Without question, my favourite thing in the world is the sound of my son’s laughter. His laughter is giddy. It surges in and overtakes him, as if his body cannot physically contain all the joy he has for the world. I cannot get enough of it, even when he sits bolt upright at 4am and starts roaring with laughing at nothing, which he has started to do with alarming regularity. I’m knackered, but that doesn’t matter. It’s still my favourite thing.
The problem is that I think he knows. That can be the only possible explanation for this new fake laugh of his. My son has started to develop a brand new laugh, one that’s only deployed whenever he wants something. It’s like he’s spent the last nine months figuring out that his laughter makes people behave more affectionately towards him, and now he’s determined to use this to his advantage. Now, if he wants attention or food or anything, he’ll laugh for us. And that would be fine, except for the inconvenient fact that my son straight-up stinks at acting.
Christ, you should hear this fake laugh. It’s terrible. It sounds like a sea lion choking on a fishbone. It sounds like one of the aliens from Mars Attacks! riding a shopping trolley down a concrete stairwell. It sounds like an asthmatic machine gun being fired into a care home for seagulls who practise auto-erotic asphyxiation.
There is nothing nice or fun or charming about my son’s fake laugh. Yet he persists, shooting it all through with a transparently ingratiating “Ain’t I a stinker?” facial expression that’s only microscopically different from the one he pulls when he poos himself. He has begun to develop other attention-seeking tactics too. He’s tried crying, but we saw through that straight away. In the early days, our son would only cry if there was an emergency. But now he’s reached a point in his development where he’s started to experiment with crying purely on the off-chance that he’ll get something out of it. Well, nice try, sunshine, but we’re on to you. We know what your real cry sounds like.
According to the gospel of some app that my wife downloaded once, this behaviour is quite common for babies of his age. At this point, they’ve more or less figured out the basics, and now they can get on with the serious business of bending everyone to their iron will.
In a way – in a weird, obnoxious, hugely biased way that probably doesn’t single me out as a model parent – I’m quite proud of his newfound ability to manipulate. Sure, his execution is a little off, but it’s nothing a little practice won’t solve.
Right now, ours is not a child who’ll meekly accept his lot. Ours is a child who’ll trick and scheme and exploit the whole world into getting exactly what he wants.
He knows how cute he is, and he isn’t at all shy about using that to his advantage. Soon he’ll realise that withholding affection is just as potent, and once he’s figured that out the world will be his oyster.
So that’s my son. Or, if you’re reading this online in the year 2040, that’s Almighty Emperor Heritage, the fearsome intergalactic dictator notorious for murdering his own father at the age of 10 for disparaging him in the press. You must fear him. And, whatever you do, you must never mention his laugh.
