Reptile Mom

I can remember breastfeeding Silas when he was about four weeks old, cuddling his warm little body close to mine, and thinking idly about what would happen if I just stashed him in the freezer. Later in the afternoon, Peter would come home from his walk, shrug off his jacket and turn to me with a loving grin, asking, “Where’s the baby?”

“What baby?” I’d respond, engrossed in my book.

An hour would pass. Maybe two. Then, after awhile, I’d look up, smack my lips expectantly and say, “Could I get a snack? I think there's some ice cream in the freezer.”

The resulting horror show, of course, would send shivers up my spine. For awhile I worried that I was losing my mind, that these ghoulish fantasies were the result of a profound personality disorder. But in retrospect, I think I was just being a good mom.

It’s not that the sick little movies have stopped. They haven’t. Take the baby out for a walk, and my brain flashes images of a speeding car and a mangled stroller. Pass an angry-looking dog on the street, and I wonder what life will be like for my son with no arms and a chewed-up stump for a leg. Push him on the swings, and I imagine pushing just a little too hard, his plump, eighteen month-old body hurtling across the playground like an errant football.

A mother loves her baby with a deeply primitive, reptile love. There have been shady-looking strangers who checked into our backpackers, with missing teeth and shifty eyes, and I found myself considering how easy it would be to claw out their eyeballs with my bare hands. Now I understand that the movies in my head are a constant scan for danger, a way for my imagination to detect and head off any potential threat before it even begins to make trouble.

And now, in a few short weeks, we are planning to move our baby on a fiberglass boat and sail him through eleven hundred miles of open sea. Reptile Mom, as you can imagine, is having a field day. The fears, though they number in the zillions, can be roughly organized into the following categories:

1. WAYS YOUR BABY CAN DROWN TO DEATH

a) You can sink the boat,
b) The baby can fall off the boat,
c) A freighter can hit the boat, causing both a) and b) to occur simultaneously,
d) You can be struck by rogue waves, waterspouts, tsunamis, maelstroms, riptides, and/or the Ire of Poseidon.

2. WAYS YOUR BABY CAN BE EATEN ALIVE AND/OR POISONED BY VARIOUS TROPICAL ANIMALS

Such animals include, but are not limited to:
a) Sharks (various species),
b) Giant squid with really gross tentacles,
c) Rabid dogs,
d) Deadly sea snakes,
e) Venomous centipedes (I’m not kidding. They have them in Fiji.)

3. WAYS YOUR BABY CAN DIE OF SICKNESS AND/OR MALNUTRITION

a) Eating tainted food (including but not limited to: Hepatitis A, E. Coli, and Salmonella),
b) Eating brain-eating worms, (See related post)
c) Eating paint flecks, underwater epoxy, and/or fiberglass (with or without acetone),
d) Eating Spam.

4. MISCELLANEOUS THREATS

a) Being brained by a hard object down below,
b) Being roughly detained by the Fijian military dictatorship,
c) Sunburn and dehydration,
d) Falling coconuts,
e) Pirates.

But I’m looking on the bright side. We have no refrigerator on board, so it’s very unlikely I will freeze our baby. The chances of getting hit by a car while at sea are exceptionally remote. And if a shark tries to lunge at my little boy?

Well, then it will have to tangle with Reptile Mom. And I’ll kick its fucking ass.