BABIES (Part Two)

Angelification of babies proceeds and expands.  And the realification of dolls is right behind.  They are “touch-activated” to breathe, coo, and move their limbs.  I’ve been seeing them in films now and then.  They don’t have agents.  You can buy one for $150 or so.   Real live human babies are regulated by law and have a disconcerting way of growing faster than the script progresses.  I scoff and mock and resist the appeal of babies, but it’s impossible not to respond some way or other.

This is an ultra-real doll that has been worked on individually by an artist.

When I was doing my hospital chaplaincy, I was called to the baby ward because the mother of one of the babies scheduled for cleft palate surgery wanted a rosary.  We had some, but no Catholic chaplain.  The mother and child were black, the mother was young and did not look well, and the baby was adorable and perfect except for the gap in her upper lip.  The mother and I chatted, she refused more than just the rosary, and that was the end. 

A real baby

But in a few days I stopped back to see how things were going.  The nurse gave me the eye.  The rosary was attached to the baby’s crib.  No mother had appeared again since I was there.  “She just wanted magic.  She wasn’t even Catholic.  We’ll never see her again.”  Even if I had been as experienced and insightful as the nurse, I still wouldn’t have been able to do anything.  “I’m rushed off my feet,” said the nurse. “Would you give the baby her bottle?”   The last time I’d given a baby a bottle it was a bobcat kitten who chewed off the nipple.   But I plunked in the rocker, accepted this little chocolate-sweet creature and spent the next half-hour trying to get the formula past her leaky mouth while she gazed trustingly into my face.

When I came back again, she had had her surgery and was moved someplace else.  I never saw her again.  By now she would be middle-aged.  Her baby eyes still show up in my mind.  I hope she was raised by someone who loved her.   I do not at all begrudge the taxpayer cost of her surgery.  I don’t care whether she EVER goes to Disneyland. Some things matter and some things don’t.

The cultural forces now coming to bear on the baby issue include our ability to save preemies when they are on the far edge of survival and will probably have damage that will cost a LOT of money.  We can save spina bifida babies.  Strong forces oppose the abortion of severely damaged or incomplete fetuses.  Those who are looking at the reality would like to spare the suffering.  Those with moral lockjaw insist that child suffering is sacred. 

Again during my hospital chaplaincy, a baby was born with its insides outside.  It lived seventeen days.  The parents refused surgery but there was no legal euthanasia possible.  The nurses did their best to keep the baby comfortable while it starved.  Another culture would simply have killed it at birth.  When it died, I went to comfort the nurses and they did not want me.   As gently as they could manage through their pain, they told me they were united in their experience and I wasn’t.  Please leave.

Another force for baby obsession is late-in-life pregnancies or impossible pregnancies, maybe due to earlier decisions or maybe due to the mysterious creeping industrial toxic molecules that saturate everything from our mop pails to our lipsticks.  The mythic elevation of being a working woman in a stylish suit and four-inch-heels is replaced with the image of the Madonna to justify changing desiderata.

This baby was abandoned on the NY subway.

On the other hand, the gay community is looking at the American nuclear family.  Now that they’re married, where are the kids to raise?   They long to have a little body to cradle in their strong arms.   The kids who so badly need just a few more years of basic food, shelter, and help with homework in order to get to adulthood are passed over because of the mystique of onesies, expensive English baby carriages, and stuffed animals that talk.  

We’re told one form of depression and anxiety is numbness.  Our hunger for “feeling” can seem to suggest the brilliant idea of raising a baby.  It’s always portrayed as so rewarding.  Sometimes that’s more of a feeling in retrospect, not so much at 3AM when the baby won’t . . . oh, I don’t have to tell you.

Pedo-predators

But maybe I do need to tell you that a small, vulnerable, ever-so-tender-and-sweet baby can strike some people as the saying goes:  “Good enough to eat.”  It arouses something in the brain chemistry that most people just pass by or laugh off, but a few people will act on in an urge to destroy, a literal response, maybe left over from some primal carnivorous impulse.  Put a newly hatched duckling in their hands and you can see on their faces they want to crush it.  (It's an acknowledged sexual "kink," usually with a woman in 4-inch heels crushing it.)  Bar Jonah, of course, acted on that impulse.  Strangely, in the grip of postpartum depression or the more intense postpartum psychosis, some protection against that impulse switches off in the brain, and mothers kill their babies.  Some people, esp. men, shift rage off onto anyone who hurts babies -- that is, they want to crush abusers of babies.  The remedy is not a matter of eliminating the predatory impulse, since it's everywhere, but keeping strong the guard against it lest it break through.

Humans are fractal.  One force balances another.  At every level an effective pattern repeats, including the cellular tug-of-war. If there are molecules in tension, there are neuron nexuses in tension: one that says, “Catch it and eat it!”  And another that says, “Aaaaaw, so cute!”  Strangest of all is the voice that says,  “It’s a danger!  Kill it!”, reacting as though a baby were a snake or spider.  Beyond that, what voice tells a berzerk soldier to cut open a pregnant mother in order to bayonet the fetus?   

Historically kings have ordered first-born children less than a year old to be murdered in their homes throughout a whole country.  They don’t do it themselves, of course.  If we’re going to get into the Bible there’s Abraham restrained only by an angel, but  there are always accusations of infanticide.  It shows up in “Game of Thrones.”  Classic.  Pervasive.

Another ultra-real doll

Where there is great exaltation or deep bonding, there is much potential for transgressive insult, high-value destruction.  That can be such a brain jolt that it exceeds non-endogenous drugs.  Googling turns up people asking for help, both mothers who have a terrible impulse to pinch their babies and people who find babies sexually desirable.  I have to struggle to understand how the idea would even occur to them.  That's what this writing is, struggling to figure it out.

But then I think about intensely realistic babydolls and how they trigger a kind of desire to hold them to your chest, to kiss them, to run palms over their soft bodies, to cradle their heads.  To OWN them.  Deep in the past when I babysat and changed a boy’s diaper, it wasn’t unusual for him to have a wee stiffie, since he didn’t know he was supposed to be innocent and sexless like a doll -- well, dolls of the past.  All babies will suck a fingertip if it’s in their mouth.  If a person were to . . . well, they can’t tell what happens to them, can they?  But sometimes the coroner can figure it out.

Doll customized to look like Prince George of Cambridge

They say there is a distinct difference between homosexuals who desire other men while despising women, and homosexuals who desire other men but befriend women.  Maybe there is something like that difference in regard to children.  I mean, some men of whatever sexual orientation, love to nurture and protect little children while others want to make them suffer -- one theory being that they themselves suffered as younglings.  With women, I think the difference is between those who welcome the fusion -- so close to love-making -- of nursing and rocking a baby and those who fear babies as an entrapment, an obligation, a destruction of their independence.  Maybe they despair of meeting the demand.  Maybe that’s how some men feel about women.  The violence is a clue.

This man is the baby's grandfather.

A culture, mysteriously and for its own survival reasons, will throw out mythological nets to hold people in place, ensnaring them with baby dolls or promises of sexual ecstasy or marriages sealed in heaven, because, as Albert Schweitzer said while in a boat on a great river in the engulfing jungle,  “Life is in the midst of life, life that wants to live.”  Fractally, at every level.