The Day My Mother Stole The Baby

Of course my father was going for irony, in the style of the day, when he famously proposed to my mother by calling her “a happy medium,” as in: “You’re not as beautiful as Frances. You’re not as smart as Vivian. You’re not as talented as Inga. You’re a happy medium. Marry me.” I’m not sure he knew just how ironic his choice of phrase turned out to be.

My mother wasn’t a “medium” anything, much less “medium” about anything she wanted or did. She could never get enough; and in her 20’s and 30’s, her fix was milky-skinned, toothless, neck-less little creatures. You’d think she was getting high sniffing A&D ointment.

My father not only gave her 5 children but also smuggled in occasional others. It happened that he did obstetrics in the 1950s and 60s when laws were loose and doctors were gods. And so there was the strange incident of Mrs. Brown’s baby.

"I’m not sure he knew just how ironic his choice of phrase turned out to be."

My mother wasn’t a “medium” anything, much less “medium” about anything she wanted or did. She could never get enough; and in her 20’s and 30’s, her fix was milky-skinned, toothless, neck-less little creatures. You’d think she was getting high sniffing A&D ointment.

My father not only gave her 5 children but also smuggled in occasional others. It happened that he did obstetrics in the 1950s and 60s when laws were loose and doctors were gods. And so there was the strange incident of Mrs. Brown’s baby.

“Mrs.” Brown (she was not a “Mrs.) rang my father on a Friday, just as she was going into labor, saying she was referred by one of his patients.

Odd enough that the call was from someone my father didn’t know; odder still because the laboring Mrs. Brown would not leave work to head to the hospital until she got her paycheck that Friday.

After a healthy boy was delivered, she disappeared leaving a note that she was going to see her father in the Bronx. And so, thinking the child was abandoned, my father placed baby Brown in the open arms of my mother.

In school at the time, I never got to see the scene that ensued some weeks later when Mrs. Brown called my father’s office looking for her baby. My father phoned my mother who refused to open the door when an increasingly frantic Mrs. Brown rang and rang then eventually ran several blocks to the nearest payphone to call my father again who again called my mother, begging her to open the door. My mother refused saying, rather heartlessly, that Mrs. Brown had abandoned her baby and that she would never give him back to an “unfit mother”.

My father, at wits end, had to close his office, run home and pry the baby from my mother. There followed weeks of silence between my parents during which I told my teacher, Mrs. Cherkiss--proudly, in a big voice--that I had “a family secret” leading her to call my house concerned that my parents were splitting up. My mother was mortified; my father, doubled over laughing. I stood between them greatly perplexed.