. *** Congratulations, you’re a father now. Welcome to the club. More precisely, welcome to the Baby Club. Membership is free, attendance optional, and all you need to join is sense of confusion, overwhelming fatigue, and of course a baby. While the world stands split over religion, economic disparity, and politics, babies have the power to bring us together, bonding us over the lifelong, shared experience of parenthood. It’s like having dreadlocks. When you pass another dude with dreadlocks there’s an unspoken connection, a head-nod that says “yeah man, we’re cool.” But when you come across another dad, it’s more of an empathetic connection, like “Dude, I feel you man”. Meeting another parent offers a chance to gain advice, seek solutions to common “new-parent” problems, and receive an encouraging pat on the back. They’ll tell you “it’ll get easier” — a lie perpetuated among all parents to feign some false light at the end of the tunnel. But babies are a strange thing to forge a connection over. Generally speaking, we usually connect with people over an interest or a hobby, like something we do outside of work. I play guitar, you play guitar, let’s hang out. I love skateboarding, you like skateboarding, cool, we enjoy the same shit. We have common interests.
But baby’s aren’t really an interest or a hobby. It’s not exactly something we spent time learning how to do. In fact, unlike an actual hobby like tango, painting, or even video games, creating a baby is far less complicated. It’s pretty much just insert part A into section B, and boom! Baby. It’s crazy how something as effortless and as awesome as sex can result in the lifelong responsibility of parenthood. I mean it doesn’t even matter if it’s good sex or shitty sex, the outcome is still just… baby. I think it’s fair that if I have the best sex ever, that should also be reflected in my baby, like he would come out a kung fu master, or super cute or something. Or better yet, how dope would it be if awesome sex resulted in like ice-cream cake or a cinnamon roll. Like your girl’s feeling a bit nauseous a month later, and the doctor hits up your ultrasound like “congratulations, it’s a double-chocolate ice-cream cake.” I think that would make connecting with other parents way better. Like, “what positions did you guys use in bed to get that brownie?” Or, “Yo, that baby’s looking a bit on the ugly side, maybe it’s time to spice things up in the bedroom.” Because right now, bonding over a baby is a lot like bonding over work, it’s not that exciting, it’s usually pretty redundant, and neither person involved really cares. It’s great at first, cause you’re new and you need to learn the ropes and find that connection. But once you’ve heard lines like “it’ll get easier” like a thousand times, it kind of gets annoying. (Especially ‘cause it’s not actually getting easier). But that’s another weird thing about becoming a parent, you become grouped in with other parents. There’s almost this expectation that because you have kids, and I have kids, we should probably hang out. Except that parenting isn’t something we’re gonna go do together after work over a beer, it’s an individual responsibility we each approach differently. The mere fact that we both have a baby is one of the most rudimentary connections in life, tying us together by nothing more than the fact we both got lucky enough to get laid, and we were both dumb enough to forget contraception. It’s like we work at that same company, and while we may work in the same building, I don’t exactly want go out dancing with you. And who knows, you might not even like dancing. *** Illustration by Francine Yulo.
