November 9, 2009

• babies are cute as hell.  babies scare the crap out of me. 

  thinking about having a kid one day was never really anything but an exercise of fear and brutal conclusions about myself.  i really only barely take care of myself.  throw in my severely self-centered disposition, perfected to extremes in a way only a perpetually single person can achieve, love of sleep, lack of self-restraint and patience, carelessness, depressed and cynical outlook, propensity to over-worry about random shit, control-freakishness (oddly this and carelessness exist in the same person. go figure) and a general desire to kick things, and chances of my kid ending up decent are not looking good. 

  i mean it’s really hard to think that i would all of a sudden have this epiphany triggered by the baby’s birth and re-organize my life for the baby’s benefit.  i think people are capable of what they have done in the past, and  there’s very little evidence of my responsible, co-existent, selfless life before, so why bet on it magically appearing after a baby is born?  that’s a really risky bet to be making, despite the volume of testimonial evidence that this motivational revolution does happen at that moment of birth.  

  i like drinking wine and eating brie, two things i probably won’t be able to afford if i also have to pay for $1,000 baby strollers and save for college and all that business.  i like watching movies in their entirety whenever i feel like it, with maximum volume.  i like going out to eat and drink with friends once in a while.  i like going out to listen to music.  i like not having to clean up my messy living room.  i like not having cheerios all over the back of my car.  all gone.  this brings up the ugly but equally likely possibility of me resenting the baby for changing my life so dramatically.  i really like sleeping all i can, and am unbearably cranky when i lose out on even a little bit of it.  that might be all i see on that poor kid’s face: what i lost.

  how would i handle it when the kid grows up a little and gets really mouthy and rebellious?  i think that’s when i’ll really lose it.  and when i do lose it, the long term consequences are truly scary to think about.  the goal here is to shape a decent, functioning, contributing adult.  future president would be great, but the baseline is decent, functioning and contributing.  will my losing it stunt their growth?  then when they do end up pregnant or in jail, i can really go to town on myself for steering them there by losing control. 

  (of course, my self-centeredness is in full bloom here.  assuming that i, as a parent, will have that much influence over my child is the height of conceit.  right now, as i see it, friends have an equal or more profound effect on the child’s personality and character than the combined parents do.  but, hey, i’m highly egotistical so all the kid’s failings will be mine and my own, for a short while anyway before, through some transfer of burden, they end up right back on the shoulders of my kid.)

  and despite this revelation of my possibly psychotic fear of having a child (or fear of myself?), this post is actually about how great it must be to have a kid.  let me take it back a step here to explain.

  yesterday was a very good friend’s son’s first birthday party.  this son is one of like ten kids born all around the same time whose parents are all friends with each other.  i live kind of far so yesterday at the party was the first chance i had to see all these kids, and it was encouraging.  it wasn’t so much the parents that changed my mind though, but the infants themselves.  some were just kind of inexpressive and unreadable, but some really seemed to show a good-natured and decent disposition, and seeing that set the wheels in motion. 

  now, some might say, “they’re infants!  of course, they can’t be anything but good-natured”, which i would disagree with.  i think some kids are born mean, and it honestly hurts me to see kids being mean to each other.  that doesn’t conclude though that mean kids have to stay mean.  but seeing those kids yesterday being all goofy, curious and well-mannered, i now have to think about the effect a good baby can have on his parents, and how that goodness can reflect back onto him reinforcing their goodness.  so, ultimately, this raises the previously unforeseen possibility of the good nature of the kid overcoming environmental shortcomings.  in other words, it’s not all about me fucking my kid up.  my (as yet imaginary) kid might end up being a stronger influence on his own life than my own unintentional acts of life sabotage.

  isn’t that what good people do?  positively change things around them?  and maybe they can do it just by being born. 

  • 11:56 am
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