My baby is asleep so I am grasping at this opportunity to take up my long-neglected blog. I could be putting dirty plates into the dishwasher and tidying up the general disorder around me, but this seems more important- sorting out the disorder in my head.
So in the interim while this blog lay dormant, I got pregnant and had a baby, and now that baby is five months old and slumbering in a little chair that has a several settings for different speeds of automatic rocking and a whole repertoire of inane lullaby songs. So maybe this will now become one of those self-satisfied parenting blogs where the mother has subsumed her identity to her child? Or else the child has become her status symbol, along with her expensive clothes and car- her "look where I got in this game of life- I have moved up a level, I have achieved success as a mother! I have beaten the ticking time bomb of the biological clock! I have unlocked a new level on the game!"
But no, I'm being hateful. I'm sure no one actually thinks of their child in those terms. Motherly love is unselfish and beautiful, it dulls pain and gladdens your heart. There is nothing more pleasing that watching your child grow and learn, laugh and smile.
I have a friend who has known me since I was a teenager who reacted a little oddly to the birth of my baby. We'd drifted apart a little due to living in different cities, but still managed a meet up about once every six months, but once my baby came, she turned down meeting me on several occasions and said in explanation that she didn't like being around babies as she felt extremely lacking in maternal feelings and seemingly extended this other others' offspring. She also added the argument that having a baby is the worst thing you can do for our mother earth at this point in time, in terms of carbon footprint and the ecological damage an added human to the sum total does in their lifetime. (After all, my baby might have babies and so spawn future generations which add to the problem of overpopulation…)
While I agree with this, I wouldn't say that this makes my baby a hateful eyesore that it is intolerable to be around. He's a cute little thing, and now he's here, the only thing to be done is to bring him up in the best way possible; and inflict as little psychological damage upon him as possible.
Oh- he's stirring and blinking at me sleepily. He's screwing up his face and squealing and his little bottom lip is trembling as he pauses his crying to stare at me accusingly- time to cut this short…
