: write what you know!

Baby Lift - Christmas 1961

by Megan Hicks

 

1961 was a year you could stand on its head and it would still be 1961. That hadn't happened since 1881. And it wouldn't happen again for over 4000 years – 6009.

It was a topsy turvy year in other ways, too. 1961 marked the beginning of the Peace Corps and construction on the Berlin Wall. Human beings defied gravity and orbited the earth in rocket ships. And in the space of five short months, I went from Baby in the Family…a job I had held for eleven years…to Big Sister.

In 1961, while my mom and dad and sister and I were on vacation visiting relatives in Oklahoma, my baby sister was born – in Seoul, South Korea. That was a really hard time in Seoul, so soon after the Korean War, and lot of little kids ended up in orphanages waiting to be adopted.

My mom and dad conceived the idea of having another kid. They made long distance phone calls. They filled out papers. They interviewed with social workers and lawyers, and after several weeks they got a letter that said, "Congratulations! You are now the legal adoptive parents of a four-month-old baby girl. BUT…"

…we couldn't meet her yet. We had to wait until enough adoptions had been processed that the orphanage in Korea could fill an airplane and bring them to the United States all at once. They said the next Baby Lift would happen in December.

How 'bout that? I was getting a baby sister for Christmas! The Baby Lift was scheduled to land at San Francisco Airport on December 17.

We lived in Long Beach, California, then. It took a whole day to drive to San Francisco. I had about eight hours in the back seat to think about all the changes that were on the way.

I wasn't going to be the baby in the family anymore. Good. What eleven-year-old wants to be referred to as "the baby"? But if I wasn't the baby, then what would I be? There was already a big sister in this family with a three year jump on me. My sister Mary was tidy, hygienic, neat, and organized. None of those adjectives described me. At fourteen, she was babysitting, pulling in 50 cents an hour and learning how to change a diaper, how to sterilize a bottle, how to rock a baby to sleep. Not only that but she was old enough to volunteer in the nursery at church. More practice. I had never even held a baby. All my younger cousins lived east of the Mississippi River, and I hardly ever saw them. I didn't have any babies to practice on.

If I had had dolls, I suppose I could have practiced on them. But my track record with dolls was pretty disappointing.

My very first doll was Raggedy Ann. Mary and I both got Raggedy Anns for Christmas the year I was five. Raggedy Ann kind of creeped me out at first. She slept with her eyes open, and she never, never quit smiling. Her shoes and socks didn't come off. But her pinafore and dress did. Once I got her down to her skivvies, I was impressed to see that she sported a tattoo. A red heart that had writing inside of it. I wanted a tattoo!

I waited until Mom was in the basement doing the laundry. This was way back in the day, before ballpoint pens, when you had to fill your pen with ink that came in a little jar. My dad used ink that was the color of the sky at night. I'd rather have had a red tattoo, like Raggedy Ann's, but midnight blue would do. I took my shirt off and got my dad's fountain pen out of its heavy alabaster pen stand, and I got to work. It was awkward drawing an upside down heart on my belly. It was scratchy, and the ink either didn't come out at all, or it came out in blobs. My tattoo wasn't nearly as wonderful as Raggedy Ann's. But I persisted. Until I heard Mom coming up the basement stairs. Something told me she would not be pleased to see me creating body art with my father's fountain pen. I hastily returned it to the inkstand. But not before I had left a blob of midnight blue on Raggedy Ann's left leg … and one on my corduroy pants … and one on the living room rug.

In 1955, my mother hadn't heard of child psychology. In our house, there was no such thing as "time out." We got "banishment."

"Go to your room and stay there!"

That's exactly what Raggedy Ann and I did. When mom decided I was ready for parole, she bundled me up in my snowsuit and sent Raggedy Ann and me outdoors to play.

We lived in Wyoming then, where winter lasts about 10 months. But one of those dry winds, called a Chinook, had blown in the day before and evaporated all the snow. It was actually a pretty warm day – 30-35 degrees. My friend Billy Russell was outside, too, so we put my besmirched Raggedy Ann in his Radio Flyer wagon and conducted crash tests until our mothers called us in for lunch. I guess Raggedy Ann wasn't hungry, because she stayed outside. Or maybe she already knew that after lunch came naptime, and she hated naps as much as I did.

In Wyoming the weather can change – drastically – within a matter of minutes. When I woke up from my nap a couple of hours later, there was already three inches of snow on the ground and more falling. It was perfect weather for staying indoors with a coloring book and a box of Crayolas.

By the time I remembered to wonder about Raggedy Ann, she was buried under a snow drift three feet deep. I wasn't worried. I knew all about hibernation. I'd find her when she woke up, sometime around the middle of April.

As it turned out, my mother was the one who discovered her. I had to admit, my doll looked pretty … um … ragged. But happy. She was still smiling. Still bright-eyed, in spite of all the mud and grit. A couple of cycles in the washer, and she … still looked pretty ragged. Shortly thereafter, she went into early retirement at the bottom of the toy box.

Raggedy Ann and I had had some good times, but I didn't really miss her. My Aunt Eloise had just sent me a cap gun for my birthday. A six-shooter, with a holster. And a big supply of ammunition. I was making noise, making sparks, shooting bad guys. I was a happy kid.

My next doll entered my life the following Christmas. It was called a Ginny Doll, special ordered from a catalog. Mom got one for Mary and one for me, hoping that they would be our traveling companions and that whenever we went anywhere we'd each be so engaged playing with our dolls that we wouldn't squabble in the back seat of the car.

Ginny was a pretty little doll. She had eyes that looked real – clear blue with bright black pupils. She had real hair, all done up in a perky little ponytail. She came with a little handbag that opened up to reveal a comb and brush and a tiny pair of sunglasses! She had real clothes, with real snaps and buttons; real little shoes and socks. And she was the first doll I had ever seen that had moving parts.

Real hair! The first thing I did as soon as Mom was busy in the basement was look for the scissors. But by this time, my mother had me pretty well figured out, and she was careful to put her sewing basket on the top shelf in her bedroom closet, where it was not only too high for me to reach, it was dark. So … no haircuts. Ginny did have her own little comb and brush, though. I could freshen her up. As soon as I got the ponytail holder loose, sproing!, her hair flew out in every direction, and nothing I did could get it back into that perky little ponytail.

I mentioned that Ginny had moving parts. She could walk. She could swing her arms. And she could move her head from side to side. Unfortunately, when one body part moved, they all moved, just like Frankenstein in the trailer I had seen at the movies. So here's Ginny, dressed like a sweet little all-American girl, wild frizzy hair, and all the grace of a movie monster. I did not bond with this doll.

But Mom insisted that our Ginny dolls accompany us on road trips, so Mary and I would have something quiet to do in the back seat and not fight with each other. That social experiment was a failure. Mary would perch her Ginny doll — not a hair out of place, clean and fresh as she was on Christmas Day — on her knee facing me and my Ginny doll – frizzy, rumpled, both socks and one shoe missing. Mary would smile at her doll, then she would purse her lips at my doll and do a little eyeroll. She never uttered a word, but the message was clear: "You have an ugly baby. Mine, however, is beyootiful." As usual, Mary was right.

"Mom! Mary's looking at me!"

My doll was so embarrassed that she hid in the backseat crack – way far down there – and didn't surface again until my dad cleaned out the trunk when he sold the car late that summer.

Five years later, in 1961, on the way to San Francisco, thinking about my ill-fated dolls, I said, "Mama? You always tell your friends I'm a tomboy. So why did you get me dolls for Christmas when I was little?"

She looked back at me said, "Because playing with dolls is how little girls practice and learn how to take care of babies … for when they become mothers."

Mary looked up from the book she was reading and said, "I feel sorry for your children. Remember what happened to your Betsy Wetsy?"

Betsy Wetsy came into my life the Christmas I was seven years old.

My parents did not believe in spoiling their children with a lot of Christmas presents. Mary and I could count on one big toy – of their choosing – and one thick book that would occupy us until the end of Christmas break. Any other presents wrapped and tagged for us under the tree were things we needed, things we'd be getting anyhow – socks, underwear, pajamas.

I was always excited about the box that was bigger, that felt a little heavier than the other ones, because that would be my One Big Toy. What I was hoping for that year was a screwdriver set. If you had screwdrivers you could get the switchplates off the walls and see where electricity came from. You could get the bottom off a music box and see the little gears spin as the music played. You could sometimes get the door off a cabinet or one of the legs off the dining room table.

Or a magnifying glass! Did you know, you can start a fire with a magnifying glass? My cousin George showed me how the summer before, and I was desperate to try it myself.

So … Christmas morning, when I unwrapped the box that held my One Big Toy, I'm afraid my, "Thank you, Mama. Thank you, Daddy," might have sounded a little bit hollow.

There she was, dressed in pink. She had molded plastic hair and eyes that clicked when they opened and shut. They sounded just like my grandpa's teeth. This was Betsy Wetsy. I had seen her on TV – beloved baby of pretty little girls whose hair stayed combed and whose dresses stayed clean. According to the commercials, Betsy Wetsy did a lot of the things real babies do. She drank from a bottle and she sometimes needed to have her diaper changed.

Okay, I thought. I'll give it a try.

I filled her little plastic bottle with water and stuck the tip into the little round hole between her lips. As soon as she was done, I laid her back down in her pink box for a nap. Then I remembered…

Whenever the ladies at church fed their babies, before they put them down in one of the nursery cribs, they'd prop the baby on their shoulder and pat it on the back. This was called "burping."

I picked Betsy Wetsy up. Her eyes clicked open, and before I could even start patting her on the back, she peed on me! All down the front of my new Christmas dress.

I put her back in that pink box and shoved it under my bed all the way to the wall. Betsy Wetsy didn't see daylight again til spring, when I sold her for a quarter at my mom's garage sale … to a little girl in a clean dress, who looked thrilled with her new baby.

Oddly, the following Christmas, I asked for a doll. Tiny Tears. All my friends had one, and when we got together and played house, they all got to be moms and I, being childless, had to be the grandma or the housekeeper. 

Tiny Tears was great. She did everything Betsy Wetsy did, and more – she cried! After you gave her a bottle, weensy little tears ran out of tiny holes in the corners of her eyes. This time, I knew what to expect, so I was careful to keep a bath towel between her bottom and my lap. I fed her. I burped her. I changed her diaper. I dabbed her little tears. I put her down for a nap. And I was still clean!

While she slept, I played with her bottle at the kitchen sink. You could squeeze the sides and suck water into it, and if the water was soapy, you could make it blow bubbles. Which is what I did until I decided it was time for Tiny Tears to wake up from her nap.

Evidently I didn't rinse all the soap out of the bottle, because after I fed Tiny Tears again, this time when she peed she also blew bubbles out her bottom … and instead of crying, she blew little bubbles out her eyes.

I thought, This is great! I wonder what'll happen if I give her milk.

So I did. And she cried white tears.

Okay, I bet if I fed her grape juice, she'll cry purple tears.

But before I could test that hypothesis, Mom called me for dinner, and I didn't get back to Tiny Tears til the next day.

She stunk! She smelled just like the babies in the church nursery. Mom noticed it, too. She unscrewed the tip from that doll-sized baby bottle, and we both recoiled.

"What is this?" she asked.

I looked down into that bottle and said, honestly, "I don't know what it is or how it got there. The last thing I put in there was milk."

Tiny Tears went out to the curb with the retired Christmas tree. The next year, Mom and Dad gave me roller skates. Now that was a perfect gift.

But here I was, eleven years old, on the verge of becoming a big sister, and I had blown all my chances to learn about taking care of a baby.

What if I dropped her? What if I tripped and fell while I was carrying her? What if I took her for a walk in her stroller and … I don't know … wrecked the stroller?

These were the thoughts that tormented me as we arrived in San Francisco. These are the thoughts that kept me awake the night of December 16 … Baby Lift Eve.

Right after breakfast on December 17, we went to the airport and found the waiting room where all the new parents were supposed to gather. The plane had just landed, and now a doctor and a nurse were checking the babies to make sure they were all healthy. Some of the babies were just getting over the chicken pox.

There were about fifty or sixty people in that room, ready to meet their new babies. All grownups, except for Mary and me. Most of them had driven a lot further than we had, and if they had other kids at home only one parent had come to meet the Baby Lift. It was standing room only. From my eleven year old vantage point, I looked up into a landscape of shoulders and earlobes.

I was reading one of my dad's Zane Grey paperback westerns, and I took it out of my coat pocket and tried to distract myself with cowboys and bad guys. I didn't work. I read the same sentence about twenty-five times.

Finally, a man with a clipboard stepped into the room through a door marked "no admittance." He was followed by a nurse. She carried a white flannel bundle. Everybody got really, really still. The man called out somebody's last name. Two people in the back of the room said, "Oh! That's us." And they made their way forward to claim their baby, whom they were seeing for the first time.

The new mom took that white bundle in her arms like a pro. Her smile shone down at that little face looking back up at her. The new dad put an arm around them and led them back to the back of the room. And so it went, one baby after another into the arms of a smiling parent.

I stood there worrying. What if our baby still had chicken pox and they wouldn't let her on the plane? What if they lost our adoption papers and won't let us take her? Somebody has to be the last name called. It'll probably be us.

The guy with the clipboard called out, "Hicks!"

That particular white flannel bundle was my baby sister!

I don't know what came over me in that instant. Something took charge of my feet. Something filled my heart with a sense of … what? … confidence? authority? I didn't ask if it was okay, I didn't even look back at where Mom and Dad were making their way through the crowd. Suddenly I was as grown up as I needed to be. I plowed through that landscape of shoulders and earlobes and held out my arms.

"She's ours," I told the nurse.

All those adults behind me chuckled and nudged each other, as if to say, "Isn't that cute?" But I didn't care.

The nurse handed me that bundle, and I can still feel the memory of my baby sister coming to rest in the crook of my elbow – solid, safe. In that moment I felt rooted and steady. No way would I fall or drop or break this baby.

I lifted the blanket from her face, and there she lay, sleeping through all this excitement. Tiny, skinny, still a little bit scabby from the chicken pox. I remembered Raggedy Ann, after three months in a snow drift… My Ginny Doll after I ruined her hair… How cold and miserable it felt when Betsy Wetsy peed on me, and how awful Tiny Tears smelled after the milk fiasco…

I thought, This is not a pretty baby. And she smells funny. She's going to pee on me, sometime. And spit up. It's what babies do.

Mom and Dad and Mary were gathered close now. I looked up at them and said, "Look! She's perfect!"


Here she is today, holding one of the "babies" she takes care of.