As I check in on my baby girl sleeping so sweetly in her crib, I am amazed at how my heart swells with love for her. Even through the births of all my nephews (and a very recent niece), I’ve never experienced a feeling quite like this before becomming a mommy myself. And it’s totally different from being in love, although that involves a lot of heart-swelling too, paradoxically. All I can say is that there’s just nothing quite like “Mommy-love”. I could try to put it to words all day long but you’ll never truly understand unless you’re a mommy too. (I suppose “Daddy-love” comes pretty close, though I’m not quite qualified to make that claim.)

A lot of reflection comes with this Mommy-love, along with many new sensations. One day Kaeta and I were sitting on the couch, playing, cooing, and laughing together, as we often do. I was once again overcome with the heart-swelling love, as I often am, and I gave in to the urge to plant big wet kisses all over her little smiling face. I tell her things like, “Kaeta, you are so sweet! Yes you are! You are the sweetest baby in the whole world!” (And anyone can clearly see that she is “You are so sweet I could just eat you up!” I exclaim as I nibble on her fingers a tiny bit. She seems to think this is a funny game, because she grins ear to ear as she voluntarily puts her fingers in my mouth.

Have you ever said to a baby, or ever heard anyone say to/about a baby, “I could just eat you up”? I don’t think I ever said it, but I certainly heard other mommies say it before I became a mommy and found myself saying it too. I remember thinking how ridiculous it sounded. How could anyone get the urge to eat their own baby? Doesn’t that just strike you as inherently wrong? But now I totally understand! It’s not that you actually want to eat the baby, but maybe just nibble on her a bit. It’s totally innocuous, as repulsive as it may sound.

I can’t help but believe this must be a common mommy-love feeling. It suddenly struck me how harshly I have judged hamster-mommies in the past for eating their own babies. As gruesome and horrifying as this little fact is (and infinitely more so to see the evidence of it *shudder*), I now feel like I can relate with these poor brainless creatures on some obscure, disturbing level. I can’t help but wonder if maybe these little rodent mommies are just misunderstood. I can just imagine the mommy hamster and the baby hamster sitting there playing and cooing at each other, when the heart-swelling mommy-love overcomes the mommy hamster and she says to her baby, “You’re so sweet I could just eat you all up!” But then the sad truth is that she just doesn’t have the mental capacity, the moral judgement, or the self-discipline to refrain. There is no little hamster-angel in white robes and a harp on her shoulder to say to her, “Now, now, Mommy Hamster, you know it would be wrong to eat Baby Hamster….”

And tragedy strikes.

I am now convinced that the mommy hamsters are not evil, they are just misguided. Aren’t we all in this fallen world? So the lesson we can all learn from the pea-brained hamsters is that you can’t have your baby and eat it too.

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