Me, a Grandma?
Last Friday at precisely 2:55 p.m. I became a grandma, and then thankfully the nightmare ended at exactly 9 a.m. Sunday morning.
As part of a teen parent awareness program, my daughter brought home a lifelike, electronic baby, which she was to care for over the weekend as if it were a real newborn. I knew we were in for trouble as soon as she asked me to pick her up from school on Friday because she couldn’t imagine taking the baby along with all of its paraphernalia on the bus. When I arrived at the school I was a little surprised by the fact that the my daughter carried only two items, an infant carrier containing one plastic infant and a diaper bag that was smaller than most cosmetic cases I own.
“I think you could have managed taking the bus,” I told her as she plopped the child seat in the back of the van.
“You’ve got to be crazy if you think I’m lugging all this stuff onto a crowded bus.”
“All this stuff!” I replied. “Try it with five duffle bags, a car seat, and a baby swing, which is what I had to lug on the bus when you guys were little.” I peeked in the diaper bag and noticed that it contained one diaper, one sleeper suit, and one bottle. “Well, if that were a real baby you’d be all set for at least 30 seconds.”
After twelve years of infant-free living you’d think that I’d have lost some of my baby instincts, but apparently once conditioned to infant care you never recover. As I bolted out of bed for the third time that first night, I groggily wondered if Pavlov’s dogs ever stopped salivating whenever a doorbell rang.
By Saturday afternoon my daughter was begging everyone in the house to baby-sit so she could get some sleep. The only one who seemed even remotely interested was the dog.
By the time the robotic child shut down on Sunday morning my child’s ambitions had been simplified to only two things: she wanted to sleep uninterrupted for a duration longer than length of an average movie and she wanted to eat a hot meal while it was still hot. I was a little surprised and saddened at the realization that after 22 years of motherhood, I had only attained one of these goals, I had given up on ever eating food that was more than lukewarm.
Besides the obvious lessons that the experience taught my daughter about being a mom, specifically that she didn’t want to be one, ever, we both learned some very valuable truths that were unanticipated.
For example, my daughter learned that growling is not an effective parenting tool, which I assured her had nothing to do with the fact that the plastic baby was not programmed to respond to sound.
We learned that although electronic babies do exhibit many characteristics of real babies, they are dissimilar in that without the ability to produce noxious fluids, solids, and gasses from both ends, the fake baby needs only one outfit of clothing for the duration of its existence whereas a real baby would need 26 per day. This incredibly essential detail was actually left out of the electronic programming of the fake baby, however, since I felt that it was a vital part of child rearing I compensated for it by occasionally dripping sour milk on it’s clothing and saying things like: “Oops, baby had a little upset tummy, gotta change her clothes.” This technique was effective at accomplishing two things: it added reality to the experience for my daughter, and, after only a few hours, ensured that she would keep the baby as far away from me as the constrains of the house allowed.
We learned that plastic babies and real babies are similar in that they both respond to begging at 4 a.m. in exactly the same way, with complete disinterest and an utter lack of empathy.
Most importantly we learned that puppies do not distinguish shapes, but only material, as in plastic is plastic no matter if it is in the form of a baby or not. Also, no one will give you a loan to replace a $1000 robotic baby that has had its feet chewed off.