Bluey Gives Me Baby Fever

How four Australian dogs revamped my family planning.

Adopt me so we can go take pictures in a pumpkin patch while wearing matching outfits.

Ok, just to be clear, I'm not a child-hater or anything like that. I LOVE kids. Their innocent little sponge-brains continually inspire me to burn down society and rebuild it from the ground up so no 5-year-old ever stumbles upon a My Little Pony goreporn video again.

That being said, I have never exactly been the conductor of the Family Express (stopping at stations "Embarrassing Proposal", "Expensive Wedding", and "Unfortunate Prenuptial"... all aboard, bitches!). It's nothing against children; I just have limited confidence in my capabilities as a mother. I can't cook and I wear so much glitter my blood is probably 80% microplastics.

Every so often I do get baby fever, though. Like when I pick up a really big stuffed animal and want to hold it against my shoulder and never put it down again. Or when babies stare at me in public and play Peek-a-boo. Or when I watch Jurassic Park (Sam Neill taking care of those kids #sob).

Most recently, I've been getting baby fever from hit kid's show Bluey, in which the charmingly androgynous titular character and her little sister get into hijinks that their parents respond to with an infinite well of patience and DBT skills. Apparently the words "I love you but I don't like you right now" don't exist in Australia.

But there's one dog in particular reshaping my thoughts on the insidious trap of parenthood:

Look at this motherfucker breaking cycles like a champ.

Bandit Heeler, Bluey and Bingo's dad! He's patient. He doesn't yell. He (probably) wouldn't make Bluey do math homework at the dining room table for 4 hours.

"Is it even possible," I wondered while watching Bluey for the first time, "to parent without making your kids cry?". No way. Yet this son of a bitch seems to be doing it. Mindblowing.

Could that be my future? Could I too be a good mother who plays games with her kids and is patient with them and doesn't leave pens in her jeans when she puts them in the washing machine? More importantly, could I find a husband who makes all those parenting things seem not so scary and fraught with peril?

Maybe it isn't baby fever that Bluey gives me: I don't really need convincing to have kids. Children are precious, and wonderful, and deserving of packed lunches and goodnight kisses and sympathy and praise and time and money and the whole fucking world. Maybe what Bluey gives me instead is husband fever. The idea that parenting doesn't have to be a battlefield. That some men are good fathers and good husbands. That having kids would be worth the risk of fucking them up, because I wouldn't be alone in it and they'd have a good father to make sure they were okay, no matter what.

Bluey the dog is only seven years old, and in some ways, seven year old children are easier to parent (my mom always said big kids have big problems). Bluey has not yet gotten access to the Internet, or attempted to buy drugstore lipstick, or learned the word "fuck", or grown into that unfortunate age of girlhood where you realize men for the most part live by a different set of rules than women and these rules are pretty much impossible to figure out but could mean life or death for you. So I can't say for certain whether her dad will fuck her up or not. I hope not, but I have learned to be wary.

In the meantime, I'm going to choose to feed the hope that having kids isn't an impossibility for me. If an animated blue dog is doing it, maybe there are more good dads out there than I thought.