I was watching a movie that wasn’t very good, but it featured a small baby, goo-gooing, and chewing its fists and being adorable.  And I thought, “You know, Robbie was a total pain in the ass”. 

         First he had colic.  He cried ALL THE TIME unless he was asleep or nursing.  Everyone told me, just put him down and let him yell.  Ignore him.  Yeah, right.  The child was being murdered by unknown forces right in front of me.  Just because I couldn’t see them he obviously could. 

         A new theory of colic: invisible aliens pinching the baby to see if they can drive the mother nuts.  I actually think there was a Star Trek: Voyager episode like that…

         Once the colic had run its course, we had the ADHD.  The kid was a superball.  Never still.  Never kept his hands to himself.  Grabby little monster. 

         If an adult was demonstrating, oh say, dissecting a cow’s eye at the museum, he wanted an eye of his own.  No eye available, he would try to get his hands on the one being used. 

         Now, he was, and is smart.  I think that was part of the problem.  There is was, ready to build a cold fusion reactor, and all his chubby little hands were capable of was ripping Bereinstain Bears Books to shreds. 

         He wanted things NOW he wanted them RIGHT NOW and he wanted them HIS WAY.  That may work for certain GOP presidential candidates.  For a two-year-old, not so much.

         And other children are perfect. All of them.  All the time.  One wonders what the principal at Robbie’s school did when Robbie wasn’t around.  Because according to these self-same mothers, no one else was EVER called into the office.  No other mother was EVER telephoned at work to get down there five minutes ago because there had been An Incident. 

         What did these mothers do that I failed at?  Were their invisible aliens benign, and mine were vindictive? 

Nah, obviously they were perfect as well.  They ate non-GMO, organic, picked-by-serene-Buddhists foods when they were pregnant.  They spent their entire pregnancy sitting in a pink room reading free verse with Mozart on the stereo.  They did not backpack when they were 8 months along and fall off a cliff.  Or attend graduate school while enceinte and stress out when the computer program they were writing almost crashed the entire ASU system.  When the TA said that nothing we did in class could hurt the computer, he lied. 

So obviously everything that went wrong in my pregnancy was my fault, and resulted in this child.  Who is gutsy, and independent, and wicked smart, and yeah, still a pain in the ass.  But he is not boring.