From Facebook: “Ooooooooo I’m in the mood to buy ickle baby things for a super special ickle baby.”
I’ve deleted pretty much the entire cast of new parents (sharents is the techno-neologism) from my Facebook. I felt an ickle bit bad about it, and as much I’m all for procreation, especially its fucking catalyst, being forced into the formulaic, endlessly unsurprising, and never as cute as the mouthy parental protagonists suggest, world of babies is to me a world of pain. I feel it is a violation of my online human rights, not to mention your child’s rights whose life you’ve made public in absentia of a mutual agreement. That’s child abuse you know!
Much like the aversion therapy torture that Alex was subjected to in A Clockwork Orange, I’ve been put off kids for life due to their laughing, snarling, puking, needy, florid indifferent faces bringing on bouts of morning sickness every time I log on. New parents, like sexual predators, planting the seeds of their loins in my imagination every bleeding day…I now see pregnant women in Big C and I throw up over bags of 8 baht instant noodles.
Remember the old days when having kids was a private affair and not something you forced your friends, colleagues, and even the window cleaner to sit through, going over the same fucking boring predictable photo album again and again and again until the image is so ingrained in your painfully pregnant brain you cry yourself to sleep to the sound of someone else’s child. Sharenting takes proud to be a parent to a neurotic, OCD level, something akin to counting shoes all day, or whacking off in public places. Twenty years ago you’d have been sectioned under some sort of public health act after the 50th time you brought out the album.
Your creation don’t forget, the screaming effigy that looks just like all its online contemporaries (enemies) started off as a globule of sperm. Only a few months prior to your ickle wonder countless prospective brothers and sisters were wiped on socks and tissues, or in more ideal circumstances secreted into an orifice of a fellow progenitor. Creation isn’t special, try making a trout soufflé.
Making an ickle one is the most hackneyed, clichéd, animalistic, predictable, boring, primal thing a human can do. In terms of humanity it’s the least special thing you can do – in fact, it’s what brings us the closest to our simian cousins. Monkey see, monkey do. It’s as atavistic as scratching your balls, or clubbing your neighbour to death because he nicked your cow.
Two little feet padding around the house… another little mouth to feed… another… oh stop please, I don’t want to know. And this is the truth, no one wants to know. People are just too polite to tell you. You’ve convinced yourself your self-aggrandizement should be public knowledge, but the fact is – and the same goes for globs of sperm – no one wants to see it. If you must share your most personal adventures with strangers and so called friends, then you could at least film the good bits: the heavy-petting in the swimming pool, the coitus, the premature ejaculations, fingers in the wrong holes. That’s what your friends want to see.
Babies are boring to everyone but their owners, like dreams, or stamp collections. Listening to someone talk about their baby is about as annoying as having to listen to someone else’s loud phone call in the doctor’s waiting room. And let’s face it – the proof is everywhere – they’re ugly, too. They get better with age, but in the beginning they look like shriveled peaches with demonic, wanton eyes. I’d be angry too without a womb above my head.
Just hide your babies away, and enjoy them in your own space. And, Christ, don’t ask me to hold him or her – it’s like asking me to check your grandmother’s breasts for lumps. They’re not public toys. They’re the result of excruciating pain, blood spills, placenta splurges, ripping, farting, popping, swearing, screaming… and sometimes pooing. Not quite a sunset at Huay Tung Tao Lake.
Personally I find babies irritating, selfish, smelly, annoying, clingy, disturbing, and severely lacking in a sense of humour. They make most people feel awkward, or reduce them to talking like idiots. They make most people tell outrageous lies.
And in this age of sexual equality the man is so often emasculated to the point of becoming pretty much a eunuch, or at least a slave to a very contrived politically correct new reality that has been superimposed on us for no other reason that it’s meant to be modern. A man in ‘comfortable’ shoes pushing a buggy around a shopping mall is about as natural as an octopus directing traffic on Huay Kaew Road. Another thing: keep your babies indoors. If you’re selfish enough to have them, and add to this Impending Disaster (overpopulation + consumer demand), then at least don’t pollute the airwaves with your ecology killers.
Back in fashion quasi-Buddhist German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was an antinatalist, meaning in a sort of way that life was more hassle than it’s worth. I disagree: life, even with all its unfulfillable desires, its arthritis, killer crisps, and the indignity of ageing, is still the life-fantastic. Being anti-baby doesn’t make one a misanthrope. Love for your young one doesn’t need to be sanctioned online, and if you have to show the little monster around, then do it like they did in the 90’s and pay someone a visit.
If we must squander our own privacy, so be it, but allow your stinky children the right to comply with your demands.