My wife and I didn't invite any babies to our wedding. It was a Saturday night, it was black-tie, and we decided to make it an adults-only affair. We knew that this was going to be inconvenient for our friends with young kids, so we pulled out a lot of rationalizations like, "It will be past their bedtime, anyway," and "Kids don't like salmon." But then we got a lot of responses like, "My kid goes to bed at 3AM," and "Weirdly, my three month-old eats salmon." If I were these parents, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't admit these facts publicly. In any event, we resorted to the trump card: "It's our wedding." Ta-da! No response necessary.
Both my wife and I loved our wedding. And if we could go back in time I still wouldn't have invited babies (although watching them eat salmon would have been fascinating.) But we also knew that we were messing with baby karma.
What is Baby Karma?
It's the sudden desire to be more accommodating to other people's babies under the fear of what will happen when you yourself have a child.
Now, on our wedding night, my wife and I obviously weren't talking about when we wanted to have kids (that, apparently, was my mother's job). But you start thinking about baby karma long before you start thinking about actual babies. The minute you meet someone with whom you could potentially procreate, you start thinking about baby karma. This is true even if you don't want kids - just in case you happen to change your mind someday and/or become a big buddy to someone else's kid, kind of like Hugh Grant in that movie About a Boy.
The best example of this is on airplanes. For most of my life, a crying baby on an airplane felt like some kind of torture method used to get spies to reveal national secrets. There was actually a deleted scene in Goldfinger where Goldfinger locks James Bond in a room with crying babies. The problem was that Bond then shot himself, thus destroying the franchise. So they rewrote the scene and had Goldfinger try and slice Bond in half with a laser. Bond could easily escape from that because lasers are obviously less terrifying than crying babies.
Anyway, back to the airplane. Soon after my wife and I became engaged, I began to look at crying babies on airplanes in a whole new light. I'd make eye contact with the parents who are holding the screaming baby and I'd just smile at them. Yes, you feel sorry for them in the moment, but there's also something more selfish going on. I knew if I ever had a child I would be taking him/her on airplane trips. And so, in my mind, being tolerant of this crying baby would suddenly increase the chances of other people being nice to me when the shoe was on the other foot. And by "being nice to me" I mean simply, "Not stare at me with death-ray vision."
So I have done my best to abide by airplane baby karma. In fact, I have been observant of all types of baby karma for several years...with only one that exception: my wedding night.
Happily, I now have a beautiful baby daughter. And so I fully expect to be invited to many weddings in the next few years where babies are not allowed. Of course, my thinking now is, "Surely you don't mean my baby! She's so beautiful and very well behaved!" (Although she doesn't eat salmon yet.)
But that's baby karma. Maybe we'll get a sitter. Maybe we'll try and disguise our baby as a thirty year-old. Or maybe we'll just stay home and send a gift. Do you think the bride and groom would like a bottle warmer?
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