Excess amounts of squishy fat, teethless little mouths with drool leaking out and the fresh smell of baby powder left me horrified in the past. But things have changed and my maternal extinct has finally started kicking in. Yes, everyone, I love babies.
You may think all generally normal human beings do, especially young women, but this is simply not true. The old me avoided these fresh four-legged creatures at many a cost. Hence my circle of friends in high school dubbed me ""least likely to ever have kids,"" and often reminded me how awkwardly I interacted with them.
When relatives or family friends would hand me their babies to momentarily hold, wails and tears would immediately begin, and sometimes the kid would even cry too.
I guess something just freaked me out a bit, like this thing I was holding three feet away from my body would somehow slip from my hands and off a cliff. Or worse, it would hurt me by turning around and claw my face off or spit acid into my eyes.
But then I realized they don't really do that and that babies are actually just harmless blobs of cuteness and spit-up.
It's when they leave Infant Ville that I start having problems because ""the terrible twos"" is a very real thing. A few babysitting experiences taught me that the hard way. While I was over at my neighbors', their toddler woke up crying so I picked him up and tried to soothe him. Instead I upset him deeper, which resulted in him screaming so hard into my ear that he peed all over my overalls. I got a $10 tip for that though.
Even older and worse was Jane, or as she was infamously known at school, Jane the Pain. Despite being probably the cutest five-year-old you'd ever seen, the minute the door opened I saw a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she quickly smiled and ran away for me to find her. After her mother left, I heard her head toward the attic.
Once I got up there, I heard giggles emerge from a long narrow fort of pillows that winded throughout the room. I eased my over-sized body into it, trying to scoot myself to where she was inside.
Then ""The Sixth Sense"" style, Jane turned on a flashlight under her face, devilishly grinned and said, ""Come get me."" She crawled over my body and ran downstairs. About an hour later, I managed to push myself out without collapsing the pillow walls and walked downstairs to be met by a locked attic door.
Me: Jane, open the door. I can hear you outside.
Jane: Not until you say the password.
Me: Jane, PLEASE open the door.
Jane: That's not the password. The password is ""Julia is gay!""
Although I'm ashamed to admit it, I did say the three words for my freedom. But in retrospect, the next four hours would have been more enjoyably spent in the dark attic.
So to those who said it would never happen, stick this in your pipe and smoke it. All I need to do now is work on what to do when they start weighing over 20 pounds.
That's why I'm thinking I just might not let my children grow. Until they start high school, I will keep them in a stroller, a bib and diaper. It'll just be easier to bypass those horrid twelve years all together. And if it messes up the kids mentally, emotionally or in any other way, that's where their daddy can come in.
Aspiring stay-at-home dads can woo Julia at shipplett@wisc.edu.
