How Baby #53: Platitude
1) The easy joke: haha, parenting is like your hair being on fire all the time, I guess?
2) The harder “joke”: this is what it sounds like when non-parents hear things like ‘you don’t know love until you have a child’. I mean, as much as it might be true, it’s still a little ridiculous, right? Kind of like comparing one part of your body being on fire to another part being on fire: it’s still fire, no?
(And I mean, what if your hair doesn’t catch on fire the moment you hold your baby for the first time? And everyone’s watching and waiting for you to light up and it just doesn’t, because love is weird and fickle and sometimes it takes time? And you spend months hoping your hair will catch fire but it never does because the hormones are making your hair fire-resistant and… okay, that’s far enough down that metaphor, I think.)
Point being, I think love feels like love, no matter what it’s directed at: amazing and frustrating and thrilling and aching and silly all at once. Trying to rank one kind against another is futile at best and condescending at worst, and kind of insinuates this idea that the only love worth doing is the kind that leads to babies, and there are so many other kinds of love that are worth having.
(h/t to my buddy ‘coveredinfeels’ for the inspiration for this comic when I was whinging about platitudes a few days ago <3)