Rage Baby

Newsletter 2024-12-30

Rage. It’s the purest human emotion. Who better to exhibit it than the purest form of human? My toddler niece is anger incarnate. She has a name, but I’ll call her Rage Baby here since it better captures her essence as a person and a force of nature. She’s the daughter of my wife’s sister, Alice, and Alice’s husband, Jerry. I write about them often. They, along with our friends Peter and Delilah, round out our core group of six with whom we play board games once or twice a week. Every time I see Rage Baby, she’s absolutely furious. Jerry and Alice insist that she’s only angry when I’m around and that I must somehow be the cause. That’s plausible. It’s been scientifically proven that I’m the worst. I’d believe Jerry and Alice’s attempt to blame me were it not for the multitude of reports from friends, family members, and police officers who confirm Rage Baby is also a terror when I’m not around. The most perplexing part is that she has absolutely nothing to be angry about. Her every need is met. She’s waited on hand and foot by nearly-perfect parents in a nearly-perfect family. No matter. She’s upset with everything and everyone, which is fair. I’ve made a second career out of complaining. The difference is that I do it in a newsletter, which is much quieter than an in-person temper tantrum. To make things even better, Rage Baby recently began a new round of teething. That distant rumbling you heard wasn’t a waking volcano; it was a growing toddler ready to destroy the world.

You’d think I’d be used to toddlers by now. I’ve had my fair share of them. I had two kids simultaneously in diapers for a large portion of my adult life. I barely remember that stage, which is by design. Otherwise, no one would ever have more than one kid. I wanted to start a family right away after Lola and I got married at the ripe old age of twenty-two. Lola wisely insisted that we wait a few years. We had Betsy when we were twenty-five. We pumped out another kid every two years thereafter up until our youngest, Waffle, who insisted on waiting only seventeen months. She’s been impatient right from the start. There’s documentation from that era. I started my Twitter account in 2012, when Betsy was only two. I went viral in 2016, when Waffle was one. In my earliest webcomics, she’s a swaddled baby in my arms. Given my art style, she looks more like a pink football with a head, but I assure you that’s supposed to be an infant. Perhaps my own words will prove me wrong, but if you go back and reread everything I wrote in that era, I don’t believe you’ll find much anger. Chaos, yes. Destruction, almost certainly. But none of that made my kids unhappy. In fact, wreaking havoc brought them the highest levels of joy. More importantly, it didn’t bother me much. Perhaps I’m naturally wired to be an apathetic parent. You might think the damage would bother my wife, but she was quite chill, too. This wasn’t a case where one parent relaxed while the other parent did all the work. We were saved by our own poverty. We were starting out in life and didn’t have anything worth destroying. My kids’ choices were to ruin the college couch we got from a dumpster or the old-lady chair we bought for eight dollars at an estate sale. Life was simple, but we were happy. Our days were filled with poopy diapers and broken things, but we didn’t know any better. The people around us did. That’s why they all waited so long to have kids.

The surest proof that things looked different from the outside was the effect we had on everyone else’s family planning. For most of our twenties, Lola and I were the only people we knew who had kids. None of our friends did. None of our siblings, either. At first glance, that seems to make sense. On my side of the family, I’m the oldest, but only by two years. That doesn’t explain all the extra years my brothers and sisters waited to follow in my footsteps. My fourth child was nearly in kindergarten before any of my brothers or sisters decided to procreate. Our kids had to be far enough out of the toddler stage for my siblings to forget the horrible lessons we taught them. The chaos in my own house put a pause on everyone else’s family development. I owe apologies all around.

The gap isn’t quite as pronounced on Lola’s side, but it’s close. Alice gave birth to our children’s first cousin about three months after Waffle entered the world. For years, Alice and Jerry both insisted one was enough. Their not-angry baby grew into a not-angry toddler and, eventually, a not-angry elementary school student. Then, one day, Alice stopped drinking. Everyone in our board game clique noticed, but none of us said anything. In today’s day and age, it’s never okay to ask a woman if she’s pregnant, even if she appears to be nine months along and she’s in the maternity ward on her way to the delivery room. The lack of alcohol was extremely noticeable. The cohesion of our friend group depends on adult beverages. It’s the only way people can tolerate the way I teach rules. Every time I introduce a new game to the table, it strains my marriage to the breaking point. In this case, though, Alice was the stereotype we all tried so hard not to acknowledge. According to both her and Jerry’s later retelling of events, as she approached forty, her body unexpectedly flipped a switch and demanded that she have one more baby. Jerry went along with it because men are stupid. In all of human history, no heterosexual male has ever turned down that offer. Now they have an enraged, highly mobile mini-human running their lives. I won’t say mistakes were made, but choices definitely were. Some decisions are more impactful than others.

Things are different for Jerry and Alice than they were for Lola and me when we were in that stage. For one thing, Jerry and Alice are older and wiser. They know what they’re dealing with, but they also have less energy to handle it. Alice is out of baby mode for good. The only thing her body wants these days is a nap. Alice and Jerry also have more money than we did in that era. They’ve had time to acquire nice things, which gives Rage Baby many tempting targets to destroy. That raises the stakes—and the stress level. Rage Baby doesn’t realize she’ll be the last child. There’s zero risk there will be a kid number three. Still, Rage Baby’s biological programming tells her to be as awful as possible to dissuade her parents from creating more siblings with whom she’d have to compete for resources. If she were the firstborn, that tactic would have worked. She definitely would have been an only child. No mother would risk unleashing two of her on the world. One might be enough to bring about the apocalypse.

That kid is always moving, and never toward good. Thirty seconds after she learned to walk, she turned on the stove. It was nice of the appliance designers at GE to put the knobs within reach. When we saw her Friday night, she tried repeatedly to eat dog food. And to go up the stairs. And to fall off the back of the couch. Every time she was denied in her attempt to hurt herself or others, she grew angrier, culminating in a truly impressive rage turd to end her night. It was a completely typical evening for her. It might sound like I’m being hard on Rage Baby, but she’s unusually restless, even compared to other toddlers. That’s not just the rose colored glasses of my inaccurate memories talking. There are a total of three or four toddlers between my and Lola’s sides of the family right now, depending on where exactly you define the start and end of that stage. None of the other toddlers are angry. They have their moments, but they also occasionally fall asleep or sit still. Like Chuck Norris, Rage Baby doesn’t sleep; she waits. You can see her on the baby monitor, staring into the camera and plotting her next move. Those crib bars won’t hold her forever. Alice and Jerry should have splurged for a maximum security baby cage with a roof.

Photo by Taylor Friehl on Unsplash

Perhaps this is all merely my wounded pride talking. For a brief moment, Rage Baby and I were close. At a game night months ago when Rage Baby was much younger but just as angry, she refused to go down for a nap. Shocking, I know. The other adults declared her to be inconsolable. I decided to lay my parenting reputation on the line. I’m awful at all things to do with children except for one extremely specific task: getting them to fall asleep. I use a tactic I learned from my dad. He used to bounce us up and down while walking around the room, singing a mournful dirge in a low baritone. The song was Three Little Fishies. If you know it, you’ll realize it’s actually an upbeat, jaunty tune. Not the way my dad sang it. When those three little fishies jumped over that dam, I thought they were diving to their deaths. No wonder I fell asleep so fast as a baby. I was trying to escape the trauma. I used that same method on my own kids when they were babies, and it worked every time. Their brains switched off to avoid further damage. Surely even Rage Baby couldn’t withstand my crimes against music. I picked her up and put my skills to the test.

I walked around the room with her, bouncing and singing. When I ran out of lyrics, I switched to a sound that I would call a comforting hum but everyone else would describe as a zombie moan. It worked. It took longer than I would have liked, but Rage Baby went down. I laid her in her carrier and watched with satisfaction as she slept for a solid hour. I wrote an entire newsletter about it. I have no shame about celebrating even the most minor of my non-accomplishments. The problem is that I never got it to work again. Like a virus, Rage Baby adapted. She’s now immune to my attempts to calm her down. If anything, she gets angrier when I pick her up. She remembers the one time I got the best of her and won’t let it happen again. She’s destroyed my confidence in my baby wrangling skills. I never thought I was a good dad, but I placed myself on the upper end of mediocre. Now I wonder if even that was too generous. I might have been the worst father in the world. I was simply lucky enough to have babies who were especially easy. I won’t know for sure until my own daughters have babies—if they have babies. If they’re paying attention to Rage Baby, they might never have children at all. Thanks to one irate toddler, our entire family line might end here. Well played, kid. Well played.

Thankfully, being a toddler isn’t a life sentence. Rage Baby has many decades to redeem herself. The extremes of her emotions could represent a power of will that will take her far. As she grows and matures, what now seems like a lust for destruction could translate into an insatiable curiosity. She could cure cancer or be the first person on Mars. Then again, maybe this is just who she is, but without the deceptive tools of adulthood to hide it. She could be the world’s first toddler psychopath. We won’t know until she grows up. As a certain senator once said to Anakin Skywalker, we will all watch her career with great interest. Let’s hope we don’t have the next Darth Vader in our midst.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James