Touch

I remember back when the kids were mostly portable lumps who didn't move around very much, I would carry them places in the sling, and total strangers would come up and ooo and ah over them and then do things like touch their hands and their faces. This used to bother me, especially if the toucher had a cold, but even in general I didn't want random strangers touching my babies. I think I even wrote about it here once.

Well, time to eat my words. A couple of weeks ago I was at a professional conference and I gave a talk as part of a symposium organized by a colleague at another university. He and his wife have a 6-month old boy, and his wife is also in our field, and so they were able to bring their baby to the conference and trade off baby-minding duty.  (As an aside, oh, the luxury of having one baby, where you can do things like that.) 

Anyhoo, I was talking to the mom after our symposium and her baby was there in the stroller and he was soooooo cute. He was definitely an extra-cute 6-month old. Most 6-month olds are cute, anyway, and he upped the cute factor by a notch or two. In the course of a 5-minute conversation I had to actually physically restrain myself about 8 different times from touching him. Each time I made an almost involuntary move to maul that cute little baby, like maybe I would just take his entire fist and shove it into my mouth, that's how cute he was, and each time my hand was halfway to him when I remembered not to do that. I was like that former Nazi from Dr. Strangelove who had to use his left hand to restrain his right hand from making the sieg hail gesture. 

So now I have a little more understanding of those rude strangers who used to touch my babies. I guess it's natural. It has me thinking about how we all love to do this to babies, to touch them and cuddle them and kiss them. We're not allowed to do it to other adults, we've socialized those impulses away, so the very natural human urge for touch and contact is largely forbidden in polite society. But we're allowed to break those rules in certain circumstances, like for babies, or if everybody is drunk. Not the babies, of course. They're not supposed to get drunk.