Baby Gifts

I read two books recently, both of which involved babies left on doorsteps. In the first, a baby was left by the young woman from next door, on the front doorstep of a couple unable to conceive. In the second, a childless couple goes out for a bite to eat and finds a baby in a string back hanging on the doorknob of the fish and chip shop.

Granted, both these books (Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet and Helen Slavin’s The Extra Large Medium) dabble in dark humor, magical realism, and the paranormal, but does this kind of thing really happen to people? Both books were set in the UK, so I thought perhaps gifting babies to people who want them is more common there. But in this morning’s LA Times I read a story about an 11-year old in Orange County who saved her baby sister’s life after their mother gave birth and then abandoned the infant in a nearby dumpster. Not exactly delivering the child into loving arms, I know, but it does knock a chink in my theory.

The Bible would have us believe that this kind of thing has been going on for centuries, millennia actually. If my public school education serves me right, wasn’t it Moses who was hidden in the bulrushes and discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter? I realize it was for the sake of his life, but with no Department of Child and Family Services to intervene, he was merely taken in and adopted. Clean and simple, and I would say he turned out just fine.

I couldn’t promise to raise a controller of the Red Sea or a deliverer of the Ten Commandments, but if someone happened to leave a baby on my doorstep, I can promise it would be VERY well taken care of.

But in reality, it doesn’t happen that way. I know that. There would be police reports to file and government agencies to deal with and the poor kid would be shuttled around for who knows how long and the mother, assuming she was found, prosecuted for attempted murder. But in my little fantasy world, where I prefer to reside, it’s a story with a very happy ending.