I remember well the feeling of being really sick and taking care of a baby, small children – when you’ve got the flu and are too pestilent and achy and exhausted to move, it does indeed feel impossible: the little ones’ routines with their painstaking successions of trivial yet gravely consequential tasks, ad infinitum snack prep and juice dose, toy recon and bath admin, all the motion and wrangling and crisis management, the ceaseless vigilance and perpetual disarray, your newfound fervour for sleep.
You realize why having a big extended family around makes so much sense – it’s really not a one- or two-person job. How frustrating in these ostensibly comfortable and abundant times that so many of us yet abide that most wearying deficiency – a critical absence of nearby kin. Our people are all back East, out West, down South, up North, some are overseas – and nowadays we find ourselves out of reach and unrelieved, marginally self-sufficient yet spun asunder by the dizzying tedium of early parenthood.
I feel it is only inevitable, as every family subsides to diaspora and daily life is subsumed by fiddlesome gadgetry, that women’s bodies will evolve to grow an extra set of arms during pregnancy. It’s the only biologically rational response to modern motherhood. Maternity tops one day will have four armholes and there will be no end to the confusing advice for pregnant women about everything from throwing a frisbee to putting on a seatbelt to not constantly smacking a funny bone. A formal anatomical designation would be something like lesser medial antepartum/partum forelimbs (people would just call them “marms”), and they’d eventually fall off a few years after the baby is weaned.
I used to think it was a missed opportunity on the part of nature that this doesn’t happen, but then dealing with everything ourselves is a relatively new phenomenon: we now unfurl across ancestrally unbridgeable distances, find work and habitation, settle fondly in nodes of nuclear autonomy that will one day each unfurl anew. So I guess we should give it time – there is the incomprehensibly vast continuum of evolution to consider, and this scenario has only emerged in its latest glimmer of nanosecond. Maybe one day years and years from now, our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren may finally be well enough isolated that our genome’s best bet for survival is a handy doubling of the maternal arm.
It's also possible that our disassociation from one another and the ludicrous overwhelm of modern life will eventually render us entirely incapable of infant care and child rearing; soon a kind of gestational overdrive adaptation will kick in, and we’ll wind up as a species bearing perfectly invulnerable young that exit the womb in the same state of development as today’s average 24-year-old. They’ll be competent and enthusiastic from moment one, singularly revolutionary in all that they do. They will drive us home from the hospital, nurse us through our postpartum convalescence with cups of instant ramen, lull us to sleep with breathless accounts of their weekend revelry.
They’ll begin looking for work, the job market will be cutthroat and demoralizing, and then late one night they’ll stumble upon something gripping and irrefutable, a theme that rewrites the story of their lives. Bildungsroman is become Manifesto: an arresting translation of history’s shifty fine print, the final revelation of bullshit everywhere. They will devote their energies to grand pyrotechnical feats: torching our institutions, incinerating our armies of straw men, minting new currencies from the tarnished trophies of our myriad pyrrhic victories. Only two weeks old, our newborns will pledge to undo a host of our generational sins; they will see to the end of fast fashion, industrial farming, gun death, televangelism, light pollution, celebrity skincare, and more!
We will never need to potty train them or puree their food or keep them away from things like batteries and plastic bags and light sockets. They’ll stay for about a month and then move out to fulfil their ambitions and unmake our mess. And the nest will at last be empty again.
