Outside of the In-Crowd – Wedding Ebola 2: THE BABIES ARE COMING

Courtney Enlow

… in the night. While you sleep.

As part what is now an ongoing educational series for Outside of the In-Crowd, there is a new Ebola in town. And this time, it’s personal. In fact, this infestation is so terrifying that I couldn’t even bring myself to make the title “Wedding Ebola 2: Electric Boogaloo” and lord knows I seek out ways to inject that into my sentences at least twice daily. Because I don’t want to associate something wonderful with something horrifying.

Yes, babies. EVERYWHERE. And I am not being remotely over the top when I say that they will kill us all. Oh yes. Did you see It’s Alive? Yeah it’s going to be a lot like that, I’m certain.

As you can see, I have a slight phobia. Not of babies themselves, really. I love babies. Babies are super. I myself have known many. I have a younger brother who was a baby for awhile, and roughly four hundred cousins, all of whom were babies. Some of them still are even, and I love each and every one of them. No, babies themselves are not the issue here.

It’s the having them.

Look, I don’t know if you know much about childbirth, but even its Wikipedia page is straight up nightmare juice. It’s like a novelization of Texas Chainsaw. It involves blood and fluids and rippings and tearings and engorgements and it’s all very John Hurt and I don’t like it.

You know what else is scary? Fetuses. Even before they come out they’re terrifying. They look like the star-child at the end of 2001. And the doctors take their picture and they don’t look at the sono-cam (not its technical name probably). I don’t trust people who don’t look at the camera when you take their photo. It makes them look like they’re plotting. They’re plotting parasites that live in your body, eat your food, make you fat, turn your breasts into cartoonishly giant milk kegs and I’m not certain that they can’t hear your thoughts.

And once their born, they take over your life. They cry and refuse to sleep normal human Earth hours. And you have to teach them how to be people. That’s scary. I’m not even sure how to be a person, I can’t teach a tiny creature to be human too; I’m not equipped.

You’re screwed either way. If you have a girl-baby, it could grow up to be a slut, then you’d have to lock it up till its 40. If you have a boy-baby, it could be a cheating pig bastard, then you’d have to lock it up till it’s 40. Either way, you’ll have to invest in home design that includes at least two small dungeon-type rooms with reasonable access to sunlight and cable, and in these harsh economic times, who can afford that?

You’d think all these things would frighten any thinking woman enough to get her biological clock surgically removed. But apparently it doesn’t. And the menfolk are no help, as they apparently lack the cognitive ability to think of anything beyond “tiny replica of self who will play football and replace all ‘r’ sounds with ‘w’ until an acceptable age, which is cute and awesome.”

I don’t think it’s awesome. I think it’s a tiny punishment for bad dirty sexual intercourse that will ruin my life and force me to stop swearing with reckless abandon.

So you’ll see, I’m not so much ready for the motherhood. But apparently, everyone else in the world is. Nearly every celebrity is pregnant right now, and the ones that aren’t are under constant “baby bump” scrutiny every time they eat a quesadilla or miss a coke bump. A few Facebook friends have recently acquired sonogram pictures as their default (which I find akin to posting a picture of a routine dental x-ray, but hey, I don’t really have a soul). And those people I wrote about last time, the ones getting engaged and all that, they’ll probably be having babies before too long. It’s just too much.

When I think of babies, I think of loss. Loss of all the stuff I like to do (ie: watch television without being bothered) and loss of getting to hang out with my friends doing what we like to do (ie: watching Fear or The Crush and drinking wine without being bothered). I don’t want any part of that craziness.

But then I pass by Baby Gap. And bad things happen. Bad ovarian things and warmth and a facial contortion into an expression that can only be described by the words “awwww der li-uhl babieshh” and a very VERY slight and subtle longing that exists just enough to strike a diapered arrow of fear into my very soul.

My God. It’s started, hasn’t it?

This does not bode well for any of us.

Courtney Enlow is a writer living in Chicago and working as a corporate shill to pay the bills. You can contact her at courtney@hobotrashcan.com.