Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
I have a newly minted 3-year-old. He celebrated his third birthday a few weeks back and has been enjoying whatever newfound freedoms come with ascending up the ladder toward senior citizenship. The thing is, he is the youngest of my four children so everybody looks at him and views him as the baby. People call him, “Baby (his name)” and if you ask him what his name is, he’ll tell you that it’s “Baby.” In fact, short of making him say his name, I don’t think he ever says his own name out loud. That’s not important here; what is important is that he is, in our house, viewed as the baby.
Being the baby of the family means when his siblings, aunties and uncles come around, they all want to pick him up and such. And because he is the baby and everybody always wants his attention and to pick him up, he has developed a supremely shady response to, well, everybody. If you seem too eager to get his attention, he will not only shade you, he’ll shade you loudly so that everybody around you knows that he wants no parts of you. And then, because he is shady, he will toss his arms out towards another person and act like he absolutely couldn’t wait to hug them and smile at them. It’s quite a show he puts on, full of shade, petty and theater. I love it.
Here’s the funny part about it: Folks’ reactions to being rejected by babies are always so funny. Despite it being a clear song-and-dance on the part of a person whose command of the English language is marginal, at best, adults always feel a slight pang of hurt. Maybe hurt is too strong, but there’s at least a slight offense on the table. It’s as if being rejected by a baby says something about the person being rejected, like the baby is judging the adult, which is…
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