At the risk of sounding conceited, I’ve come to realise that I am better than God. I know, look at Mr Boasty over here. But, having examined it from all angles, it seems perfectly reasonable to state conclusively that I am definitely better than actual God.
Look at the way He designed babies, for crying out loud. He mucked them up something rotten. Babies can’t feed themselves. They only communicate in vowels. And for the first couple of weeks, they poo Marmite. Babies are rubbish. They’re the Apple Maps of people. Given a do-over, I’m positive that I could engineer a smarter baby than God ever managed. This baby would be born knowing how to sleep through the night. Its fingernails would be less like razor-sharp tiger claws and more like actual human fingernails. Thanks to a combination of science and dark magic, it’d be able to keep a pair of socks on for more than 10 poxy seconds at a time. And separation anxiety would be eliminated.
Especially that last one. Because we’re currently going through a bout of separation anxiety at home and the whole thing seems like a fairly catastrophic design flaw.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, it has happened because our son has gained object permanence – so he knows that things still exist once they have disappeared from view – but he hasn’t quite grasped the concept of time. Therefore, whenever my wife leaves the room, he becomes convinced that she’s walked out of his life for ever and consequently embarks upon a screaming meltdown.
That might be an understatement. These screams are apocalyptic. They’re howls of physical agony. He’s making the noise he made when I accidentally clipped his skin into a carrier; the one from before we knew how to wind him properly. That’s fair enough, really. If you can’t get a bit emotional at the sudden realisation that you’re essentially alone in the universe, when can you?
The whole thing could be vastly improved on so many levels. For starters, we could make it so that babies developed the other way around, so they had an innate understanding of time before object permanence kicked in.
Or we could push it back a little – after all, it seems tremendously unfair to go through the most heartbreakingly existential phase of your entire life before you’re even old enough to eat an apple properly. Or, you know, if this absolutely needs to happen, let’s not make it last for 18 solid months, which is something I’ve just read and now I’m hyperventilating into a bag.
In short, separation anxiety is the worst. It’s the worst for my wife, who now feels riddled with guilt whenever she has to put our son down and go to the toilet. It’s worst for my son who, if he maintains this level of blind hysteria much longer will grow up to have the adult speaking voice of Doctor Claw from Inspector Gadget. To be honest with you, it’s pretty bad for me, because the baby doesn’t cry when I leave the room and, frankly, I’m starting to take it personally.
But, look, we’re parents. Parenting is often about doing your best to claw back whatever fragments of silver lining you can from bad situations. The same is true here. Yes, our baby has just woken up to the fact that the world is cold and desolate and he’ll be forced to trick and struggle his way through life until he dies old and full of regret like everyone else who ever lived. But, on the plus side, he likes peek-a-boo now! Peek-a-boo! That’s fun, isn’t it?
