The funny thing about your baby learning to walk is that, almost overnight, she becomes much better equipped to interact with the outside world.
If you set her down on the sidewalk, suddenly she can make good on her obsession with the Con Edison truck depot. And she’ll stumble towards the open gate with impressive determination. In our case, my wife stopped her before she got too far, but frankly I was curious to see how they were going to handle her at the guard booth.
Now that she is beginning to set foot in the world, well, between the broken glass that I’ve started to notice everywhere on the sidewalk, and the things I hear on the news every day, I’m really wondering: what kind of world have we brought her into?
It’s kind of a disaster, isn’t it? We’ve made an awful mess of it in so many ways. Ours is a world that’s been so severely polluted that the climate itself has turned against us. It’s a place filled with so much unbridled rage and resentment that people are willing to set off bombs at a marathon. A marathon — an event that brings together people from across the globe in celebration of positive achievement. What were we thinking, bringing a baby into this place?
I know, I shouldn’t get hung up on just the bad things. There’s so much more to the world. For one thing, in the face of mind-numbing atrocities there is an immediate and overwhelming response of caring, as people put themselves in the middle of harm’s way to help others. And if we step further back, we can see how much things have improved: our lives surely are better now than they would have been throughout most of human history, when violence, disease, and death were so thickly woven into the fabric of daily life that they weren’t half as shocking as they are now.
How, then, can we comprehend the terrible things that still happen, and the awful state of this planet? Maybe the bottom line is that things are always becoming both better and worse.
While science and technology have brought great advances, they’ve also created entirely new ways to bring ruin upon ourselves. Something as mundane as plastic, for instance, has made our lives much easier. Nearly every item that I use to feed my baby, or to entertain her or keep her safe, is made of plastic. But at the same time, we’re strangling the planet’s wildlife with our thoughtless, disposable conveniences. We have even created an eighth continent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean composed entirely of floating plastic garbage.
It’s a mess, and it leaves us confused and even angry. There are so many contradictions in this world that we spend a lot of our time looking for answers or trying to point fingers. We’ve even resorted to blaming babies for the ailments of the world. Yes, that’s right, babies. You might think that babies are innocent, but you’re wrong — babies are guilty! Isn’t that why people baptize babies? To clean them of sin that they already carry as they enter this world?
At least that’s what conventional wisdom tells us, although I can’t quite get on board with it. Having been present at the birth of my daughter, I agree that when a baby is born, she definitely should be cleaned. But if a newborn has blood on her hands at birth, it’s because being born is a brutal ordeal to suffer through — not because she’s done anything wrong. Look, it’s one thing to blame the baby for that ceramic salad bowl that you broke, but to pin all the sins of mankind on her? Well, there’s just no excuse for that. “Oh, these moral failings over here? That’s the baby’s fault. She’s going to hear it from me — just wait ’til she’s born!”
Indeed, it’s a troubled world that sees us going to such desperate lengths to explain everything that’s wrong. Focusing too much on feeling guilty or blaming others, however, won’t solve anything. Neither will sitting around wondering if it was right to bring a baby into existence. Every generation inherits a world full of problems, and what matters is how we handle the problems that we’re given.
At 15 months, my little baby is thrilled to be here. She stands up and bounces in her crib like a kangaroo. Right from under my nose she grabs my cellphone off the coffee table and runs towards the bathroom with it. When she’s tired, she flops her head down onto my shoulder, and during all of these things she flashes a mischievous, gleeful grin that I didn’t know could exist in this world before she was born. She will face difficulties in her life, but for now, at least, she seems more than happy with the world.
When I was a kid, my dad used to say, “Always leave a place better than you found it.” Usually he was referring to a campsite or a hiking trail in the Adirondacks, but I’ve found those words to be an invaluable guide to living on this planet.
I wish I could solve all the problems I see before I hand the world off to her, but that’s not a parent’s job. My job is to teach her how to make good decisions; to navigate all of the ugliness that’s interspersed with all the beauty; to not be infected by the anger and resentment that consumes some people. My job is not to worry about the world I’m giving her, but to provide her with the right tools, so that she can leave the place a little better than she found it.
Tim is a part-time stay-at-home dad, who lives with his wife and their generally content baby in Park Slope, Brooklyn. More of his thoughts about babies and other things that confuse him can be found at www.RevoltOfTheImbeciles.blogspot.com.
