You gotta' come see the bay-bee!

I used to laugh at that Seinfeld line, but now it's become reality and the line ain't so funny anymore. I mean, it's been ten weeks and I still haven't mustered up the will to go see the damn thing.

I mean, really, what man is interested in someone else's baby? First and foremost, that baby is the living embodiment of some other male's success in mating. Mating is our biological imperative and the father of the wretched thing won; beat us in this biological imperative. We're the loser. We've let him succeed in perpetuating his genes.

That bawling, drooling thing will grow up to compete for resources, our resources. By the rules of the jungle, we should by all rights devour the baby right then and there, put an end to the humiliating reminder of our own reproductive failure and the eventual competition for resources.

Secondly, this baby pretty much represents the death of the friendship, at least friendship with non-baby friends. The dreamy eyed parents don't realize it, but they've walked through some Twilight Zone door of perception ruled by weird hormones and even weirder perceptions of reality. They're on a drug every bit as powerful as crack, but their drug is called prolactin.

More commonly known as the "nesting hormone," prolactin, much like cortisol, drove down his Testosterone levels. The father's become docile. He's become lovey dovey. He's donned permanent coke-bottle thick rose-colored glasses.

The father doesn't even know the incubus is sucking the Testosterone out of him. The day that thing was born, it somehow, either by its touch or its demonic cooing or even its mere visage, coerced the father's brain into producing more prolactin. In the mother, the prolactin causes her to lactate, but instead of lactating, human males start wearing goofy utilitarian clothes, the better to withstand the vomit and excrement they'll be wearing for the next couple of years; the better to make them less attractive to any other female that walks the earth.

He'll probably start wearing Crocs (because you can hose the puke off them) and the closet will be filled with all kinds of X-Vest like accessories designed to make tending to the baby easier, only instead of lead weights they're jammed with Wet Wipes.

Prolactin will compel the parents to sell their modern, multi-level naked-Jacuzzi party-deck paradise home with the great view because they don't want their child to do an Eric Clapton off the balcony, even though the infant's many months away from being able to crawl, let alone toddle. Besides, the yard is "only" a third of an acre, and apparently babies/children are like sheep, cattle, or other ruminants in that they need acres and acres of land so they don't develop sour gut or cholera.

They'll buy some ranch house in the burbs with 3.5 bedrooms and a swing set and they'll invite you over on Sunday afternoons and they'll tell you about the baby's wonderfulness. You'll hear about what a good eater it is. You'll hear about how attentive it is. How the way it throws its poo against the wall is indicative of some future prowess in throwing the John Heisman prolate spheroid; how even its post-pabulum belches are as lovely and harmonic as some castrati Pavarotti.

They can't help it. They're like some old couple that took up canasta. They're really into canasta, live and breathe it, and when they're out with friends, all they want to talk about is canasta, so much so that non-canasta-playing friends want to kill themselves. Eventually, the canasta couple only wants to hang around with other couples that play canasta and you're thankful for it.

You might be stupid enough to invite them out to dinner, assuming that like any sane people they'll get a sitter, but you guessed wrong. They'll bring it along. Dad will be wearing it on his chest, the baby strung up on some modern-day contraption that's a blend of Hannibal Lecter's U-Haul dolly and an Arapahoe funeral sled that makes the father look like some demented rapper wearing a novel piece of bling, only this bling screams and shits.

If you're lucky, they'll have the decency to put the thing under the table like a piece of luggage so you won't have to look at it, but all the same you'll still be creeped out because you're familiar with Ray Bradbury's short story, The Small Assassin.

You see, Alice thought the baby was trying to kill her; kept crying all the time to keep her awake so she'd be weak; insisted that somehow, it had learned to crawl months ahead of schedule; thought it had placed things on the stairs to make her trip and fall.

The doctor didn't believe her until he came over to the house and found David in a twisted position, dead at the bottom of the stairs. Upstairs, he found Alice dead in her bed. An electric cord plugged into the wall had sparked, blackening the wall. The doc follows the cord to Alice's bed, where he sees a safety pin has been pushed into the cable.

The doctor heads for the crib, but the baby's not there. He sees, though, that the wind has blown the door shut, preventing the baby from returning to its bed. Now he knows Alice was right; the baby is a killer. The doctor hears something rustling behind the curtain. He pulls out his scalpel and says, "See, baby? Something bright, something pretty... "

Ought to be mandatory reading for any couple, but they wouldn't believe it anyhow; the prolactin wouldn't let them.

And it won't get better when the kid gets a little older; it'll get worse; worse because now you can't talk about anything they couldn't print in the Reader's Digest. The prolactin will have approached more normal levels, but regardless, hanging out with these humanoid loaves of Wonder Bread is like being sucked into a G-rated movie filled with whimsical stories of dogs eating the family turkey and dad confusing the pimple cream with the toothpaste.

Puke.

There's no denying it, the friendship's on life support. Who needs to be exposed to that drudgery, that ho-hummedness?

Now I obviously used to be a kid myself. In fact, you might have seen me in Jerry Maguire. I played Ray, the cute little moppet who told Jerry Maguire the human brain weighs 8 pounds, which is a line right out of TC's Big Damn Book of Knowledge.

Sure I look too old to have played Ray, but I did an awful lot of blow with Mary Kay and Ashley so I aged a little quicker, but what the hell, the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And I burned so very very brightly.

So, since I was a kid myself, you might ask, why all the agitation over children?

My answer is that it's not the children so much, but the fact that the parents have made their child the center of the universe. These kids will grow up believing their needs are more important than anyone else's and there's a rock-solid chance they'll grow up to be the self-centered pea-brains that seem to be the dominant species nowadays.

I still blame it on the prolactin. Who knows, maybe there are hormonal mimics or hormone disrupters in our environment that end up increasing or exacerbating the release/effects of this hormone that make it more powerful or prevalent than in the past?

I have memories, or at least memories of things I read, of a time when children were merely ancillary fixtures in the household, like sofas or lampshades. Nobody made a big deal about them or ascribed to them any notoriety. After all, there were so many of them running around.

But let's consider marriage in general. After all, it often leads to birthin' babies. In fact, according to author Susan Squire (I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage), marriage is an institution created to regulate birthin' babies:

"Once people figured out that the endgame of sex wasn't ejaculation but conception, something had to be done. The overriding concern was to avert confusion over paternity, no easy matter given the universal assumption — sustained until around 1800 — that women were nymphomaniacal by nature. The solution was marriage, instituted in concert with the double standard: A woman could only have one sexual partner at a time, her husband, while a man could marry and/or fuck any woman who didn't already belong to another man."

While Squires agrees that modern technology has separated sex from reproduction, and even though the double standard has become, theoretically, a single one, she maintains that marriage is still the foundation of the family and that it still regulates sex.

But beyond the fact that marriage regulates sex is the fact that hormones regulate marriage, or at least successful marriages that lead to reproduction in the first place.

Just this week the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science published a Swedish study of 552 pairs of twins that showed that successful pair bonding — the type that usually leads to having babies — was related to a "bonding gene".

This bonding gene modulates the hormone vasopressin and levels of it are strongly tied to how well men fare in marriage.

Lead researcher Hasse Walum first became interested in the role of vasopressin while studying vole rats. Males with higher levels of vasopressin were more inclined to hang around and mingle with the female after copulation. Rather than eat crickets and shit on the heather, they snuggled and asked the female about her day.

Obviously, voles and most humans are usually quite different, so Walum wasn't sure the association would hold.

But it did.

Men with a certain variant of the vasopressin 1a gene tended to score low on a psychological test called the Partner Bonding Scale. They were also less likely to be married than men carrying another form of the gene, and carrying two copies of the gene doubled the odds that the men had undergone some sort of marital crisis over the last year.

In other words, low vasopressin made men, like voles, less likely to canoodle after copulation.

Interestingly, there's also a relationship between vasopressin and prolactin, the nesting hormone. The higher the vasopressin level, the higher the prolactin level. The same hormonal combo responsible for successful pair bonding is apparently also responsible for couples making baby the center of the universe!

Now there's more to marriage and reproduction than just the sum or minus of our

hormones but it's a telling relationship, one I'll try to keep in mind when, eventually, I gotta go see the bay-bee!

Photo by David Lachapelle

Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting people shouldn't get married; I'm not suggesting people shouldn't have children; I'm not suggesting your child isn't the center of the universe; and I'm not suggesting people mate with vole rats, so before you post an angry response, either read the article again or get your prolactin levels checked.