Baby Grows Up
revisited
In my Memoir as Spiritual Practice class, we did an exercise responding to a photo of ourselves when we were children.
I wrote about Baby Grows Up on this newsletter before, but I did not know there was photographic evidence until my mom died last year. Parts of this meditation cross over into another work-in-progress about discovering my mother was likely autistic and dissociative (like me) through her secret surveillance photographs … more on that soon in an essay called My Mom the Autistic Detective.
Before I jump in, a little appreciation for my mother’s skill with K-Mart layaway, too. She found a way to afford presents.
As always, I altered details of the therapist to protect identity.
CW: some mentions of child abuse
Christmas morning, 1979. I am four. I tiptoe down the hallway to see what Santa brought me. The streetlight at the end of our driveway provides just enough illumination to make out two plastic strollers next to the Christmas tree.
I do not want to risk switching on a lamp; my father will ruin the day as soon as he wakes up.
In the first stroller, Baby Grows Up:
Yank a cord from the base of her spine: She’s your baby!
Stick the bottle in her mouth: She’s your little girl!
In the second stroller: Dancerella.
Dancerella has only one identity: ballerina.
She is not a baby and a little girl — not like me with the blood in my underwear.
She is too young for her period, my mother said to the woman doctor, extracting a plastic bag containing my stained underpants from her purse.
Diagnosis: not my period. I must have another urinary tract infection. I was always taking antibiotics and little pills that turned my pee bright orange to treat urinary tract infections.
It is unusual, the doctor said, for a little girl to get so many UTIs. She blamed it on our soap. Then the pediatrician blamed it on not using soap. Tomboys like Karrie get dirty, he said. Little boys can get away with being dirty and not get an infection. Little girls have to stay clean.
My dad blamed it on playing with myself. Get your hands out of your pants he would scream as he unbuckled his belt and made me bend over.
I squint at the strollers: I do not want a baby doll. I want Hot Wheels. I want a Superman action figure. I want a basketball.
But Santa has only brought “girl toys.” I have to be a girl if I want a Christmas present. I have to want a baby.
So I pick Dancerella. I want to be like her. I do not want to be multiple ages at once.
Plus, I already know it does not work like the way the Baby Grows Up box promises: someone can make you older by sticking stuff in your mouth, but nobody can make you a baby again, not really.
Mom stumbles sleepy-eyed into the living room and stops, hands on her hips. Even before she speaks, I know I am in trouble.
“Karrie,” she says, in her mad voice, the one that only screeches out of that skinny body when I am going to get spanked. “The ballerina is for your sister.”
The strollers have no name tags.
She stomps to the rejected crib and lifts the Baby-Grows-Up box like she is cradling a real baby. “This is the doll you wanted. You asked Santa for her. He didn’t forget.”
When she attempts to snatch Dancerella out of my hands, I run away. “No! I don’t want Baby Grows Up! I hate that doll!”
She calls me ungrateful. She calls me a brat. She calls me selfish. She finally catches me and grabs Dancerella.
“Here,” she says, to my sister — the real dancer in the family, not like me, who nobody thinks counts, even though I tap dance & pirouette on stage at the Paramount Theater every year, just like my big sister.
After she forces me to pose for the picture, she stuffs Baby Grows Up on my father’s side of their closet—the dangerous side, the one I will get the belt for invading if I borrow a necktie or try on a suit jacket. All the next year, I catch glimpses of the plastic hinges on her knees when the door gets left open.
When you accept Baby Grows Up in your heart, you can have her, she says. Like the doll is Jesus or something.
A few months before my mother dies:
“Baby Grows Up came out in 1978,” I tell my therapist.
“That’s the year my brother Greg got discharged from the Army and came to live with us.”
“That’s an interesting overlap,” he says.
I tell him I bought the doll for myself on Ebay — that I needed to have it — and pass him my phone to show him a picture of the creepy cord sticking out of her back:
I confess to how, when I finally pretended to accept her into my heart as a child, I would stuff the bottle in her mouth and make her grow up, then fold her over my knee to yank that regression cord over and over and over and over.
“I think I needed to yank that cord again,” I say. “I needed to see how it feels.”
No, that is not it: I needed to access the memory of how it felt. I cannot discern Little Karrie’s intentions. It feels like someone else’s memory.
But I cannot travel back in time—not really. The regression cord has gone brittle with age. It creaks like my joints do now, arthritic from so many dislocations thanks to Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. My mint condition, new-in-box Baby Grows Up got stuck halfway grown up, hunched over like my mother, and her mother, from osteoporosis.
She is a baby; she is a little girl; she is middle age; she is osteoporotic in her old age. She is Baby All Grown Up and Baby Never Grew up.
I could not stand to look at her hunched like my mother, so I shoved her to the back of my own closet this time.
I am not sure I can ever love her. Ever accept her into my heart.
“To this day, my mom makes fun of me for refusing that doll,” I say. “But she also refuses to see that I am nonbinary.”
“It’s not just your gender,” my therapist says. “It’s your spinal cord, too.”
He means my syringomyelia, the syrinxes in my spinal cord that cause paresthesias, ataxia, and electric pain. I keep getting sent to neuro rehab to learn how to walk, like a toddler again.
They formed because of a neural tube defect — another thing my family pretends does not exist.
Strange how that doll’s spinal cord is like mine, and that was also the last year I identified as a dancer, too. I stopped enrolling in ballet and tap. I stopped choreographing routines on the driveway.
Baby Grows Up makes a good origin story. If I had to pick a moment when the amnesia began—when there was no going back on becoming a DID system—it was Christmas 1979. I did not remember asking Santa for that doll. I did not remember commercials for it during Saturday morning cartoons. Her little body felt Uncanny Valley, like I had been presented with a replicant of my own self.
Something had changed in me over 1978.
It was my brother.
My mother had noticed the urinary tract infections, the bloody underpants, my sudden revulsion for Baby Grows Up, but she had not noticed me.
All my life, I have felt unseen by my mother. She would buy me gifts that felt like they were for someone else — but for my sister, she nailed it every time. She struggled with me, did not know me, did not even want to know me. Now that I know the amnesia had begun already in 1978, that maybe I did ask for that doll, maybe I did know it existed, I know at least this time, I had made it impossible to be seen. I had made myself invisible.
But what about all the other times?
She called my disabilities psychosomatic and attention-seeking, while always believing my sister when she was sick — even though it turned out we had the same genetic disorder. When we finally got diagnosed in our forties, it was because of me. I figured it out for both of us, got us both booked to see a geneticist, and my mother called me, frantic, to say, “DID YOU KNOW YOUR SISTER HAS EDS?”
When my sister came forward about our brother, she never even asked if he had touched me, too. When I swallowed all my epilepsy pills and the doctors interrogated her, directly, about the possibility I had been sexually abused, she denied it. “I don’t think so,” she said. No mention of my sister’s allegations.
15-year-old me was lying down the hall hooked up to a heart monitor with a black eye my father gave me, with a skull fracture my father gave me, and she said to the social worker:
She lied to CPS.
She lied to the cops.
She lied to my teachers.
But did she know she was lying? Maybe she did not see the truth, because she did not see me.
She died never knowing I am autistic, that I have DID, that I am nonbinary, that I am pansexual. I did tell her my gender identity, but there was no point in trying to explain, in trying to get her to see me.
My mother locked me in a little box that promised: remove the bottle, she’ll grow up; put on her pretty little girl dress and shoes.
Baby Grows Up splitting in a police lineup: caught doing wrong, caught being wrong, no matter if she was your baby! or your little girl!
Look closer. You can see it on my face here:
Dear Little Karrie,
After your mother dies, you will find this photo in her bins and bins of family pictures, the ones she never showed you:
Your basketball hoop, the one where you practiced shooting hoops for hours.
The goal: swishes only, no backboard. You loved the quiet whoosh. You loved the control it required over the ball, the articulation of every finger just right, the little hop. You would back up an inch or two each time, until you were shooting from all the way down the hill, in the street — a Caitlin Clark Logo 3, autistic style — and by then, you were so focused, so at one with the hoop, you made it every time. You never tried out for the basketball team, even though you could hold your own with the boys on the block. You just liked that time alone with the ball. I think you might have hated actually playing a game in a gym, all those thwacks, echoes and screams.
Now I recognize it as stimming.
Look at how your mother photographed that hoop, sneaking from a crouched position beneath the window frame, where nobody could detect the glint of sunlight off her viewfinder or lens.
Was she listening for the whoosh, too?
You will file it under: Evidence My Mother Loved Me.
You will find photo after photo like that one-- liminal, dissociated, autistic:
(more on my mother’s liminal photos in a future newsletter)
Dear Little Karrie,
After your mother dies, you will start to see your mother, too:
It is 1962. Your mother has just won an archery competition at Ellis Park in Cedar Rapids. That is her on the far right, smiling as she reaches for an arrow — and as always, refusing to wear a dress.
She is eighteen years old, two years away from her first marriage to a man who turned out to be gay, whose name she refused to speak for the rest of her life.
The only reason you know he existed: you will find her high school yearbook with notes from all her friends wishing, “Congratulations on your engagement to Allan,” and you will ask, and she will snatch it from you and destroy it. This woman who hoarded photos and keepsakes, who stored every Christmas card she ever got in plastic bins that filled the garage, and later, her tiny apartment ... destroyed her yearbook because it exposed her secret.
The next time you ever heard about him: decades later, when you take your mother to the passport office and a shudder passes through her entire body when the application demands she list prior marriages, divorces, and annulments.
WHY DO THEY NEED TO KNOW THAT? She will seethe, through clenched teeth.
Later, you will find out his last name searching old wedding announcements in the newspaper archive. You will track him down in California, where he opened a gay bar and hosted Christmas dinner every year for LGBTQ folks with no family. But it will be too late to talk to him: He has just died.
You already know about the archery competition. You found it in the Cedar Rapids Gazette online archives in 2011:
You emailed it to her. You wanted to know her. To see her.
She emailed back:
yes I did so some archery at Ellis Park, the Gazette pick out of few of us, and I was one. It was fun, but never had any way of pursing it.
Picture her drawing the arrow and releasing it, the crowds around her disappearing as she focuses on its trajectory to the target.
My mother was stimming like me with the basketball.
The only way she got that 8 x 10 is by ordering it, paying for the print, even though she was so poor she had to stuff cardboard in her shoes to insulate her feet from Iowa winters through all the holes in the soles. That is what she meant by never had any way of pursuing it.
This photo -- this experience -- meant something to her.
Yet she concealed it in a folder for over 60 years. Never framed. Never hung on her wall. Never shared with her daughters. A secret.
She knew. She knew there was something in archery for her — something she could not share. She kept it secret, but she held onto that picture all the same. It meant a lot to her.
You will find her secret stash of car photos. Hot Wheels —the real kind, for people who aren’t epileptic, who can drive.
There is something here about gender, too. “If you bury me in a dress,” my mother used to say, “I will haunt you.”
As a kid, I hated dresses, too, but she forced me to wear them every Sunday. Forced me. Baby Grows Up! Now she’s your little girl. So you can take off her bonnet and baby clothes, let her hair down, and put on her pretty little girl dress and shoes.
Maybe she did not see me because there were parts of herself that she did not want seen. And she saw those parts in me.
Maybe that means she did see me, and not seeing, was her way of seeing.
Brilliant.