Raising Cubby Read Online Free PDF Page B

who admired him for a moment and then passed himto me. Between us, he settled down. I wasn’t sure if the handoff was part of a ritual, but I thought not, because I knew Mom didn’t have any more baby experience than me. Ritual or not, I wanted to be sure the baby I brought home was the same one I was holding that very moment in the delivery room.
    The truth was, I had a fear of baby swapping. Like most people, I had read news stories of baby exchanges (usually, but not always, accidental) with some sense of amusement. But now that I faced the possibility of a personal swap experience I did not find it funny at all. Prior to hatching time, I had studied the layout and operation of the standard baby spaces in hospitals. Armed with that knowledge, I’d made a plan.
    The first and most important step was to get a positive ID on him. A nurse had slipped a name bracelet around his arm, but I knew that could be pulled off and swapped as fast as she’d put it on. I wanted something more personal and I was ready. When the doctor handed me our new hatchling, I quickly but discreetly wiped off his foot and tagged him with a Sharpie permanent marker. He was now the only baby anywhere with a little black triangle on his foot: a delta, the Greek symbol that signifies uncertainty and change. Whatever else he did, he would certainly bring us that.
    With his ID assured, I smiled and handed him to his mom. We were safe. Even if other people carried him away for testing or evaluation, we could be sure of getting the same baby back.
    The doctors and nurses looked at me a bit funny, but I didn’t care. I had not inspected the baby-holding facility at Cooley Dickinson Hospital before that night; for all I knew it was just a big open pen, like the Sunderland fish hatchery. There was no way you’d tell one fish from another without a slime-proof marker. I had looked at the other kids in the ward, and none of them were solidly tagged. Did baby swaps happen often? For all I knew, depraved nurses shuffled babies for entertainment. That was something I might do if I was a bored maternity nurse late at night. Oncewhen I was a teenager, a group of us did that with cars, swapping identical-looking red Toyotas and watching the confusion as their owners tried to figure out how their cars had mutated overnight. (We took advantage of the fact that the key to Doug’s dad’s Toyota fit a number of other vehicles.)
    I have never trusted authority. To me, the idea the hospital would keep track of him was just ridiculous.
    I was surprised to discover that few people shared my point of view. Some of them actually questioned my actions. “You wrote on your baby?” Their tone of voice suggested they could not believe I would mark my kid, but why not? At work I marked my tools to keep them from getting stolen. All I could figure was, those people had never looked at a sea of babies basking under baby warmers and tried to pick out the one that was theirs. Also, the nurses had given Little Bear some awfully powerful painkillers, and if Cubby was taken away and mixed in with other newborns, I doubted that she could recognize him either. The fact is, identifying a baby can be a lot more difficult than identifying someone older. I knew that intuitively. Babies don’t have many distinguishing marks; they are too young for scars and tattoos. Furthermore, they change fast. You can look at two newborns, one bald and the other speckled, and their hair might grow in to look exactly the same a week later. Given all that, marking a brand-new kid seemed like a no-brainer.
    It is possible that I have a particular difficulty in recognizing people I have just met. Neurologist Oliver Sacks has that problem; he’s written about it in
The Mind’s Eye
and other books. My poor recognition capacity might have made me unusually fearful about identifying my own kid. Then again, maybe I am just wiser and more cautious than most. After all, the onus of baby recognition was entirely