For Christmas, years in and out, Fern requested babies that cried and crawled, and at long last, she became the proud mother of Baby Alive, who ate green slop and pooped it out into a diaper. Eventually we had to send this doll to the county dump after Fern mixed her peas too thick and the powdered vegetables turned moldy in Baby Alive’s food chute. Fern equipped her playroom nursery with a diaper station and every other accoutrement on the market. She learned, early on, to play lullabies on a CD player and, later, on my iPhone. She borrowed report sheets from the UW Oshkosh Children’s Center, circling “W” for wet diaper and “BM” for bowel movement; these were the first acronyms of Fern’s life. Not only did Fern physically resemble her great-grandmother, but GG owned and operated one of the first licensed childcare centers in the state of Wisconsin, and Fern was following, at least in her land of make-believe, in GG’s footsteps.
Fern’s infatuation with babies defined her. When we ordered personalized birthday cakes one year, Irie’s cake was a swimming pool, Leo’s cake was a Stormtrooper, and Fern’s was a nursery. Our friend, a cake guru, rolled little diapered babies out of fondant and arranged them on the pastel frosting. For every special event, we’d associate Fern with babies. Even on her birthday, we’d wrap her gifts in paper meant for baby showers. She loved her babies so much, she convinced us they were real, and then, if I found them discarded on the playroom floor, facedown and naked next to a T. rex or a Nerf gun, I’d threaten to call social services, jokingly but with some degree of genuine distress.
When and how do girls learn to nurture? If “maternal instinct” is part of our evolutionary wiring, why do girls in the same family, with the same mother, attach to such diverse representations of babies? For some time, I worried about Irie. Was she not drawn toward human contact? Did she experience less anxiety when she rocked her blank-faced Eggy, as a ball was less likely to spit up or cry or cause anguish, or was Irie just gloriously imaginative, anthropomorphizing the least animate objects? After all, some children invented headless imaginary friends out of thin air. Was Fern more likely than Irie to become an attentive mother, or a mother at all, and did this matter to me, a woman raised by my own staunchly feminist mom? Would the ability to nurture come to Fern more naturally, or was it possible Fern would deplete her supply of fuel early on?
For as different as our girls acted toward their babies, they seemed to be passing at least one litmus test. Years apart, without each other’s influence, both took turns converting our least coveted dolls into feminist symbols for their futures. Irie chopped off secondhand Barbie’s hair, streaked it purple; painted her face like a princess warrior’s; and marked badass rock star clothes on her naked body. Then, to my surprise, Fern used permanent ink to map brain surgery onto Crawly Baby’s cranium. Irie wanted a career in the arts, and Fern wanted to be a doctor. Was the jumble of hieroglyphics, in fact, a true set of lobotomy instructions, or was Fern planning another type of brain surgery?
As their siblings grew older, the girls would cry secretly to me, “I wish Leo was little again” or “I want to turn Frank back into a baby.” Dr. Walter Freeman, father of the lobotomy, admitted that lobotomies were largely dangerous. He described them as “inducing childhood,” forcing patients backward to an infantile state, thereby seriously diminishing their psychic lives. Maybe, deep down, this was what Dr. Fern wanted, some easy, albeit gory, remedy to the constant process in our family of people growing bigger.
She herself often said, “I wish I was a baby again,” and then she’d crawl into our laps in fetal pose. Maybe she was fantasizing less about motherhood than we imagined, instead living vicariously through her dolls, becoming baby Fern all over again, all these dolls for Fern being rooted in nostalgia.
How many of us have wished our children would not grow up at all? At the very least, Fern did not have to worry about Crawly Baby, or Wallace, Ashley, Adele, and Dylan. Dolls can’t ever become older, stronger, self-possessed, or independent in the way that real children do.
Kevin’s trial felt like divorce proceedings from his own parents. As he awaited the big day, Ryan matched his quota of angst. Kevin was sending heartbreaking letters from jail, reminding Ryan that his life was on the line, not to mention pages upon pages of notes on potential legal strategies. On lined papers ripped from legal pads, Kevin jotted down “F = M(V2)” to explain why it was altogether impossible that Kevin could break his mother’s back by pulling her to the ground. He made long lists of inconsistencies: no grass stains on Linda’s clothing, no scalp damage, and no tracks in the lawn where Kevin allegedly dragged her inside. Wouldn’t lack of evidence be enough to raise suspicions about his mom’s lies?
The police took statements from all three affiants but never returned to the scene of the crime to collect much of any evidence, such as, say, the bottle of Gatorade and duct tape. Neighbors were not interviewed, nor were family
