Adventures in Babyholding: “I Am Here to Hold the Baby.”

I recently mentioned in the comments that I held a baby once. This is not strictly true. I have held two different babies on two separate occasions. Really, I have probably held babies more than that, but I can only remember the two times because holding babies tends to be pretty much the same every time.

The first baby was the little brother of a grade-school friend of mine who I will call Pam because that is almost her name. Pam was eight-years-old and the oldest of four girls when her mom became pregnant with a fifth child. I don’t remember how it came up, but at some point we found out that Pam’s dad had decided that they were going to keep having kids until one of them was a boy. Doesn’t Pam’s dad sound great? He called his wife, “Mother,” and she called him “Dad.” He looked like Joe Garagiola, but with a unibrow. As it turned out, baby #5 was a boy and Pam’s mom was allowed to retire her reproductive system.

A few months after Simba was born, I went over to Pam’s house for the express purpose of holding him. I knocked on the door and when Pam’s mom answered, I announced, “I am here to hold the baby.” Which in retrospect sounds odd, but that’s how I remember it. Before I get to the thrilling tale of how I held the baby, I should say that historically Pam’s mom had not been a huge fan of mine. I think it’s because one time I accidentally shut their station wagon door on her arm. She treated me with a certain level of suspicion after that. But during Pregnancy #5, I was over at the house one day and she was vacuuming. As soon as she put the vacuum cleaner away, one of Pam’s sisters threw a bowl of dry corn flakes on the floor, causing Pam’s mom to cry out, “you know Dad likes a clean house!” which prompted me to ask, “then why doesn’t he clean it?” She didn’t answer, but after that, Pam’s mom seemed to think I was okay.

At any rate, I knock on the door, announce my intentions regarding her baby, and Pam’s mom tells me to sit in the rocking chair. She hands me the baby swaddled in a blanket, and goes to the kitchen to start fixing Pam’s dad’s dinner or to weep or possibly both. After a few minutes of electrifying baby-holding action, Simba starts making those “enh! enh! enh!” noises and kicking his blanket off. As I was only a child myself, I called for parental intervention. “Mrs. Hamilton! Mrs. Hamiliton! The baby is not cooperating!” Or something. I don’t remember what I said. Pam’s mom said, “oh, he’s just being fussy,” scooped him up, took him back to his crib, and then I went home. The end.

But wait, there’s more. Shortly thereafter, and probably unrelated to the time I held the baby, the family decided to move to the suburbs. Pam’s dad wanted his son to grow up in a nicer neighborhood, and they moved at the beginning of summer. A year later, a bunch of us from the old neighborhood were invited to Pam’s birthday party. My friend Lynette’s trashy mom drove all of us in her Pontiac. When we got there, it turned out that except for Pam’s sisters, we were the only kids at the party. They had lived there for a year, and Pam had made no new friends.

The thing about Pam was that she was a giant weirdo. She wore eyeglasses from the 1950s. She called jeans, “dungarees.” Every day at lunch, she ate her peanut butter and jelly sandwich by taking a bite at the top of the sandwich and then nomming all the way down the center of the bread, leaving the left third of the sandwich in her left hand and the right third in her right hand and the middle third in her mouth, where she would chew on it for 7 to 12 minutes before swallowing with an audible gulping noise. And then there was the horse obsession. A lot of little girls love horses to distraction, but Pam went way beyond that. I can’t say for sure, but she may have wanted to be a horse. At recess, she was always trying to get us to “play horses,” a game which consisted of her circling the playground making clip clop noises with her feet and the rest of us clip clopping along behind her. But the strange part of it is that while we were clip clopping along, we were also holding the imaginary reins and when it was time to stop, we were supposed to pull up on the imaginary reins and say, “Whoa, girl!” So I was never sure if we were horses or girls riding horses or grade-school centaurs or what. It was a confusing game, metaphysically speaking.

Thus, I can see why she had no friends after a year. We were her friends because she hadn’t come to us as The New Girl. If she had, in the nutty glasses and needing to be Heimliched every day at lunch before taking a good long gallop around the monkey bars, we probably wouldn’t have been all that eager to hang out either. But because as far as we were concerned, she had always been there and she was always like that, even though she was clearly a crazy person, she was our crazy person.

At her birthday party, the first order of business was to go to her room and look at her collection of plastic horse figurines. She had at least twenty, each with its own name and personality and proclivities, which she lovingly detailed to us for what was probably the millionth time. Then it was time to go outside and play horses. We clip clopped around on their sidewalk, all of us feeling like idiots except for Pam, who seemed pretty happy. Then we went back in to check on the plastic horse figurines. And then it was time to open the presents. Pam opened the one from her dad first and it was a A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer.

Just kidding. It was a plastic horse. She immediately took it to her room so she could introduce it to the other plastic horses. Suddenly, we heard her voice like a car alarm. “MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!” Her mom and Lynette’s trashy mom went to see what was wrong, while out in the living room, Tammie and Lynn told the rest of us that they took all of the plastic horses off the shelf and hid them in Pam’s sister’s toy chest. We all ran down to the room to find Pam jabbering about the paddock gate or the barn door or something, while her mother said, “obviously someone is playing a trick on you.” And then she looked at me! I had nothing to do with it! I thought we were cool, Pam’s mom! Remember when I said your husband should clean the house? Come on!

Tammie and Lynn triumphantly threw open the lid of the toy chest, revealing all of the horses. Pam took one look and let out a very cinematic scream.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!”

Pam’s mom reached in and pulled out a plastic horse and the plastic horse’s plastic leg, which had broken off. And a plastic shotgun to humanely euthanize him. (That last thing is untrue. I get loopy when my posts seem to go on forever with no ending in sight.) She held the horse and his leg up, which caused Pam to fling herself face down on her bed and wail as if she were being beaten with a large stick. Tammie and Lynn began apologizing profusely and probably would have started crying themselves, when Pam’s mom told them that that horse’s leg was always breaking off and getting glued back on, so they shouldn’t feel bad. Meanwhile, Pam is still face down on the bed, wailing. All of the girls, minus Pam, were ushered back into the living room where we were served cake and punch, which we ate with heavy hearts. It didn’t help that we could still hear Pam sobbing.

After a while, she quieted down but didn’t reappear. Pam’s mom gave each of us a bag of party favors and we all piled into Lynette’s trashy mom’s Pontiac to go home. As we started to drive away, Pam came galloping up to the car, pulled up on the imaginary reins, and with a big goofy smile on her face started waving at us with both hands.

“Thanks for coming! Thanks for all the presents!” Man, Pam was nuts, but she certainly had good manners. She took a last look at Lynette’s trashy mom and said, “thanks for bringing the party here!” before turning and galloping up the driveway and off into the sunset, and by “sunset,” I mean “semi-finished basement.” Godspeed, Crazypants. Godspeed.

Next time on Adventures in Babyholding: Glamour Magazine leads a young girl astray.

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