Last night my cousin Sean tried to set me up with one of his neighbors. He made sure I was going to be at his son Troy's baseball game, and then (unbeknownst to me) had his neighbor come to the game under the pretext of wanting to watch her brother's team play against Troy's. She had her daughter in tow. Sean's plot was sort of transparent; he knows that if he'd told me that he was playing matchmaker I wouldn't have shown up.

So halfway through the game this woman saunters up to the bleachers and just stands there. Sean realized she was there after a couple of minutes and introduced us, and got his daughter Tanya and I to move over and make room. The next hour or so was taken up with passing around the baby (so much attention was paid her that I remember the baby's name but not her mother's.) Tanya cringed every time the baby came within five feet of her.

Babies make me edgy. I can't explain it. I'm sure there's an entry for this in the DSM somewhere, but frankly I am comfortable not wanting to be around infants. There's always the danger that you're going to (a) drop them (b) forget not to swear excessively around them, drawing the ire of anyone nearby- there's always at least one- who has managed to convince themselves that a six month old can tell that words like "shit" and "fuck" are no-nos (c) get assaulted with drool, puke, or other infant discharge.

And I hate all the obligatory professions of eternal love for infants. Especially when you're averse to holding the infant, you have to tell the parent how beautiful the child is. They're apt to take any other behavior personally. According to advice columns, if you want to act appropriately around ugly babies, you're supposed to say they're "precious," because of course all babies are precious to someone; but what if people are onto that one? What if it's already an obvious code for "I'm trying to be polite here, but your baby is a troll?"

[ed.: and what makes any baby cuter than another, anyway? A little less wrinkly? Fewer, or more, rolls of babyfat? Well-proportioned gums? A tasteful combover? Help me here, people, I'm lost.]

This woman looked like she was about fourteen. It was a little disconcerting. She had eyes that like Afghan girl in that old National Geographic photo, piercing and blue-green. When she showed up I wondered for a minute how this girl got stuck toting around someone else's baby; as it turns out she's 21. Sean cooed at the baby; I clumsily offered to hold her for a few minutes. She tried to pull my hair; she smiled toothlessly and clapped. Eventually the baby got antsy, laid down in my arms and squirmed. I said something perfunctory like, "Sorry, hon, I'm not a recliner," and gave the baby back.

Sean's wife, Teri, showed up around then. Teri is endlessly, unabashedly maternal; it looks odd on someone as tall and willowy as she is, but smart women know that Teri is basically free babysitting. Get her near a newborn and she'll keep the child occupied for hours.

The woman with the baby and I barely spoke. I was sincerely interested in the baseball game, and besides that, of course I imagined dating this person, what it would be like, the logistics, the technical details... Perhaps a few strands of feminism passed me by, but I have a hard time imagining just dating a woman who has a child. I don't know whether it's my fear of responsibility or an unfair assumption of weakness (or- who knows?- jealousy?, but how do you casually date someone who has in their possession a fifteen pound attention conduit?

My senior year at Sarah Lawrence, my don and mentor- a brilliant specialist in the history of animal testing- was pregnant, and one day she was complaining about how she was halfway dilated and tired of carrying around all this extra weight and her boobs ached. ("Sorry, too much information, probably," she said... Trying to be solicitous, I told her to feel free.) I offered to postpone a meeting we had the next week. I was still doing my independent study on late Medieval scientific education, and was closing in on trying to write a paper on Boyle. She bristled, asked, "how sexist is that?" and was in a nasty mood for the rest of the session.

What I'm trying to say is that I feel on pretty solid ground with women, however I may avoid dating, but babies complicate my feelings about them, and I find it particularly hard to differentiate helpfulness from sexism when it comes to mothers. Most of the time I try to ignore the fact that yes, women can give birth, and pretend it's only a marginal difference- that if I had a hole somewhere between my ass and balls I'd be perfectly capable of doing it, too.

In any case, as we were trapsing back to our trucks from the bleachers, Teri asked, "Too much googoogaga for you, huh?" The baby's mother hadn't done much but coo with satisfaction as she watched her child drink formula.

"I don't know... I guess I'm with Tanya. Not a big fan of babies, I guess," I said.

"We were wondering if that'd happen. Well, it was worth a try."

"And anyway, I'm not really in a place right now where I need to be in a relationship. It's hard enough to keep a healthy one going when you know where you're going to be next year, and what you're going to be doing."