Baby!

Yeah, alright, I had a baby.

And for whatever reason, it makes me itch to write -in a nervous, not-sure-I-can-reach-between-my-shoulderblades-to-scratch kind of way.  Having extruded a tiny human, am I capable of generating anything else?  Or am I, like an old seam of coal, mined out?

I feel picked over, broken up.  The baby-having is not for sissies.  Women may have done it for millenia, but you know what?   A lot of them died.  And if they didn't, they didn't get any sleep and were subsequently tired and vulnerable and got eaten by sabertooth tigers, leaving their tiny, mewling daughters to grow up and perpetrate the next generation.

Surely, if every woman knew exactly what she was getting into, we would have figured out how to pawn this off onto men.  We've at least figured out how to have fewer babies, so that each one we do have becomes the tiny, terrified sac into which we cram the totality of our hopes and anxieties.  Fun times for mom, fun times for babe!

But I'm told you forget.  Biology pulls its rabbit out of a hat- or, rather, stuffs the rabbit back in.  Your memories hop away into darkness and you're left holding the bag.  Or rather, the baby.

Good thing it's cute.