Your Father's Deepest, Darkest Secret...

Dear Ellie,

I have a deep, dark secret to tell you…  Are you ready?  Here it goes…

I despise babies.  Yeah.  There it is.  Don't take it too personally.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love kids.  If they are older than 2 years old, I am every child’s fun uncle.  It’s just babies… ugh. 

I know.  It’s terrible.  But in all fairness, I’m pretty sure they despised me first.  No matter how calm and serene their disposition might be, it very quickly changes as soon as they look at me.  Changes to fright and terror.  To tears and snot and gargling wails.  But why?  On what grounds do they assume I’m going to steal them from their mothers or eat them?  Okay, I don’t shave all that often and to their bleary, tear-filled eyes I probably look like some kind of furry predator, but that’s hardly grounds for prejudice. 

Keep in mind, my distaste for babies goes beyond mere emotional retaliation for how THEY feel about ME.  After all, babies are the ultimate manifestation of greed and selfishness.  “Feed me.  Change me.  Feed me again,” they wail, “Oh and to thank you for all of that labor, I think I’ll keep you up at inopportune hours of the night and reserve an extra salvo of pee and poo specifically for the moment you take off my diaper!” 

See my point, Ellie?  Pure.  Evil.  And just look at them!  Fat and drooling like Jabba the Hut.  I’m certain that if nature had not implanted the impulse in our brain to perceive babies as cute, we would all decide to have nothing to do with them.  We human adults would easily see past their sinister plots and leave them to their devices.

But you, Ellie?  Well… I haven’t made up my mind about you yet...  You are different than the rest of them.  You are so tiny.  A proto-baby, really.  You look lean like a wise old man, not jiggly and bloated.  Your eyes don’t gaze blankly into space.  Instead, they are closed, as though they are looking inward.  You appear contemplative, like a meditating Buddhist monk. 

There is one thing, however, that you don’t do like other babies that I wish you did.  A thing that I never, ever thought I’d miss.  You can't cry.