Column: Lessons from babies and possums

Babies used to creep me out a little bit.
The vacant stare, the uncontrollable limb spasms, the fact that they have to be extracted Alien-style out of their unfortunate, suffering creators, blind and sticky and covered with things that look like they probably should have stayed where they came from.
The whole business is just a tad too obscure.
Unlike most girls my age, the Treasures ad featuring giggling babies sends me not into a fit of cluckiness but is perching at the top of my list of world's most terrifying things, second only to earwigs and Lotto presenters.
It is perhaps my very limited experience with babies that has caused this fear; while I've spent a significant amount of my working life tutoring and attempting to guide obnoxious tweenies towards the shining path of literacy.
While their vocabulary was almost exclusively limited to "your mum jokes" and while I still have the business end of a 2B lodged in my pinky thanks to a certain student's friskiness with the pencil jar, they were at least capable of speaking, moving and, to an extent, thinking.
In comparison, babies are the amoebae of the mammalian world. In fact, if it weren't for their general tendency to live away from the base vegetation of freshwater ponds and streams I would say they are almost identical; jellylike mass - check, parasitic - check, exist almost solely to "engulf food particles" - check.
If babies could form their own food vacuoles, they'd be pretty much on par.
Unfortunately, they're not that advanced. At least, this is how I felt until I watched a friend of mine with her baby.
Having had close to zero contact with freshly popped versions of the human species, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from my first baby-hold, and although I wasn't exactly anticipating a well articulated greeting and an offer of canapes on arrival, I was expecting a little more than what I got, which was nothing.
No crying, no giggling, no biting, just a bit of an awkward flail and a stare that made me wonder if I had a flesh-eating slug on my face. And yet I was charmed. No, beyond charmed; I was terrified, protective even. The little tyke just had to hiccup and I'd fly into an inward, "Oh my god, I'm going to kill Susan's baby type panic".
No wonder car seats are so expensive. But not only did my first real infant encounter instil an entirely new and somewhat unwelcome feeling of motherliness in me, the  ordeal made me feel  guilty about the events of the week before. My first possum hunt.
Armed with bullets I can't remember the names of, inside a gun I can only describe as heavy, I embarked on my inaugural mission to save New Zealand's precious flora and fauna, read: shoot some stuff.
The next hour and a half proved grisly, loud and, initially, immensely satisfying.
One week on and thanks to the baby and my newfound sentiment, I feel like a ruthless murderer. I know that possums and babies are on an entirely different level. Possums are an imported pest that destroy native wildlife, infect our burgers and have a mating call that sounds like a homicide.
Babies are cute, defenceless and, eventually, capable of more than manic screeching.
It is also incredibly frowned upon to make slippers out of babies. But although the differences between humans and possums are considerable, a baby, no matter what genus, is a baby and as such, the process of reliving my mighty shoot was less of a victory and more of a haunting replay of soulless destruction.
As I watched Susan with her baby, saw her reactions, the way she responded innately to his every movement from blinking to performing excretion No 5012, I came to the scary realisation that it doesn't really matter what babies can or can't do. It's what they represent; innocence, love, an infinite amount of potential and nine months of bloated, moody, fat-ankled torture that makes them, mute as they are, precious beyond belief.
My first possum hunt was probably also my last. While Baby Encounter Number One hasn't converted me to an insipid flag-waving vegan type just yet, and while I'm more than happy for fellow New Zealanders to go out and explode our national furry nemesis to their hearts' content, I can't help thinking of my victim's mum if she's still around, because, amoebae or not, babies are pretty irreplaceable. And even possums must get fat ankles.