Om nom nom
On eating our babies, and our babies eating us
There are so many things crying out for your attention right now, but you’ve chosen to read an essay about wanting to eat babies, and for that I thank you. Blessed are you for reading KAFKA’S BABY (now in its third year)! The best way to support this fever dream is to share <3
Part 1: I’ll eat you up I love you so
Whom’st among us has not considered imagined having a nibble on a chonky baby thigh? I once stuffed my baby into a homemade ham costume, the felt bone rising up like a crest over her shiny cheeks and her chubby arms bent like wings at her side, fighting the urge to squeeze her and consume her whole. She is now too big to fit in an oven, and I have the urge instead to bite gently into my nephew. At six months of age, he has the beautiful body of an overproofed croissant, and is working on his side planks. There will be a moment while he is balanced that his milky body becomes the kind of shiny and delectable treat you’d arrange on a platter at Christmas. Truly, it transforms before your eyes into a glistening roast chicken.
Grandmothers have long threatened to bite off a pudgy foot, but what is the meaning of it? Why are babies so tasty-looking,* so entwined with eating, so often threatened by the prospect of an old witch gobbling them up?
It’s nothing new, is what I’ve learned. During the Renaissance, painted "birth trays" were given to new mothers for good luck, food presented on top of a painting of, for example, a "chunky toddler wearing a coral amulet and holding a pinwheel," in the case of one by Bartolomeo di Fruosino, as Deborah L. Krohn’s scholarship explains.
Exhibit A
There were also painted fertility trays of a Cupid with affirmations such as "I AM A BABY WHO LIVES . . . AND I MAKE URINE OF SILVER AND GOLD" for those trying for a baby.
These older talismans are a good reminder of the fragility of life, and of a person's reproductive efforts — you really could use all the positive urine wishes you could get back then, when mothers had an even higher chance of dying during childbirth, and babies a slimmer chance of making it to their first birthday. By gobbling some postpartum treats off a picture of a cherubic baby, you might have had a better chance of feeding your child and surviving to see them grow beyond the phase where they look like a pâtisserie.
Exhibit B
Science has also taken a stab at this balloon, successfully destroying the vibe while trying to decode the innards. A few years ago, a paper published in Frontiers of Psychology detailed a study in which the researchers captured the scent of newborns from their pajamas (PJs the eggroll wrappers to their tasty mince innards), then presented the scents to a) a group of new mothers, and b) a control group of women who had not given birth, while tracking their brain activity.
The Christian Science Monitor notes that all the women’s reward centers were activated but that “the mothers' reward circuits showed far more activation than those of the non-mothers; for moms the sensation one gets when sniffing an infant presumably feels even more like the feeling of having obtained food.”
I hope you’ll agree with me that science is missing something spiritual here, a thesis more like “Babies Found To Look Like Roast Chickens And Tiny Gods At Same Time, More Research Needed To Establish Why.”
On the other hand, can you imagine the gaping hole that a whiff of your child as a newborn would open up in your gut years hence?
Exhibit C
Part 2: Not my gumdrop buttons
My 6-year-old looks more like a sinewy rib now than a hock, but the babyishness that remains lies in his desire to spontaneously stick his hand in my mouth. I have a crown on my front tooth from where he threw his head back once sitting in my lap and broke it. It was a period when it seemed both children might climb back inside me through my mouth. They seemed always to be casing my body for secret ways in, peering into my ears and slinking under my arms.
The oven in Hansel and Gretel is like a big mouth threatening to swallow them, but in the end they cook the bony old witch, don’t forget. I have felt like I would tear off an arm to satiate my children, and like they might eat me alive. The nursing, I’ve almost forgotten, but you are so entwined when they are little, hurrying through a fig bar so you can eke out some milk to pad their second or third chin roll, an extra loop in the digestive process that goes out and around and confuses their body and yours. Early on, I felt myself turn to sand while nursing, but their bodies!!! Ach. Plump and juicier by the minute. Eventually, I got to the skinny spit between the promontories of feeding them and being eaten; it was relaxing to feel the milk whoosh over the bridge, like standing in water while tiny fish nibble your feet.
Japhy discovered his shoulder blade the other day. He was reaching back with his hand and noticed the sharp edge of it. “That’s your shoulder blade, buddy,” I said, “they call it a scapula if you want the fancy name.” “Oh my gee,” he said as he kept touching it, “Cool. I love that.” He loves to admire his own body.
Scout: “Why do you call me Muffin?”
“Oh, I don’t know, do you not like it?”
“No, I do like you calling me Muffin.”
I’m not even trying to eat them anymore, but they want to be reassured that they still look tasty.
Oh yes, the tastiest.
Footnote:
*Presenting the only wrong answer to this question: “If we look at the attitude of fond parents toward their children, we cannot but perceive it as a revival and a reproduction of their own long-since abandoned narcissism.” —Hey! FUCK YOU, FREUD.
Appendix A
Appendix B
Mood check
^tip o the hat to my friend Molly
Goodies
Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things is out, and it’s extremely up the Kafka’s Baby alley:
“All of it’s in his bones. It’s the actual stuff of his body and brain. The placenta you made from scratch. Your milk from nursing him. All those pancakes and school-lunch sandwiches, all of that food and care… Everything you’ve ever fed him… His whole self is made completely out of your love.”
I’m ringing this bell again: Listen to “How Other Dads Dad,” the poddie from Hamish Blake (see Exhibit B, his firstborn) on the gold standards of dadding, and also, in the episode with Dave Hughes, on how to worship less at the altar of your own ego.
Speaking of chicken art, this wonderful look at the art of Carolee Schneemann.
Tree-tipping generally, but MR. EATON specifically.
Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s “Brooding” column at NYMag is always suh smart:
There are so many ways to be annoying online, and momfluencers are constantly bumping up against them while trying not to be “judgy” or “preachy” or “negative” or “too perfect.” It takes a particular kind of expertise to pull off these contortions. When a momfluencer turns a brutal morning getting her kids out the door for school into a thoughtful bit of content about the challenges of slowing down, she’s attempting to transform something mundane into something poignant without being corny about it. The eye of the needle through which these stories are told ends up being quite tiny. But then, saying things without ruffling feathers is a skill women have been practicing for a great many centuries.
Peter Ho Davies writes a surgical birth in A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself:
Craning, he can just make out her feet in the distance, socked because of the chill. He’s reminded of the magic act, sawing a lady in half."
For those of you wondering what happened in 2022, a very good list from 22 people on the defining internet posts of the year, at Embedded.
Cindy DiTiberio: “To turn yourself into their feeding machine is a sacrifice that must be honored and recognized.”
My sister illustrated another children’s book! Tabitha Finds Her Feet is available now in Oz :)
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY <3 <3 <3 If you thought this was a bit of alright, you might like some previous KAFKA’S on:
"It was a period when it seemed both children might climb back inside me through my mouth. They seemed always to be casing my body for secret ways in, peering into my ears and slinking under my arms." I laughed very literally out loud reading this. Can relate. At one point I wondered if they were aware of their constantly trying to reenter my insides. But my wonder was allayed when my oldest said, at the age of 5, "Mommy, is there a way to get back in your uterus? I bet it was nice in there. I don't remember."
They know.
Love this article! It took me back to when my kids were born and my grandkids.
I gave them a million nibbles !❤️❤️❤️