the entire circus including the lions AND THE CLOWNS.) There are productive ways to respond to people who are trying to tamp down what’s good in the world. Despair is a burden that, for now, I can refuse to bear. I will forever be, at my core, a hater. But I can also be a helper.
During every rough time in human history, people carried with their lives to the extent that they could, and helping each other to the extent that they could. And if writing about a baby laughing at her own farts is one way to bring connection and levity into my life or into the lives of people who read this, it’s worth doing.
Plus, I deleted TikTok. That’s like, an extra hour per day I now have to write.