The Form My Son Filled Out

The Babies I Rock

So that is how I came to be the paid lady who keeps my own grandchildren, along with nine other families’ babies, in the Sonshine Room at First Christian.

I want to tell you about the babies, because if this were only a story about my son getting his comeuppance, it would be a thin little thing and I would not bother writing it down. Brenda down at the salon can cheer a comeuppance in three words and that is her right, but a comeuppance is not what I keep.

What I keep is the rocking.

There is a boy named Beau whose mother is nineteen and works nights at the gas station on the bypass, and she picks him up at six in the morning with her eyes gone flat from the shift, and she hands him to me like she is handing me the only good thing she made all night. He goes quiet for my three notes. He has since the first week. His mother cried once when she saw it, just stood in the doorway and cried, and said, “He won’t do that for me, he’s too wore out by the time I get him.” I told her he saves the fussing for the person he trusts to keep loving him through it, which is the mother, and that the quiet he gives me is cheaper love, and she should not envy it. She hugged me so hard my glasses went crooked.

There is Harper who is learning to walk and falls on her bottom and looks at me to find out if it was funny or sad, and I decide for her, I say “boom” and laugh, and she laughs, and that is a thing you can give a child, the decision that a fall is funny.

There is a set of twins, Mack and Millie, whose grandmother keeps them most days but brings them to us two mornings a week so she can go to her own doctor, and she and I stand at the counter and talk about our hips, and she is seventy and I am fifty-six and she calls me “young lady” and means it.

And there is Ella, who is mine, and Cody, who is mine. They do not get more of me than the others when the door is shut and the work is on. That was the hardest rule and I set it myself. In the Sonshine Room, Ella is a baby with a dairy allergy who likes to be held facing out so she can watch the big kids, and I hold her facing out, and I do not hold her a minute longer than I hold Beau, because that would not be fair to Beau, whose mother has it harder than my son ever dreamed of.

But three-fifteen comes, and the parents start arriving, and the room empties out. And on certain afternoons the person who comes through the door for Ella and Cody is Drew.