the new black

So it seems d.w. and I are being trendy having a kid. Last year it was chihuahuas. This year, apparently, progeny are the new black. The Times put it this way:

Five hundred or so years from now, graduate students surveying our national library will wonder: So what was with all the mommies and babies? Had babies come before? Or was it simply that millennial Americans produced better babies, power babies (maybe)? Darwinian in their thinking, such students might then presume that yes, that must be it, having deduced from the [new parenting] literature that only the very smart and directed — the women on their way to running Lehman Brothers or the Centers for Disease Control,  if but for swaddling cloth — were the ones bothering to have babies at all.

And to think d.w. and I got here because I said something along the lines of, "Oh, come on, we don't have anything to worry about, you can't possibly get pregnant right after a miscarriage..."

I hate to think that people are so fashion-conscious that when a baby becomes the season's must-have accessory, they go right out and get knocked up. Not a good scene for mom, dad, or (especially) baby. My guess is that it is more of a pop-culture manifestation of the Baby Shower Effect, or BSE, an affliction of the pituitary gland that overrides the body's natural tendency toward logic and reason, and creates gibbering, baby-obsessed lunatics out of otherwise normal human beings when they come in contact with pregnant women and infants. The spread of BSE is normally contained by the limited guest lists of most baby showers. However, when people in supermarket checkout lines are inundated with images of impossibly beautiful people and their impossibly beautiful offspring, an epidemic of BSE becomes inevitable.

At least that's my theory.

Incidentally, BSE is also the acronym for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, a similar disorder more commonly known as "mad cow" disease. Someone really should look into this.

Comments

[the weirdgirl]

Hilarious post! There does seem to be babies everywhere lately. I figure it might be our generation's version of the baby boom.