Nah’msayin?

Can’t Get That Baby Taste Out

OpinionsGraeme Shorten Adams — Published February 25, 2014 | Updated February 25, 2014 at 7:43am

As nights deepen and I finally crawl into bed, my neighbour’s baby, almost without fail, begins reciting its screaming libretto. And, hands clamped over my ears, I fantasize about biting it.

Like, a big chomp. A definitive chomp. A chomp that brings silence.

It’s not always biting. Sometimes it’s a swift punt through a window, or blunt-force trauma, or—worst of all—a three-step scheme involving a barbecue. I don’t like thinking these things, but something about that baby’s cries has a direct line to the darkest parts of my soul.

I’m probably just projecting, but it really sounds like the damned infant is positively indignant. No one has as large a sense of entitlement as a baby. It might be a single hair in its diaper, or else a toy dropped just out of reach of its useless arms. But to hear it go on, you’d think the apocalypse was at our doorstep. I just can’t take the melodrama!

I know, I know, that’s just how babies are. Everyone was a baby once, etc. etc. And it just goes to show that our parents deserve our respect, if for no other reason than not murdering us after the first diaper change.

I’m not evil, really. Things get better the closer babies get to the age of two. Sure, new problems come up, but at least the child starts to look like a real child instead of a disgruntled Republican Party backer, and the tantrums develop at least some discernible logic.

Toddlers are the heartbreakingly adorable Gyarados to the infant Magikarp: the trick—and the trial—is in staying with the floppy, useless thing to level 20.

I know I’m not alone in my deranged baby-desecration fantasies, and I would never act on them. But they do contain an awful grain of truth. It takes a village to raise a child, and to not murder it at three in the morning.

–Graeme Shorten Adams, Graphics editor