Oh, Baby, a Sweet Bit of Revenge
I am so embarrassed.
For years, whenever I said I didn’t really like kids and didn’t want to have any, they all said, with the wisdom of the ages in their voices, “You wait. You’ll change your mind when you have one of your own.”
Gosh, everybody, you were right.
I sit here looking at my own little blue-eyed guy, at his pudgy little legs and his dimpled elbows, and I just wonder, why didn’t I get him sooner?
I mean, he only cost me about 10 bucks.
(Pause for cries of outrage.)
Let’s cut to the chase here. I lied. The bio-clock isn’t just ticking, it’s moving down toward T-minus nothing, and, read my lips, I still don’t want kids. There are plenty of them around already--too many--and mercifully, none of them are mine. My idea of easy childbirth is to wake me when the kid’s in military school.
What I want is revenge .
* On the people who bring their kids to the office on holidays, when they tear pages off my daily calendar, upchuck in the Xerox room and crawl under the walls of the toilet stalls when I’m in one.
* For the money I’ve shelled out on endless baby shower gifts. When a woman who ordinarily wears Dior suits with lapels that could slice redwoods suddenly comes into work wearing something fluffy with smocking on it, I just know I’m looking at another 30 bucks.
* For going into my ob-gyn’s office for a check-up--and birth control--and finding nothing to read but baby magazines that smell like old spilled formula.
* For “Baby on Board” signs until I want to scream. What am I, some psychotic Mario Andretti who’ll be reduced to sentimental pulp and 20 miles an hour by the sight of one of those signs?
* For all those restaurants, planes and movies where, no matter how much you maneuver or make reservations four months ahead, you get the stereo squallings of some whelp whose parents think it’s never too soon to inculcate an appreciation for fine food, especially when it’s thrown rather than eaten.
* For all those parties that start out so well, then deteriorate into little knots of people who look as if they’re telling good dirty jokes but are actually comparing notes on the color and consistency of baby excrement. Whoever sent me the cartoon now hanging on my desk, thank you. “Why no,” the woman is telling a pair of friends. “I don’t want to hear what the baby did.”
That’s why I got my baby, the one sitting right here beside me as I write.
I knew he was for me the moment I saw him. “Instant infant,” the advertisement promised. A flawless cardboard replica of a baby of, what, 4 months? He’s got a couple of front teeth. (Now I’ll get heaps of mail from people who date their babies to the nanosecond: “Yes, he’s 16 months, 4 days and 11 minutes old. We’re going to keep the party small.”)
The instructions said he was “absolutely adorable, not an ounce of work, zero chaos, a real gentleman.” (That’s how I knew he was a boy.) At the suggestion of one of my students, I named him Rupert Murdoch, after the newspaper magnate who pioneered bare breasts and thin journalism. The kid is, after all, topless and two-dimensional.
Little Rupert Murdoch Morrison is going to go everywhere with me. (He fits in my briefcase; I measured.) I will extol his virtues endlessly. Anything your kid does, Rupert will have done better. He will read earlier, walk taller, excrete more excrement. Rupert will be eating the olives out of martinis in a month.
In London, where I found him (5.99 including tax and diaper), I carried him home under my arm, and several people stopped me to ask where I had found him--a very forward act for a Londoner, who would insist on being introduced before he would tell you your coat was on fire.
If they pressed past my initial answer--”the black market”--I told them the name of the shop. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” said one man. “My daughter will love it. She can’t stand kids.”
She doesn’t have to. This guy stands all by himself. That’s what the little cardboard easel is for.
I told you he was a genius.
