Childhood Happiness and the Substitute Baby

On March 28^th 1995, I was pushed out of my mothers vagina and thrown into a world of mayhem. I suppose the same could be said for any other person's birth, the world is chaos for everyone after all, but what I mean when I say this is that I was born into a large family, a kind of chaos that had already been going on for a while by the time I arrived.

Looking back I am grateful for my upbringing in so many ways, I was of course ostentatiously privileged, as anyone lucky enough to be born into a wealthy country is, I had everything I needed to pursue a good education and happy home life, and I had parents who loved me, and if that wasn't enough I was showered in luxuries. I had a playstation, a gameboy, some toy guns to play with outside, and everytime I wanted a book my mum would enthusiastically buy me it, there are people in this world born without a chance of basic health care, where they work so hard and make so little that they never experience a single luxury in their lives. Indeed I'm a very, very lucky person.

But as a child, I was never happy. It's not too hard to believe, happiness is the strangest thing in the world next to love, just like love it is completely and utterly alluding, and just like love anyone who tells you that they have found the method for it is either lying or trying to sell something.

When I look back at my sadness (and it really was that, I didn't know what happiness was until I was sixteen,) the only thing that I can specifically identify is that I was constantly annoyed. It sounds trivial, but growing up it was always noisy, and not in the usual childhood way, I had three older siblings and two very stressed parents, and I happened to have been born an introvert. All I ever wanted was some peace and quiet, for people to leave me alone. It felt like everything was being pushed onto me, and I just wanted it all to go away so that I could breath and do things for myself. It's silly, I know. As a kid I had a great sense of self-respect, I don't know where it came from, but I couldn't stand people talking to me like a child, even though, y'no, I was one.

As well as creating four crazy children, my parents also owned pets, as a result I've been around animals for my entire life. Even as a very little boy I would fuss over the cats and dogs, I would stroke them and tell them that they're cute, I babied them in the exact same way that my three older siblings incessantly babied me, in fact I think I still emulate the exact same kind of babbles that she would use on me as a toddler. It felt good being on the other end of it, and figuring out why isn't exactly brain surgery, I was the youngest of four children, of course I wanted to be in charge for once. Babying the pets was a good way of doing that, I felt so joyful fussing them, because they were stupider than me and therefore mine to look after.

This never really went away, and it probably never will, I've always been extremely maternal. Pets are perfect for childless parents like myself because they never grow up, they can be a baby forever, and they don't even need to be taught anything because it's not like they're going to go out into society and be left to their own devices. They're the easiest form of baby, nowhere near as rewarding, upsetting, joyful, depressing or insane as the real thing. That's where I came up with the title of this article, the Substitute Baby.

The dog pictured above is named Charlie, he was my substitute baby for a very long time. I found him eight years ago, and strangely enough these have been the hardest eight years of my life (for reasons I won't go into now,) he was my little rock, no matter what was happening or how trapped I felt, the one joyful consistency in my life was that he would always be there wagging his tail, being completely oblivious to what was happening. When I was cutting myself he licked the blood up and went back to his chew toy, when I lyed in bed paralysed with fear that my life was over he snuggled into my arm, when I was thirteen and took all those pills he looked at me as if to say “please come back into bed so you don't keep waking me up.” In all three of those instances, I cuddled him close to me and cried, and felt a little less like I wanted to die.

He wasn't really my child, and I know that, I know that I didn't love him as much as a mother loves her baby or a father loves his son. But I did love him, and he brought me so much joy everyday, he was my best friend.

When they took him away it felt like things would never be okay again. Sometimes it still feels like that. But I know that it will be, eventually. Whatever happens, I'll never forgive those who stole him from me, and that isn't a decision, that's a biological fact. As far as my brain is concerned he was my baby, and for a parent to forgive an atrocity like that is simply impossible.