Last year my fifteen year old son, Billy, made me a grandmother. Not in the “Oh, for the love of God, why ME,” way that my parents must have felt when I was knocked up at sixteen…but in the form of a computerized plastic doll assigned him by his health teacher. Three days of simulated parenthood intended to diminish the teen sex drive. Good luck with that, I say.
The baby comes with all the necessities and the teen is supposed to ‘fake parent’ the ‘fake baby’ when it ‘fake cries.’ But let me tell you…there is nothing fake about a screaming baby, fake or not, at 3 a.m. Basically what happens is the computerized baby cries and he has two minutes to figure out what it wants or on Monday the printout will fail him as a parent, hence he’ll fail his health class. Needless to say, Billy has no room for error on this one…he has to get the grade.
When we left school Friday afternoon Billy was quite serious about the task. He buckled little Ellen (that’s what I call her…he just calls her ‘it’) into her car seat, tilted her upright until she appeared comfortable and away we went. In the mile and a half ride home he turned to check on her three times. She just stared at him. He seemed a bit disappointed. On arrival, he proudly carried her into the house, displayed her for the other kids and snuggled into the couch with her tucked cozy in his arms.
“Look, mom…she’s holding my hand,” he said proudly.
“You’ve got chores to do,” I reminded all the kids.
“I’ve got a baby.”
“Wow,” I said. ”I wish I could use that excuse. I’ve got six! Now get up and do your chores!”
No sooner had Billy begun his chores when his bundle of joy began to scream as if she had been struck by lightning. He dropped the broom and ran to her like the house was on fire. He rocked her and checked her diaper. Still she screamed. He stuck the bottle to her lips and she began to make adorable sucking sounds. So cute. For fifteen minutes he held the bottle to her mouth, each time he tried to pull away she’d scream some more.
Eventually she made a cooing sound, indicating she was finally sated, and he set her back down, returning to finish the sweeping. And she went off again like a city-wide fire alarm. Mid dust pan he fled the scene, scooped her up and checked all her vitals. This time there was no calming her. She simply wanted rocked. He stood, holding her to his shoulder, swaying his skinny teen boy body back and forth as if he had the hips of a born nanny. He was looking a bit frazzled. I looked on with sympathy…and laughed hysterically inside my head.
An hour later his fifteen minutes of chores complete, Billy commanded his sisters, “Bring me baby clothes!” They swiftly fled to their rooms, gathered armloads of doll clothes and mounded them at his side. He tried on outfit after outfit, holding the apple of his eye up, viewing her from all sides, and finally settling on a fourth of July outfit Grandma made for the girls Cabbage Patch dolls. He struggled to find the arms, and squeeze them through the holes. I pictured if the baby was actually mobile, as a true infant would be, flailing arms and trying to crawl away while he dressed her. With the way he fought the dress, one would have thought she was trying to escape.
The next morning Billy woke looking a bit ruffled. His hair askew, the same clothes he’d worn the night before, eyes bloodshot. He looked just like I remember feeling when my babies were young. Perfect. When asked how he did, he claimed he had woken each time the baby cried, comforted her, fed her, cared for her many times throughout the night and all went well. The girls, however, who slept on the couches outside his bedroom door claimed different. Their scenario included pounding on this door at all hours, finally opening his door, picking the wailing baby from her seat next to his bed and shoving her into his chest…and he still didn’t wake. I suppose the printout on Monday will tell us the true story.
Billy seemed a little tired and edgy all morning. I made some comment about remembering this feeling every time he thought about sex…which for a fifteen year old boy is about every twelve and a half seconds.
In the afternoon Billy set to work cleaning the inside of our van in the driveway. Not long into it I saw he was just sitting there, opened the door to find him gently tapping on her back, bumping her up and down on his knee. ”I’m burping her,” he said from the backseat, surrounded by cleaning supplies.
The cleaning job took three times longer than usual as he was interrupted to feed, change and rock. I checked on him often, not so much for sympathetic as for entertainment reasons. I was not disappointed.
At one point I opened the door to find him cleaning with frenzy, mischievous smile on this face. I looked over at his baby girl, snuggled into her car seat and watching him work…while drinking her bottle…by herself…then I saw why he was smiling. He’d “fixed” his problem by strapping the bottle in place…and knew he had at least fifteen minutes before she would need him again.
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| I’m pretty sure there are laws being broken here… |
He made it through the rest of the day with no help from anyone, as instructed, and I was really quite impressed with how he adapted to the child’s needs, put hers before his own, and truly seemed to grasp how much work a baby could be.
At eleven o’clock on Sunday morning I figured I’d better check on the status downstairs…as I’d not seen either Billy or his daughter all morning…and the replacement cost of the baby is about 300 bucks. I found them sleeping peacefully in each others arms, snapped a good blackmail photo…as any good mother would do…and quietly closed the door to the future.
