Darwin did this to me

If you kick your sister in the face then you have to give back the book you yanked out of her hands. This is not a complex or debatable point. Like any sudden confrontation with one of the occasional moral certainties in our universe, this sets off tears and wailing. And somehow I’m the one who ends up feeling guilty. My three year old lies on the hallway floor, face streaked from crying, and bangs on the bedroom door with one hand, screaming “I need that book! I need it!” In the face of this absurd and self-absorbed display I felt bad for the little monster. I admit, not proudly, that for a moment I also resented my older daughter for having the poor judgment to be reading a book my younger daughter turned out to want, and to be lying down with her face in a kickable place. Why couldn’t she have just anticipated her sister’s wants beforehand and then catered to them? Is that really too much to ask?

Before I had children I had a reflex to treat all evolutionary and genetic explanations of behavior with skepticism and scorn. Now they’re on my mind all the time. One possible evolutionary benefit to having a parent feel guilty when their child cries is that the parent takes steps to placate the child. If this occurs at the expense of another child, well, the one with the cry that most brings on the ‘anything you need to ease your sobbing’ response gets the food and shelter and the other gets bred out of the gene pool. As a result someday humanity would become a species of insufferable whiners whose demands are catered to no matter how irrational or at what cost to other people’s well-being. That’s what I imagine it’s like being very wealthy, and it sounds awesome. If only I had the right genes for it.

I think part of the new appeal of the genetic explanation for me is that I desperately want for my children’s obnoxious behavior to not be my fault. Likewise for my terrible personality. I don’t choose to be like this, I just have the wrong genetic material. Maybe it’s your fault for not appreciating that what seem to be flaws are survival enhancing adaptations that nature selected for.

Then again, if I excuse the failings of my character and shrug off how difficult my kids are by a vulgar darwinist ‘we have survived therefore these traits must be adaptations’ then somewhere in there is the implication that I should have even more kids (if that seems like flawed reasoning, all I can say is that it’s gotten me this far, so don’t blame me, take it up with evolution), which would mean even more parenting. More being tired all the time. More dealing with irrational small animals who use big words but don’t understand that you don’t throw the book at your sister’s head when you’re angry. More never socializing with adults. More worrying about my kids’ future, and their present. More feeling constantly inadequate. The ‘reasons not to’ column is full with these and others.

The other column is mostly empty, except that babies are so cute. I was firmly convinced that stopping was the right call but now that my little baby is big enough to wail on my slightly bigger baby and then sob that she doesn’t get to keep the stuff she pillaged, my conviction is wavering. I know that’s insane but knowing that doesn’t reduce the wavering. This too is arguably evolutionarily adaptive, though it’s not an adaptation that’s individually beneficial. I have a hazy sense that it could be possible to write something here analogous to the book of Job in the bible, replacing God with Darwin, but fuck it. I can’t remember the details other than the fact of suffering and the irrationality of evolution. Parenting embodies both. But, like, baby hair is so soft and nice to smell.