baby mamas.

been thinking a lot about mothers and babies lately. my cousin is having a baby, my sister now has two and is moving to a bigger house (which in my mind neccessitates more babies), there was a wallaby with a baby in its pouch on Ellen the other day, and then i found this link with all sorts of animal babies (the baby tigers already have an evil hunger in their eyes), and oh yeah! i won the baby pool at work when my coworker Julie spent 24 hours in labor and finally gave birth to her beautiful baby daughter, Olive, on the 22nd of april. thanks for holding out, ladies!

but back to the mammal babies. i started thinking about the different mothering style of animals and how it relates to human parenting theories. here's what i came up.

the wallaby carries its baby in a pouch made of its own skin (sort of a second uterus, if you will) so the little guy doesn't even need to get out to eat---the teats are right there! and did you know there are different teats with different formulas depending on the development of baby wallaby? this reminds of the now popular "helicopter parents." we get calls from them all the time at school - "hello? my daughter is enrolled in a class there and i was just calling to see if she has homework/class has been canceled/i can look at her grades/i can hold her hand/she has her lunch box/she remembered to breathe/she can she dress herself?" let them grow, parents, let them grow. if they can text all day while on the internet, they can probably figure out these small problems on their own. or, in wallaby speak, get out of the pouch.

the cat or bear. i'm doing no research on this one, this is all on memory and cartoons. i just like that these guys hang out with their young while they're little, feed them, teach them, but aren't afraid to wrap their jaws around their delicate little necks once in a while. also, bears will kill anyone that gets close to their kid.

the whale. no offense kate, but i'm spinning these guys in a negative way. in my mammal-to-mammal parenting theory (read: not in real life), these monsters represent the parent who is a friend, not an enforcer. you know, cause they're always swimming to the mall together, shopping in the juniors section (hello, that's totally my landlady) and staying out too late in the warm summer water for the baby-sitter. please see the following film. or this one if you like scrubs.


dolphins and elephants both use the "it takes a village" approach. uh huh, yeah, oh course they do. dolphins even let their kids turn the basement into an apartment and stick around a little longer than necessary. those darlings of the animal kingdom are smart, but not too smart. elephants are a bit more doting, but human mothers would be just as devoted if they could hold their babies with five appendages instead of just four.

and my last, and probably worst example of a matriarch: a rabbit in captivity.

they eat their babies. i'm just going to call this bad parenting and leave it at that. take this film and replace the pills with "your own babies", and that about raps it up.


my question now, dear readers, is two fold. what type of parenting did you experience growing up? and what kind of parent do you want to be?

i was lucky enough to have a mama tiger and a poppa bear. and i'll be the type of parent that scares the crap out of their twelve-year-old by being brutally honest about the evils of sex and drugs. hmmmm.

here is another article on animal mothering if you enjoy this topic as much as i do.