Every time I see a baby, I can’t help but think how much disappointment and pain this person is going to feel. She (let’s call her she for simplicity) has not experienced any of her life, and she is so happy. She just crawls around and laughs and eats and smiles and poops. She has yet to experience junior high school, rejection, illness, loss, depression, and, depending on the choices that she makes in life, poverty, hunger, and drug dependency.

I can’t just see a baby for her cute innocence. Her whole life flashes before my eyes, and I want to try to protect her, because I know how hard life can be. I want to keep douchebag men away from her in twenty years, and I want to tell her the dangers of texting and driving.

I don’t remember being a baby, and I know that that was the happiest moment of my life. I think it’s a cruel trick that we can’t remember that early period in our lives. When I’m upset, I try to think back on a happy memory. Just once, I want to remember rolling around in my own food and vomit and pooping my diapers and just screaming and drooling for hours. Granted, I do remember that, but I want to have those memories that didn’t occur four years ago. I want to remember the first time I did those things. Back when I didn’t do things like that due to a stress and anxiety-induced nervous breakdown. Back when I didn’t have the cognitive capacity to know that if I did all of these things, I would lose everyone I ever knew and loved.

Maybe I’m an exception, and my life so far has been more mentally straining than the average twenty-nine-year-old. That is, American twenty-nine-year-old. I’m sure that the majority of people my age around the world have had it much worse.

Babies are cute, and I should just focus on the cuteness. They will be in control of their own lives.