I don’t talk about The Baby on this site very often. Sure, I’ll refer to certain things that parenthood has exposed me to. I’ll opine on how having a kid gives me new perspectives on things. But for the most part, I don’t like talking about anything she actually does.
The reason is that, whoever you might be, I’m sure you do not give a shit. If being married means creating a series of endless in-jokes that no one else in the world will ever have a chance to be a part of, then that’s what being a parent is like, times a thousand.
Like, when you’re hanging with a friend that you’ve known for a little bit, and he’s hanging out with guys he knows from way back, and they spend the whole night reciting disembodied lines from episodes in their collective past. And they’re laughing their heads off while you think What the fuck are these idiots talking about? So they start explaining it to you, but the explanation has so much back story and footnotes to it that you’d prefer to remain in the dark.
Prime example: last Saturday, The Baby climbed into our bed while we were still trying to sleep. So I pretended I was still asleep with exaggerated, cartoony snoring sounds. The Baby thought this was funny, so she started to imitate it in a way that only a baby can imitate something she doesn’t understand. For a few days, every time I said “Go to sleep!”, she’d make a similar noise. But every time she did it, it was as if she was making a copy of her previous attempt, so after a few days of this, it sounded less like a snore and more like she was clearing her throat of phlegm.
I thought this was hysterical, so I tell her to “go to sleep” every time she’s been around friends in the past week. Of course, these people never heard the several days’ transition between Snore Noise and Weird Hacking Noise. They just hear her make a horrible sound and wonder if she’s feeling okay. There’s no way they could think this is funny, because they would literally have to have been with us the entire previous week in order to “get it”. The payoff is so small that it’s not worth the setup.
Continue reading Self-Imposed Rules for Not Talking About Cats