Take my Baby, please

(with apologies to Milton Berle)

I never understood before this urge that parents have to pass their children, particularly the tiny ones, to other people to hold. It always struck me as somewhat presumptuous and in more than a few occasions risky. There's the danger of the transfer, particularly in an unsupported head. Some people may have colds, and risk infecting a baby with no developed immune system. And on more than one occasion, the recipient isn't really begging to hold the child in the first place.

There's the logistics of how you're supposed to hold a baby as well. It takes some getting used to, but quite easy once you learn the tricks. Most start off with the two arm cradle, like your hands are sunburn and you have to carry a watermelon to a picnic. Perfectly fine, but gets tiring after awhile, and looks inelegant. Then there's the over the shoulder one arm, but it means she is looking behind you, and all you're left with is a small pair of pants covering a bubble butt of diapers and a hundred layers of unnecessary clothes. Myself, I prefer the Heisman. It offers good control of the head, her body rests along one arm, leaving the other free to read a book, drink coffee, or just shake somebody's hand.


I was that reluctant receiver a long time ago, when my cousin had her first child. There's not only this sense of crushing responsibility (please God, don't let me drop him), but the idea that baby's, like dogs, have a special sense of whether or not you are "good". Hand a sleeping baby to somebody, and if they start crying it obviously isn't because they were just woken up, or are cold, or any number of reasons. It has to be because, being closer to heaven than the rest of us slobs, they recognize our darker nature. A crying baby is assumed to be a moral Geiger counter of sorts, and who of us wants to be revealed as the duplicitous Iago we know we really are.

With a chirping and burping kid of our own now, predictably, we have a new perspective on this. For so long, she was simply an idea of a kid, a theoretical construct that we could insert into some fantasy lifestyle we would discover down the road. Can't tell you the countless visions I've had from teaching her to throw a baseball, to putting Band-Aids on her scraped knees. All of the sudden though, she's become a physical thing, an indisputable fact. My thought today is, the handoff has more to do with sharing in the "there-ness" of her, rather than what she "means". It's too easy to get swept up in all the ideas of what she will become someday, that I'd hate to miss out on what she is now. By holding her, it's hard to ignore the little gassy, yawning, 7 lbs of the best Corrie and I have to offer.