Entry #13: BABIES ARE PEOPLE

BABIES ARE PEOPLE

Most of us took Psychology 101 - or maybe Parenting 101: Learned On the Job - and figured out that little babies are hella confused. They don't realize those fingery things attacking them are their own hands. They don't know that they have ears or feet. They don't realize yet that there is Self and Other. Eventually they figure out that Other will feed them when they are hungry (hopefully), but it takes a long time to learn that sometimes Other goes out of sight and does different things all by itself. That gets lonely, but if you cry, Other will come back again and pick you up (hopefully).

When I had my first child, we were inseparable. Poor Baby had colic for three months and could not eat without crying. Or do anything else without crying. No one told me she was probably allergic to all that milk I was drinking. She cried and wailed and kicked my caesarean scar, and I cried right along with her.

It's tough being a baby - with colic! The world is loud and incomprehensible, you have gas pains all the time, and you're often hungry, too. Your body keeps surprising you by doing things like randomly sneezing or hiccoughing you. Soon you get your first cold, and you don't know yet that you're supposed to breathe through your mouth when your nose is stuffed up, so you sniffle and snuffle for days.

People want to meet you, and they pinch your cheeks, or peer into your baby carriage, or try to pick you up. Poor Baby had a solution for this: she shrieked and turned purple from crying. Sometimes she would expel all the air out of her lungs with such force that there would be silence at the end, long enough for me to wonder if she would ever inhale again. It was terrifying,

Poor Baby was extremely sensitive. She and I were bonded 24 hours a day while I tried to ease her pains and calm her nerves. If people came to the house, we would go upstairs where it was quiet and free of intruders. Poor Baby heard every sound in the  house, and would wake up screaming if someone ripped off a length of tin foil in the kitchen. She noticed every detail - which some people still believe babies cannot do - and cried in horror when her father washed his hair and it stood up on his head instead of lying down the usual way.

Poor Baby never slept longer than four hours at a stretch. Somehow I knew instinctively the moment before she was about to awaken in the middle of the night, and would stumble into her room and be standing by her crib just as she woke up. She did not need to cry from hunger. I was already there.

With a crying infant in the house, no prior experience with babies, a caesarean to recover from, and no outside help, I no longer had time to spend on the made-up needs of my own mother. Just a few days after the birth of Poor Baby I received from her a tan mailing envelope. What kind of baby present fits in a large, flat envelope?

There was no baby present. The envelope was filled with grainy photocopies of photographs of my mother as a baby. LOOK AT ME, The photographs seemed to shout. FORGET THAT OTHER BABY! YOU WANT A BABY?  I CAN BE A BABY, TOO!

My mother had been deeply resentful of her own children, and now she was deeply resentful of the arrival of my daughter. From Day One it was a competition for my attention, which SHE ALONE deserved.

Obviously my mother was not babysitting material, but she would call occasionally. Once I explained that I had to hang up because something was getting on Poor Baby's nerves. My mother said, "Babies don't have NERVES," as if I was an idiot.

The next time she called, Poor Baby started to cry, and I said I had to go. "Why?" my mother asked. "When babies cry, it means they want to be alone."

I may have been an inexperienced mother, but I knew that was insane. Apparently when I had cried as an infant, she had decided that I "wanted to be alone."

I realized my mother was such a travesty about childrearing that I became filled with incandescent rage. Now that I had a precious, perfect child of my own, I realized on a profound level what a heinously bad parent she really had been.

My mother refused to use Poor Baby's real name. She said she wanted to call her "E.T." after the movie alien. Containing my rage, I explained that this baby was not "E.T." - or any of the other bizarre, arbitrary names my mother tried to use. She had a lovely name, and we were going to use it.

When my mother phoned, she would ask in a creepy tone, "How is it?", as if we had an amoeba or an armadillo. Not "she," but "it." What the hell kind of grandmother refers to her grand-daughter as an "it"?

Now I know, after years of therapy, that there is a phenomenon called "objectification." During war, soldiers will mentally turn the enemy into objects to psychologically enable them to shoot other human beings. Objectification makes it possible to harm, maim, or kill someone, but still see yourself as a good person. The "object" is bad and deserves your mistreatment.

When you pretend a baby has no nerves and cries to be alone, you turn the child into an object. When you call an infant an "it," she ceases to be a beautiful baby girl and becomes just a thing you can pick up or put down like a glass of gin.

It takes a special kind of person to objectify children. The pattern is established early and, without intervention, lasts throughout life. 

We call this kind of person a child molester.