Your sadness sustains me!

My three-month old son laughed for the first time last night. It was a magical little cackle that would melt the iciest heart. And I, his doting mother, is the one who made him burst out in adorable giggles. How? By showing him what I look like when I cry.

What a dick, right? (Him, not me. I’m SUPER nice.)

Yeah, he was sticking out his lower lip, looking like he was about to cry so I mimicked his facial expression. I stuck out my lip, furrowed my brow and put on my saddest sad face.  And my son found it hysterical.

Heathens. I’m raising socially inept heathens.

I know he’s just a baby and that he probably hasn’t developed empathy yet so laughing at my sad face isn’t anything more than a child finding humor in something unusual. My face. My unusual face.

I’m not feeling better yet.

It wasn’t the first time one of my children found great amusement in my pain, pretend or otherwise. My daughter’s favorite thing to laugh at as a baby was me smacking myself in the head. You might ask why I would do that in the first place…

Uh… ’cause it made her laugh, that’s why. Duh.

And because I am a person who bases her self-worth on making people laugh… at any cost.

So my first child was amused by me hurting myself.

My second child, a son, made a game out of trying to get me to fall down the stairs. He upped the ante. He never fully succeeded but I’m pretty sure he is still plotting for the perfect “Stewie-Kills-Lois” scenario.

His second favorite game was the childhood equivalent to “The Game” in the movie Waiting. I’d be in the kitchen, turn around, and BAM! He’s be buck-assed-naked, wagging his dangle bits around for me to see. I’d struggle to be the competent, new age parent who doesn’t instill a knee jerk disgust when seeing the naked human form so when my child grows up, he will not view his body as shameful… But in hind-sight, maybe that’s just a thing for girls… Maybe with boys it creates super-no-inhibition boys who wag their dongs at passing strangers. Maybe this is how pedophiles are made. Well, we’ll cross that bridge to the prison when we come to it. Right now I’m doing the best I can…

Okay, so I think we’ve established how fucked my first two kids are/will be. Child three, my second son, I will try to remain optimistic. He enjoys emotions so perhaps he is not autistic or a sociopath. (Not that I am lumping those two categories together! Please don’t think I’m an insensitive twat. Just a normal twat, thankyouverymuch.) So other people’s sadness makes him laugh. So what? I laugh when people fall down all the time! I also laugh when I fall down. And, to be SUPER optimistic, maybe he could tell I was faking my sadness. Maybe he’s just that astute at 3 months old that he can decipher a false emotion from a real one. Maybe he’s a baby genius bullshit detector!

Or maybe he is already showing signs of being more like me than I realize.

My kids are so screwed…