If you’ve been dog parents all your life and then suddenly become human parents you’re in for a shock.
You might think: ‘Surely having a baby is like having dogs; just a hundred times more difficult and involving.” And I don’t blame you for holding this opinion. I did too. It’s tempting to group these two things in the same ballpark of ‘love and take care of something that is dependent on you.’ But you would be wrong.
Having a baby is nothing like having dogs. I repeat. Nothing.
First there’s the sleep thing: dogs sleep when they’re sleepy. Babies, for some reason, don’t. In fact, quite the opposite: when they’re sleepy they get upset. And then you have to put them to sleep.
Then there’s the problem of attention. A dog is easily satisfied - it is a simple creature, fascinated by simple phenomena. And the type of phenomena hardly ever changes throughout a dog’s life (unless weighed down by old age or illness).
A baby’s passions change in a matter of days. Our baby boy was seemingly in love with curtains and other hanging fabrics for the first 10 days of his 2nd month on this planet. These clothes, towels, and other motley textiles never failed to get a smile out him - but now these same rags aren’t worthy of even a moment’s attention. Instead a specifically blue kind of light is his new great love, drawing smiles in the midst of scream-crying hunger tantrums. (Update: That poor light’s cerulean hue is now just another used and discarded fragment of reality that has served its purpose).
The sheer rate of change is astonishing and if you’re used to dogs it can be startling at first. Creative solutions to entertain and soothe have to be conjectured on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.
In other words, being a parent challenged not only your time management and your sleep cycle but also your creativity and creativity as most people know, is hard.
All the differences between babies and dogs comes down to the difference between animals and humans. Animals have a fixed set of types of behaviours, determined by their genes. This means one can observe the behaviour of an animal and determine what it wants and doesn’t want fairly easily and with a large degree of confidence. Humans on the other hand are not determined by their genes: our genetic programming is constantly being interrupted, tempered, heightened or ignored by our culture, by the memes that float around in our heads, by our imagination, by our dreams.
This key difference makes babies hard to understand. Since the baby has not learned language yet there is no way of knowing exactly what is going on in the baby’s mind. It’s behaviour is not refined enough to communicate either. So parents have to guess.
Sometimes your guess is wrong and your baby screams like he’s in pain. Or maybe he is in pain. In that case did you get it wrong or were you right? But now baby is calm and his eyes are half-closed. Ah, so he was sleepy. Or is he just exhausted of crying out of hunger?
Slowly, communication improves between you and your child. Both parties learn how to get what they want. Parents learn how to get baby-free time and baby learns how to get food or sleep or a diaper change.
This kind of two-way communication doesn’t happen with dogs. Very early on, dogs learn cues and tones and stick to it for their entire lives. Once in 2014 there was a mouse in our kitchen cabinet. Now, in 2021, when we say ‘Where’s the rat?’ with a little action in our voice, our two Cocker Spaniels rush around, nose in cupboards, hot-feet dancing, tiny tails wagging rapidly. They don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing: they just do it because they’re responding to a stimulus.
In this thoughtlessness, there is a purity, an earnestness and an honesty that we find refreshing and appealing. It is such a desirable contrast to what we feel are the ulterior motives, the cunning and artifice and selfishness of human beings. Dogs aren’t trying to work you, they’re not judging you, they’re not holding grudges.
Which is why it’s not surprising that some people feel that it’s ‘enough’ to have dogs and that they’re a suitable replacement to having children, with all the positives and none of the negatives.
Of course, this is wrong. Dogs can’t replace babies just like babies can’t replace dogs. So what is this whole piece about if I’m just going to leave you with this lukewarm conclusion? I won’t.
Let me give you with one illustration of why, after just 3 and half months of being a parent, I cannot help but feel that if it really comes down to it, there is really no comparison between babies and dogs. Let me be clear: I love dogs. Our dogs have given me much joy and companionship for the last 8 years and I am grateful for having known them.
But this is the difference: when your baby looks up from his crib, dressed in a banana-print, yellow and white onesie that his mother has specifically chosen, his hair oiled neatly to the side, large forehead crinkled slightly in warning of an oncoming cry, and he sees you standing over looking at him, his eyes meet yours and his face lights up in a startling, coruscating, shimmering, sparkling, magical smile, a deep, conscious and unconscious, wholesome, life-giving, bad-mood extirpating feeling of pure, gurgling joy rises from a depth in your heart that you never knew existed, you know that this is different. This is not normal. This is not joy, or happiness or fun or satisfaction. These words seem to capture too little of the factor of time. They seem insignificantly momentary. This is something much, much more. This is something that alters the darkness of your past, lightening the tone and and trivializing the content of weights and baggages that you’ve carried all your life.
So we have a winner: baby. And now I’m going to go bury my face in our fattest dog’s fur and have a good cry.
Very Interesting Topic...