Have you heard of the “terrible twos?” My daughter Hazel is a few months past her second birthday, and, personally, I think this time should be renamed the “beautiful twos.”
Ha! Just kidding — it’s unbearable! One minute Hazel is saying “Daddy!” and spontaneously hugging my leg, but the next she’s throwing herself on the floor and screaming “I don’t want it!” because the piece of corn muffin I broke off for her is the wrong size. “I don’t want the little one! I want a big one! Nooooo!”
Don’t take this the wrong way. Most of the time I’m bowled over by how sweet she is, by how quickly she learns things, and how adorably she mangles the English language. Even her fits can be pretty funny. It’s just that her sudden swings into tantrum-land give me terrifying flashbacks to the days when she was an infant — to those nerve-piercing episodes when tiny Hazel was screaming endlessly and I had to fight a heroic battle in my head to beat back the voice asking me, “Why are you doing any of this? You could be playing golf right now.” And I hate golf, so you can see how dire things must have been.
The other day, as Hazel was crying on the floor and I was reminiscing about those traumatic early days of parenting, I found myself wondering why infants take crying to such absurd lengths. I mean, from a Darwinian perspective, what good does it do to torture your parents by shrieking for hours on end? The conclusion I’ve come to is that Darwin didn’t know what he was talking about.
I’m sorry, let me back up a bit: have you heard of this Darwin guy? Back in the “Olden Days” (that was the historical era before the internet and Starbucks) a scientifically inclined fellow named Charles Darwin developed a theory called “Natural Selection,” which suggests that whichever variant of a plant or animal is best suited to its environs — due to its coloring, temperament, number of eyes or what-have-you — will have the best chance to thrive and further its species. Hence, an insect that happens to resemble a leaf or a twig will better survive in an environment full of carnivorous predators than will its cousin-insect that looks like a cheeseburger. That’s why nowadays there are still plenty of green grasshoppers that blend into their leafy surroundings — but when was the last time you saw a beetle that looked like a Big Mac?
Sounds like this Darwin character was on to something, right? Well then, how do you explain human babies? At birth, little tiny humans are not equipped to handle much of anything. They can’t walk like other newborn mammals. They have to rely on the adult humans for everything, so you’d think evolution would result in the flourishing of human babies who don’t cry so incessantly that they cause their frazzled parents to seek relief by jumping off the nearest cliff. If this whole evolution thing has any merit, then shouldn’t babies be much more well-adjusted by now?
Forget about “natural” selection for a minute. Throughout history, humanity itself has devised ways of selecting its own evolution. Take the ancient Spartans. They fancied themselves the toughest of human beings, and the auditions to become a new Spartan were pretty ruthless — any newborns who were sickly or feeble or otherwise subpar were taken away and left on a mountainside to die. Now, the Spartans were ancient Greeks, who were supposed to be pretty enlightened. I hate to imagine what went on in the less-civilized parts of the world back then. It seems like this trait of excessive crying would’ve been “selected” out somewhere along the line, whether by natural means or otherwise.
So tell me, Mr. Darwin, how do you explain the fact that we’re even still here, when all the babies of our species are clearly engineered to make their parents lose their minds? Shouldn’t humans be extinct by now?
As a relatively new parent, I realize that I have a baby-centric perspective on just about everything, so maybe I need to take a broader view of this “survival of the fittest” idea. Maybe it’s not just babies who need to be tough. Maybe the purpose of all that screaming is to weed out weak parents.
In my worst moments in those not-so-long-ago days as the parent of a newborn, there were times when the vicious cocktail of sleep deprivation and the endless wailing of an infant gave me the urge to seek out the nearest desolate mountainside. And yet, I didn’t. Why? Well, it could be that evolution has made me just strong enough to handle that stuff.
Recently my wife and I took Hazel on a road trip to visit a goat farm. After driving for several hours on the highways and scenic country roads of upstate New York, we arrived and parked the car. Hazel, however, wanted nothing to do with the goats. As we approached the big red barn, she threw herself down onto the dusty gravel driveway, screaming: “I don’t like it! I don’t wanna go inna farm! Nooooo!” Fortunately, she loved playing on the tractor that was parked around back, so the trip wasn’t a total waste.
Looking back on episodes like that, I can be happy that I have a willful and assertive child who will surely shape me into a strong and well-evolved parent. And for the record, those abandoned Spartan babies weren’t always fated to a cruel demise. Reportedly, many of them were found and rescued by passing strangers — especially the ones who screamed the loudest.
Tim Perrins is a part-time stay-at-home dad who lives with his wife and their highly selective toddler in Park Slope, Brooklyn. More of his thoughts about babies and other things that confuse him can be found at www.RevoltOfTheImbeciles.blogspot.com.
