Babies and Drugs

Most of my teenage summers were spent in the wilds of the Texas Hill Country, employed by the Boy Scouts of America to train young lads in the ways of the outdoors, everything from building fires and swinging axes to tying knots and constructing rope bridges. It would have been the perfect job if it hadn’t been for all of those damn kids. One drawback was the schedule, with one batch of kids leaving Saturday afternoon and the next batch arriving on their heels the next Sunday afternoon. But that 24 hour span in-between was ours to do with as we pleased.

One weekend, some of my friends came out to visit and see for themselves this magical patch of acreage that I emerged from every September laden with stories with which to regale them. With no troops around, we were free to camp wherever we wanted, so we snagged a sweet spot right next to the river. Now being teenagers, there was, of course, alcohol. That was just part of the deal, and I would have been righteously disappointed in my friends had they arrived dry. And I even halfway expected them to come packing another party favor, which they most certainly did. What I did not expect them to show up with was hallucinogens.

LSD, to be specific. Two of the friends in question, let’s call them Rusty and Zeke, had big plans to go out into the woods and fry their little brains out, and they wanted very much for me to join them. Now seeing as how the property upon which we were camping was my place of employment, and seeing as how this was employment that I valued very highly and had no desire to lose, and seeing as how I had zero experience with this stuff, I pulled a Nancy Reagan on ‘em and just said No. I said it several dozen times, in fact, as they continued to plead and prod and come-on-man me until they decided that the trip train was departing and I was not to be joining them. I made some token requests for them to refrain from their acid dropping entirely for my sake and my job’s sake, but I knew there was no changing their minds. 

A few hours later, I found myself in the role of Rusty and Zeke’s babysitter. The moonlit woods became a magical and frightening place for them, and I was scared they’d wander off, get lost, get eaten, get bitten by a snake, drown in the river, get found by a ranger, or succumb to any number of fates that would end with me getting fired. So I stayed with them, me in my plane of consciousness and they in theirs. I didn’t really know exactly what they were experiencing, so I just tried to keep them occupied. I led them on a walk down by the river where an animal of some kind jumped out of the brush, scaring them so badly that Rusty ran in off in one direction and Zeke ran off in another. I took them to the suspension bridge that connected the two sides of the river, and they were certain that it was going to fall and send us all plummeting to our deaths. As the night drew to a close, I managed to get them back to the campsite and into their hammocks, but then they convinced themselves that the site was surrounded by a battalion of armadillos that were preparing to attack us, which sent them into yet another freakout. We managed to make it through the night with no deaths, injuries, or job losses, but I don’t think anybody got more than 6 or 7 minutes of sleep.

So of course, this was the first story I thought of when I read Greg’s write-up over at Daddy Types about the Boston Globe article on the new baby brain research findings that have been coming out. Now I’m no expert on this stuff, just a guy who can read. But the gist of it seems to be a shift away from the idea of the baby brain as this undeveloped ball of mass that can’t focus on a damn thing for more than .02 seconds to a recognition that a baby’s brain is constantly in mega-sensory-input mode. Everything is new and amazing and mystifying and like-wow-man. It’s like what I used to imagine the life of a koala to be like when I thought that they spent their days hallucinating due to the hallucinogenic qualities of the eucalyptus leaves that they ate all day, but then I learned that the whole koala-eucalyptus-hallucinations thing was just a myth, which really pissed me off because I liked that idea so much, these fuzzy little marsupials just hanging out in the trees and watching the leaves transform into Buddhist monks and grasshoppers and Chuck Norris. So while I may have to accept the fact that I live in a world where koalas don’t hallucinate all day, I still get to live in a world where babies are all “whoa man, a giant fish!” every waking second of the day. Of course, I don’t know that these findings are really news to a lot of people, but it’s certainly nice to see scientific backing for the idea that babies really are taking it all in.

Taking care of my two boys is often similar to the experience of taking care of Rusty and Zeke. They see stuff I don’t see and which I’m not even sure is there. They take drastic actions based on these sightings. They’re prone to running away from me, often in opposite directions. They won’t go to sleep. They get up out of bed and it takes forever to get them back in. They’ll ask me the same questions several hundred times. They babble incessantly, sometimes incoherently. They don’t like to take no for an answer. They often interrupt my beer drinking. They suspect you, they love you, they want you to go away, no wait, stay, STAY! My poor teenage self had no idea what he was previewing.

Drugs. Preparing me for parenthood since 1994.