Baby shakes family dynamics

Last month, my daughter held what she referred to as a Baby-que, that is, a barbecue to celebrate her new daughter and provide friends and family the opportunity to meet the baby.

Seeing as Evelyn is the first of a new generation in our family — our first grandchild and my parents’ first greatgrandchild — virtually every aunt, uncle and cousin attended the baby-cue. And, all were smitten with the baby.

All that is, except my 19-year-old son who after arriving home from college and being introduced to his new niece made this announcement: “I’m not holding it.” It.

To date, he has stayed true to his word. This, despite the fact that my daughter and the baby stayed with us while her husband was away for three weeks. Throughout that time, it took some doing to avoid holding the baby, because a young baby needs a lot of holding.

My husband, daughter and I took turns passing her around, feeding her and rocking her to sleep — all of which seemed like a rather pleasant task to me. My son not only declined every opportunity to pick up the baby, he also refused to touch her, even agreeing to wash bottles rather than interact with the baby.

Initially I shrugged this off, blaming his squeamish attitude on the fragility of newborns. He quickly discredited this theory. He made it clear that he was unduly appalled by her habit of spitting up after eating, whatever was in her diaper at any given time, and by her tendency to shriek uncontrollably when hungry.

At one point, he asked not to have her facing him in her infant seat during dinner.

“What if she throws up? That’s disgusting!” he declared, only half joking.

Another time, he observed her during an unhappy moment, tightly swaddled and crying fiercely the way newborns sometimes do.

“She looks like an angry zucchini,” he teased, to his sister’s dismay.

He also compared her to a mandrake — those fictitious humanlike plants whose cries can be fatal if heard in Harry Potter.

Of course, my daughter was frustrated by her brother’s lack of enthusiasm for his new niece — a fact that served to further provoke him to vocalize his ample supply of infant insults. Certainly, some of this boiled down to a sort of lighthearted sibling rivalry of the adult kind, with my daughter jokingly accusing her brother of being a horrible uncle, and my son agreeing wholeheartedly.

In fact, I noticed a baby, being a new member of the family, seems to reignite old family dynamics. My husband decided to espouse upon his long lost argument that babies really ought to “cry it out” so they learn to sleep on their own — a concept my daughter and I readily dismissed without further discussion.

My two daughters and I all

spent time together adoring the baby. And my son crystalized his role as taunting brother, routinely ridiculing his siblings for fawning over Evelyn.

In general, I’ve found the males in the family are less taken by the baby than the women. The fact that my son is so uncomplimentary at first seemed somewhat disturbing. But, by the end of Evelyn’s three week visit, I began to take note of another phenomenon.

That is, the baby seemed to like my son. She smiled at him, observed him curiously, reacted to his antics with a delighted look in her eye. He brushed this off, but I know that no one, not even the crankiest young uncle, can resist a baby’s smile.

I predict that they will one day be fast friends. It’s only a matter of time.