On Becoming a Little Mommy

I love babies but I can’t stand kids”

That was my mother explaining why she was signing our family up to take in foster babies. Daddy didn’t question it. Anything that brought in even a little more money was welcome. He fixed cars at the local Ford dealership and in the summer would go back out after supper to paint houses. For awhile there, before it beat him up too badly, he was also doing second shift work as a dispatcher for a trucking company.

There were four of us girls and I’m the “eldest” as Mom always put it. I was eleven when Baby Boy Charles came to live with us.

We knew he was Baby Boy Charles because that information plus his birth-weight were all that was written on the index card that came with him when he arrived. He was not at all typical of the infants we would get after him. Generally, we would get four-day-old babies who would stay with us until they were four months old which was the adoption age in Ohio at the time. Then, off they’d go and within a couple of days, another one would arrive.

Baby Boy Charles, or Charlie Brown as we nicknamed him, was about nine months old and had something wrong with one wrist and hand. It was kind of curled around oddly and he couldn’t straighten it. Mom said it was “spastic”. Because of this, the agency was having difficulties in finding adoptive parents for our little spastic Charlie Brown.

I took over with Charlie the minute he arrived. As the oldest of four girls, I already had plenty of experience with diapers and feeding schedules. At that point, our youngest sister was three, so my next younger sister and I had been on the job for years.

Charlie Brown became my baby

I got very territorial with that baby. Unless I was in school or at church choir practice after school, no one else fed Charlie. I bathed him, diapered him, sat up with him when he was fussy and didn’t want to sleep. And he bonded with me to the point that he wouldn’t eat or go to sleep for anyone else.

It was like having a real live doll baby.

Because of Charlie’s disability, we had him for far longer than we ever had the “normal” infants that came after him. Blissfully, I stepped into my role as little Mommy and took the best care I could of that little guy. And, keep in mind, that these were the days before Pampers. Not that my mother would have ever bothered with such nonsense. Cloth diapers. Diaper pails filled with bleach water and learning how to pin a diaper onto a squirming baby making sure that if the pin bit flesh, it was mine.

Did I get bored or resentful?

I might have. Memory is the most unreliable narrator. But I don’t recall that being the case.

I do recall being blind-sided the day I came home to feed “my” baby and he was gone. The agency said that they’d finally found a family for my Baby Boy Charles and had come to take him while I was in school. I don’t remember being warned that this would happen but that may only mean that I ignored the reminders that this wiggly, sunny, dear little boy was not going to be with us for always.

I think something got knocked sideways that day when I came home, ready to feed my little guy and found him gone. As in completely gone. His clothes, toys, everything that was Charlie Brown was gone as if none of it had ever been there. About a week later, a tiny new infant arrived with its index card.

I backed right off

It’s not as if I had a choice, however. My sisters and I were always expected to help around the house and I had the 6 am feeding. But I’d learned my lesson. I didn’t cuddle any of the new babies (much) and I don’t remember one of their names.

For years we had a steady stream of tiny infants arrive, live with us for four months and then go off to their forever homes.

By the time I was 16 things were getting dicey around the house. There was a lot more drinking going on and Daddy was certain that Mom was sleeping around. This made for some godawful nights of furniture being thrown around, the police arriving and then Daddy crying. It was so horrible that I tried to stay away as much as I could.

Then came Baby Girl Dawn

We called her Dawnie. She had been removed from an abusive mother and was probably close to a year old but was tiny and traumatized. Funny the details that do stick in one’s memory: her little toe was bruised. She was one shut-down little girl who was silent for months.

Because her mother was fighting to regain custody of her and her twin sister who had been placed in another foster home there were no possible adoptive parents in the picture and Dawn lived with us for nearly four years. I only found out years later that my parents had been fighting unsuccessfully for all those years to adopt Dawn.

She became the fifth daughter.

It took time, but kids are resilient as weeds if they fall into the right garden. We were the right garden. In under a year, Dawnie was a normal two-year-old who was absolutely adored by everyone in the family. None of us girls whined about having to feed or bathe that little darling. She thrived in our home and, for a time there, the friction between our parents was camouflaged.

But Charlie Brown had been my baby in a way that Dawnie never would. I was also revving my engines for escape.

I believe I’d already left home when the unimaginable happened. Dawnie’s mother moved to the neighboring county and regained custody of both girls. I wasn’t there for the fallout but losing that fifth daughter and knowing she was going back to a possibly abusive situation cut my Mom’s heart out. That was the end of taking in foster babies.

Mom had finally bonded with a kid that she could love. No more.

Is this why I never wanted kids?

Who knows? My next-younger sister got pregnant on her honeymoon. Of the four of us, I’m the only one who didn’t have kids.

Going off the deep end, moving to a nearby city with (surprise!) an abusive boyfriend and beginning my 17-year slide into the gutter, I was in no shape to be parenting. The fates took pity on me and in all those years when I wasn’t being at all responsible, I did not get pregnant. Go, fates!

I keep a little notebook by the bed and do a mini-gratitude list every night before going to bed. Often enough one of those items is my gratitude that I never wanted to have kids and that I never did have any. My tiny window of being a play-Mommy to a disabled baby would not have prepared me for motherhood nor did it instill any desire for that in my life.

Like my mom, I love babies but I’m not crazy about kids.

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