I wish I was a Vulcan. Cool. Dispassionate. Not given to emotions. Logical. Awesome pointy ears. I know I'm a girl, and that's precisely why I want to be Vulcan. Have you ever broke down crying when your boss yells at you? Being a girl can suck.
I've noticed a new wave of emotions since having a baby. It could be hormonal, I suppose. I had normal girl hormones before and pregnancy is like adding five new ingredients, turning up the heat, and stirring the pot rapidly. Childbirth is where that mixture explodes and your body and hormones may be similar to the ones you had before, or you may carry an eternal aversion to vinegar and a higher propensity to get canker sores and cavities. I'm still sorting out the damage. (Men. Be thankful you are men.)
So I'm not sure if my body is trying to kick start back into normal gear and keeps hitting me with these random emotional spikes, or I am the new owner of a set of supercharged mom emotions, but I keep crying over the littlest things.
I went and watched the Warcraft movie within a few weeks of Genevieve's birth. It's a high fantasy movie based on the high fantasy computer game World of Warcraft. So there are orcs, but they aren't Tolkien's orcs. They do tend to be violent and bloodthirsty, but they are a strong tribal society valuing family and clan and the honor of a good fight. One of the orcs is pregnant and her and her husband go with an invading force, and when they turn against the wrong of their fellow orcs, both her and her husband are killed. The baby, still very young, was in a basket on his mother's back, and, Moses-style, he is cast into the river to save him. And he makes all these little baby noises that I knew now being a new mom and I almost started crying in the theater.
I heard a story of missionaries in China during the Boxer rebellion and when they came for them, the mother hid her six-month-old daughter with a note on her explaining what had happened, went out, and was executed. The baby was found alive two days later, but I cried thinking of the baby all alone, nobody to hear her cries or feed her or change her diaper.
I got mad watching Maleficent and seeing the incompetent pixies give the baby princess carrots to eat by plopping them in her bassinet and then all sleeping that night, deaf to her cries of hunger. FEED THE BABY!
This happens with startling frequency. A baby lives in my heart and so my heart bleeds for babies. I already had this weird protective streak that although I didn't want children for the longest time, something would stir in me whenever I heard of them being hurt or abused or their innocence stolen and childhood ended long before they actually grew up. It's a noble sentiment, but I hate breaking into uncontrollable tears. I hate crying. I hate the weakness of emotions.
So the thing that set me off yesterday and continues to make me cry whenever I relate it to anyone was a stupid .gif on Facebook that was clearly meant to be funny. You could say it "triggered" me. It looks like and old-style painting of a woman stirring her pot on a stove. She moves like a paper doll and lifts her spoon out of the pot. And then, out of the pot, comes a little hand, chubby, fingers spread, reaching, searching. The women then uses her spoon to poke the hand back in the pot.
I stared in shock as the .gif replayed, the hand continuing to reach, the woman continuing to cook. It is supposed to be funny, I tried to tell myself. A woman cooking a baby is supposed to be funny. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. I know I have a problem with over-analyzing everything, but HOW is this funny? Is it the flagrant disrespect for human life that is in imagining a helpless infant being literally cooked alive? Is the baby reaching out for help, or are we pretending that the baby is actually somehow fine despite the flames under the pot and the baby is just reaching playfully? How many times has my own baby lifted her chubby little hand, fingers spread, to my face to touch it?
Every time I've recounted my horror at this .gif, I've started crying. I'm crying now. It makes me want to cry out to God for forgiveness for our country as we've allowed ourselves to forget that babies, even ones not yet born, are lives, souls, people.
Bah. I hate crying. Even when the situation seems to deserve it.
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