How Baby

Not rain, nor snow, nor high holy day of childhood will keep me from making a comic… happy belated Halloween! Momo made off like a damn bandit, like usual.

There’s a new baby in the family, and nothing turns me into a babbling nincompoop faster than seeing a brand new fresh baby. I was ambivalent-to-hostile about babies until we had Momo, endured her breaking me of that opinion, and now it’s just like – babies, man. I love ’em. I love their stupid little squawks and their clumsy little paws and their big blinking eyes and little heart-shaped mouths going mawm mawm mawm.

It’s gotta be some kind of evolutionary trick, right? Because I cannot imagine ever wanting to go through pregnancy and babyhood again, and yet – I wanna HUFF those babies. It’s evolution doing its bastardly work to make me have another.

I mean, I know it’s because I’m not seeing the hard parts, only the good ones. It just makes me look back and think, oh, that was nice actually. I don’t know why I thought it was so hard. When I’m feeling particularly self-pitying I think wow, remember when Momo had this much innocence and opportunity, and I wasted it by being a bad/inattentive parent? I didn’t know what I had.

Parent-brain sucks. Momo is wonderful, and I love that she is a real person I can have a conversation with. It’s not her fault at all, it’s entirely me; there’s just a little pang that’s always going to haunt me: that I could have done more, been more, in these crucial first years. It all just extrudes out of me when I see a baby, like I want to bask in the glow of their innate holiness.

But that’s a lot of weight to lay on a new parent; it’s easier (and far more socially acceptable) to act like babies make my brain leak out my ears, and leave it at that.