Oh Baby

 This is an excerpt from the book, “I Have No Business Being Here” - available now. Read the whole collection here.

One summer morning, my mom rounded the corner of our hallway and found me, her youngest child, just ten-years-old on the toilet, in turn guzzling soda and grunting. She greeted me with the same gentle confusion as always.

"What are we doing now?" she asked, looking from the two-liter bottle of Sprite on the counter to my legs dangling from the toilet.

"I thought if you ate or drank while on the toilet, it would immediately come out," I said, pants gathered around my ankles. I had taken several gulps from the bottle beside me, and no matter how I bore down, nothing came out but a few trickles.

She had found me in similar scenarios before, but she rarely judged. Even when she found me sitting at our coffee table, covering my face in watercolor paints while wearing a floor-length vintage lace nightie with a Marvin the Martian T-shirt, she said nothing. Any time she walked into my room to find me sitting on the end of my blue velour inflatable sofa having a full-on conversation with the air, she never judged. (To clarify, I wasn't talking to myself. I wasn't that pathetic. I was giving an interview to David Letterman and his studio audience.)

Given my track record, there was nothing surprising about my little experiment.

"That's not how that works, ding dong," she said walking away. She added over her shoulder, "Don't waste all the Sprite."

I was offended at her flippant dismissal. How dare she challenge my scientific inquiry. I didn't have a lot to go on. I went to public school in the conservative state of Texas, so anything below the waist was explained "because God" or left a mystery. And my parents weren't much help. They relied on the science teachers for the explanations. Meanwhile, they gave me a series of electronic children over the course of my life, none of whom possessed or explained realistic human bodily functions.

The first of these was a doll called "Baby Alive" I received a few years before the toilet test. Rather than a lifeless, plush Cabbage Patch doll, Baby Alive did just what real kids do – eat, drink, and soil themselves. The only thing this doll didn't do was grow up to resent me.

She came with a mechanical mouth, and a little bowl and spoon from which you fed it "food." The food was small packets of powder that, when mixed with water, formed pastes in such appetizing colors as beet red, grass green, and a putrid yellow that you would then force feed into the doll's gaping maw.

Baby Alive did not have a sophisticated digestive tract. I had to change the doll's wet diaper immediately after eating because Baby Alive®, much like me in my 30s, almost instantaneously evacuated her bowels and bladder after every meal. The food substance shot out of the round, quarter-sized hole in her bottom the same color as it had gone in. So after a delicious meal of red paste, Baby Alive® produced a veritable crime scene in her pants.

When I ran out of food packets, mom informed me that there would be no more packets to replenish the food supply. We soon learned doll food rations were expensive. The box warned against feeding the baby anything but the pre-approved packets, which was a pretty good racket for Hasbro.

From that day forward, my Baby Alive® subsisted on water only, which made being a parent seem pretty cheap and easy. The commercial's catchy jingle had promised an experience "so real." However, reality would have necessarily involved government intervention when I fed my child only water, then eventually nothing. I ended up leaving her nude and abandoned in a plastic crib, exposed to the elements, batteries corroding, forgotten for years in a space beneath the treehouse in my parents' backyard.

Later, I would get a Nano Baby. This was an egg-sized electronic "game" with a gray square screen on which a cartoon baby would appear, asking to be played with, fed, or changed. I should mention there was no off-switch, and without proper attention, Nano Baby would simply die. As it was only a toy, you could reanimate your dead Nano Baby by jamming a paperclip into its reset port in the back.

One trick to avoiding the death/regeneration cycle of my Nano Baby was to leave it in my mom's care. That meant that even when my sister and I were at school, she had not even one moment of peace, forced to feed, play with, and change a digital dependent during what was her only time alone during the day.

I received my third robot child for one week during my sophomore year of high school. Prior classes took home flour sacks covered in nylon pantyhose. Not my class. We got a fresh crop of Ready-or-Not Tots, infant size robots that used computer chips to track the treatment students inflicted upon them. We had to soothe it when it cried, feed it, change it and wake up with it during the night.

The Ready-or-Not Tot sat mostly upright, with a forlorn look on its face, arms outstretched. It's rubber expression seemed to say "Love me or you'll get a C.". The mold that the manufactures had used for the face made it appear as if, at some point, this creature was sentient but had now realized its horrible fate. Doomed to be forever stuffed into lockers, forgotten in backpacks, left crying in the trunk of a car, ignored by teenagers while they make out in dark parking lots.

A week after adopting our ever-watchful plastic children, we were to return them to Mrs. Gragg, the kind, soft-spoken child development teacher. She would then plug the child into its base, and the baby would give us a grade.

I received my Ready-or-Not Tot the same week I was taking driver's ed. While my mom sat for Ready-or-Not Tot, I attended class in a strip mall storefront, wedged between a Blockbuster Video store and a Cici's Pizza Buffet. Our teacher, who I'll call Pam, was a round woman with unnaturally bleached hair who barked at us like a drill sergeant. I'm not sure if it was the room or her, but the classroom always smelled like freshly popped popcorn.

Night after night, Pam began class by following the state sanctioned video then workbook format. But without fail, whenever we got to the discussion portion, she would veer off course.

Now, looking back as an adult, I understand Pam a little more. Allowing 15-year-olds on the road is, for the most part, a terrible idea. I've also come to understand that once you have experienced the wrenching grip of tragedy, it is hard to function without that tragedy then coloring everything else you do. But we all have to soldier on and not let that tragedy pour out of us at every occasion. If we don't, we become that one person at the party, you know the one, who has to be handled with kid gloves lest we give them the opportunity to let the story slip out. Pam was that person. And her trigger for telling that story was driving. Also cars. Rules of the road. The road itself. Yellow lines. Curbs. Basically everything we covered in the class set her off.

If they gave awards for enduring human tragedy, Pam would win by a mile. Not only did she seem to suffer from some popcorn-related physical malady, she had lost nearly everyone close to her to one common wicked foe: decapitation.

Her teaching method relied heavily on personal anecdotes. Every cautionary tale she shared with the class of apprehensive soon-to-be drivers ended in decapitation. I tried researching the statistical likelihood of being decapitated but could not find any reliable statistics. If we are going by Pam's numbers, the chances are about one in five.

Each lesson was introduced by a happy but stern woman on a tube TV that Pam wheeled in from the back room. After the video, we were given worksheets with blanks that corresponded to the video.

The proper following distance is ______ feet behind the car in front of you.

Pam would rush through the workbook answers, then launch into an anecdote about a family member, friend, or friend of her son whose lives were cut short by that vicious and all too common beast, decapitation. The cause of death in each case was decapitation, and the cause of each instance of decapitation was a lack of attention to the Texas Department of Public Safety's guidelines.

"My son knew a boy whose name was Kevin," she began one day when the subject was tailgating. "He drove a beautiful black Camaro. He followed a semi-truck too closely, much closer than the 150 feet suggested by the Texas DPS. When the semi stopped, Kevin's car went right underneath. Kevin was decapitated," she said. The class stared at her. No one spoke. "So," she concluded. "Don't follow too close."

In reality, a far more likely result of following too close is a rear end collision. Everybody's heads remain attached to their respective bodies and, at most, you will probably be sued by the other driver. It may require everyone to go to court, testify, and be forced to take a day off work. Your insurance premiums will probably go up. A real pain in the ass, and I suppose, only slightly less painful than decapitation.

During the chapter about stopping to render aid, Pam shared another story.

"My husband and I were driving home when we saw an SUV on the side of the road in a ditch. As we approached, we noticed it was the McNally's car. They were a family from our church. As opened the door to look inside, we found the whole family. Everyone in the backseat had been decapitated."

Everyone? I thought. In the backseat?

I had so many questions but said nothing. It wasn't my place to question her. I couldn't even drive a car, not legally at least. And she had sat front row to the worst driving had to offer. Maybe she really did see decapitated bodies in the back of that SUV. Maybe she stumbled upon some crime scene, the work of some lucky serial killer who had found himself the perfect hiding place: right in Pam's sight where it could be brushed off as, not a crime, but the result of yet another case of reckless disregard for the rules of the road.

After five solid evenings spent in that strip mall store front, the classroom portion was over. Another student and I were then scheduled to spend a few hours with Popcorn Pam behind the wheel getting on-the-road experience.

But when we arrived at the school that Saturday, Pam was absent. Trevor, a 20-something substitute instructor was there instead. He took us cruising around our hometown in the driving school's tan Saturn sedan. We went through the motions, making the requisite turns and doing our assigned parking jobs. The other student was behind the wheel when Trevor asked our opinion of the classroom portion.

"That lady, Pam, is a nut," I said. "She always smells like popcorn and every story ends in decapitation." There was a long pause.

"Well she's my mom, so..." Trevor said, staring straight forward out the windshield. The other student sucked in air, and I slumped in the backseat, ashamed.

Aside from some awkwardly mumbled instructions, we were all silent for the remainder of the lesson. I felt so guilty for insulting his mom, but how was I supposed to know he was her son? His head was still attached to his body.

I felt like a monster. This woman had opened herself up, shared tragic stories with us, and my inclination was to mock her. I imagined someone mocking my mom and felt myself get angry. I looked at Trevor with disdain as he remained quiet. If someone were to come after my mother, I wouldn't be so passive.

Despite my blunder, Trevor gave me a passing grade on the driving portion. That coupled with the five evenings of lectures on all the possible beheading scenarios that accompany driving, got me my license.

During this time, my mom cared dutifully for her plastic grandchild. At the end of the week, when Mrs. Gragg plugged Ready or Not Tot into its base, the report revealed my mom had done an A+ job. The machine indicated that the baby was never neglected or ignored. Mrs. Gragg announced that my baby had been cared for perfectly, proving that my mom was indeed ready and capable of raising a child.

None of my three pretend-children made me want kids. All three were unfeeling nuisances I saddled my mom to care for. Maybe that's the real lesson – not in my interaction with the fake babies, but in my mom's interaction with me.

The real test for when I'm ready to have kids will be when I'm ready to love a creature as she loves me: patient and kind, caring but realistic, ceaselessly supportive. Either that, or I should just hurry up and have one now while she's still around to lend a hand and help keep me from needing to press the reset button.

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