The Teachings of Orange is the New Black: "Babies Give You Hope"

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I have been binge-watching the relatively new television series called Orange is the New Black. My second day in, and I am on my ninth episode of the first season.

If I have learnt something other than discovering that deep down I currently having a huge craving for living in prison and creating an undying mateship with all other felons and developing an equally undying hatred of some prison guards and they way that they manipulate felons, then I have learnt that my perception about babies has been single-sided all along.

Aleida Diaz, one of the characters in the series, or, for those of you who have not gone so far as being so immersed in this television show to the point where she says the quote located in the title of this post, the mother of Dayanara, who also is in prison, decides to give her daughter advice on what to do with her quickly developing baby, which has something to do with one of the prison guards. My mouth dropped millimetre after millimetre when I heard that quote being said, as I came to a realisation in my head about what babies really can mean to the world, or to the mother.

She continues on to describe to her own daughter that she has accepted her own wrongdoings, but sees her as hope, sees her children as hope, and so too should her daughter see her own daughter as a beacon of hope. This makes, to me, babies seem more interesting than how they were normally explained to me, 'an act of God', or 'a sign of womanhood'. No. Babies are more than little sacks of fat that wake mothers and fathers or mothers and mothers or fathers and fathers up each night. Babies are more than little waste- and barf-buckets. Babies are more than teething masses of mumbling and stumbling humans. They are the future.

This honestly has changed my entire perception of them. Now I feel grief for all mothers or fathers who have lost their babies to homicide or accidental deaths, to all those teenage mothers who were forced to abort their children, their beacons of hope. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone feels guilty about something, which empowers those guilty people who have babies to rejuvenate themselves, to rejuvenate their lives through what they made, to watch a sense of accomplishment that they never felt, to perform otherwise to the prior generation in terms of treatment and of teaching, to relinquish a sense of youth that they probably never got to experience, to warn about what they were never warned about. Babies are, in a way, a new slate.

And I honour mothers who I have witnessed treating their babies in this way. I, for one, will make sure that my future babies will eat healthier than a goat in the middle of a corn field. I will make sure that they develop interests in anything and everything that they desire. I will make sure that they will find their inner voice, that their identities will form to their fullest potential, that they have the most open of minds and that they embrace things wholeheartedly. I will make sure they they are tucked in so tightly so as to keep warmth from escaping at night and to, the following day, teach them about ensuring all other humans have that same warm experience. I will teach them about human and animal rights, and I will make sure that even if they are exploited for it, or mistreated for it, that they respect and love everyone indefinitely, especially themselves, no matter what they look like - the media will not govern the way my child will thin, and nor will any family members. 

Just like babies giving me hope, I too will give them hope, hope that there are parents out there who care not only for themselves but also for the greater good. I know that when my baby becomes a teenager, I will be hated on behalf of the greater good when it comes to lecturing them about things that are against their peers' actions. But most importantly, when I have my baby, I will remind them that they are central to themselves, and central to me.