The red pill

A good friend of mine recently had her first baby and sent me an email today thanking me for being so excited for her, as if it was an emotion I mustered up on her behalf to keep her afloat.  She is very much still in the post-partum, sleep-deprived haze of a first-born one-month-old and will get to a point when she realizes that I actually really do want to hear about how she managed to get all the way to the grocery store and back without any vomit on her shirt, but it got me thinking about why it is I cannot help but get so giddy over my friends' offspring.

Perhaps it's because I know what they have in store.  

Tonight, when I got home late from my meeting and went back into the kids room to kiss them goodnight, they were still awake. You'd have thought Elmo himself wearing a sweater of Hot n' Nows just walked in
their room by the expressions on their faces. We laid on the bed for over an hour and I was told about the unhealthy but obvious man-dinner Daddy provided (which Matilda will neither confirm nor deny but from what I could gather consisted of roasted flour tortillas that puffed up into "balloons," purple mac n cheese, and "so so much milk my belly sloshed in a bad way.")  I was also informed that Jackson is no longer a fan of cats, which is why Caroline was meowing and hissing periodically, and that putting one's nose in one's bottom is a bad idea. 

Becoming a parent is like choosing the red pill. You are suddenly thrown into a reality that anyone still in the fabricated reality of the Matrix cannot possibly understand or appreciate. It is overwhelmingly exciting to have a good friend cross over, if for no other reason than to commiserate on how incredibly inept our children can make us feel.  It doesn't hurt to share in their hilarious approach to the world, either.