Baby Business

We went to our next pre-natal appointment and the registered nurse confirmed the existence of the other being by finding the fetal heartbeat. It was pretty neat. WHANG! WHANG! WHANG WHang...whang.... WHANG! WHANG! WHANG WHang...whang.... the kid wouldn't hold still long enough, apparently, for the nurse to get an accurate count of the heartbeat. "It's the pressure," the nurse explained, "the fetus is trying to get away from." Thereby re-affirming the truth of the old adage like parent, like kid: Stanley Hilarius doesn't like all this attention any more than I do.

While we stood at the appointment desk to schedule the next visit, a chiming sounded and the women behind the glass, in a display of excessive sentimentalism which immediately made my hair stand on end, all sighed in unison. Apparently the father of the very new child gets to inform the world of his achievement by pushing a button which rings this chime. Great. As if enough perfect strangers didn't know all about the impending birth. What happened to a woman's right to privacy? Wasn't that the crux of Roe v. Wade?

I had called ahead to confirm the time for the appointment and while the woman on the other end brought up the information, a soft bell could be heard in the background. "Oop!" the woman said, "A baby has just been born." "Really," I said, mostly to make polite conversation. Then a new mother and her newborn apparently stopped by the desk and the woman started cooing. She's beautiful, she said to the new mother. This of course is a complete lie. Babies are not beautiful. After they've been in the outside world long enough, they're cute in a funny looking way, but they're not beautiful. And newborns are just plain ugly. There's really no other way to describe them. They look like any other human who might have been sitting in water and in the dark for the past nine months and then squeezed through a small opening. It's just not the way we're supposed to live our natural lives, and while I admit that this is the way we all come into the world I rather think it's not so much the way it has to be as a matter of poorly thought out design on the part of some busy fertility deity who forgot to add the finishing touches. If newborns were meant to be beautiful, they wouldn't be waterlogged on delivery.

Still, the women who sit behind the glass at the OB are in the baby business, after all, and presumably they are in the baby business because they genuinely enjoy babies. Many of them probably think full grown humans leave something to be desired in the beauty arena. So perhaps I should forgive them for being more sentimental about this baby business than I could ever be.

Of course Stanley Hilarius will be a paragon of human beauty his/her entire life. That goes without saying.