ZUMBIES!!

I don't know if its coincidence or attention bias or what, but it seems like as my age cohort has achieved prime procreation age, zombie literature has proliferated.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Walking Dead, Warm Bodies; the corpus seems to be piling up thickly and quickly.  To add some frosting to the cupcake, the Zombie genre kicked off in earnest in the late 60's with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, right about the time Baby Boomers would have been hitting prime procreation age themselves.  As a new parent and a recent initiate into the genre of zombies (I'm about 20 episodes into The Walking Dead for my first foray), I've found myself with niggling, deep and mysterious thoughts about attempting to connect the two ideas.  But how?  How could you possibly connect hoards of mindless, relentless shambling creatures seemingly bent on consuming your very life's blood with zombie movies?  Okay, so maybe the connections aren't that obtuse.  As much as it makes me feel a little like a bad parent to admit it, though, the more I think about it the harder I have to try and convince myself the connections aren't there.

For me, at least, there is something somewhat existentially terrifying about both the Zombie Hoards and the Toddling Hoards.  They may represent different spectrums of Sir Elton's great circle of life, but they both seem to have the same basic goal: supplant the current regime through relentless expansion.  They are both notoriously insatiable.  They both seem to be more active at night.  They both have finicky diets.  They both drool a lot.  Both inadvertently remind us that death and immortality stalk us all, and are well beyond our control.

I'm not sure what it means for me personally to think about children in the context of zombie literature yet.  I've just started my hamster churning on the topic, but the best I've been able to come up with so far is to be more motivated to confront the fears that I have about childrearing (of which there are many) head on rather than sublimating them into horror films.  Utilizing my community of support, taking the time to examine my own thoughts and behaviors as a father, guarding the time for self-care behaviors and diligently communicating with my wife about our lives as parents are all parts of making sure that I stay ahead of the herd.  That, and making some time to watch The Walking Dead.