The Baby Incident

It has been almost two weeks since I wrote last.

Well, wrote and published would be more accurate. I’ve been doing plenty of writing, not least for the daily and weekly tasks for The Artist’s Way. I realize now that I haven’t talked about that much on here and now the group I’m doing it with and myself are almost two weeks away from completing it.

The Artist’s Way is about healing, healing one’s creative self and allowing it to flourish and be the guide for our creativity after it’s healed and unblocked. A few weeks ago, one of the tasks was to think of ways to forgive ourselves, to acknowledge whatever the situation was, remember it and let it pass as something we can’t control and to forgive ourselves. Since my biggest self-flagellation weapon of choice is being too hard on myself, I remembered ways I’d been too harsh about my writing, berating myself for not being productive at every instance of downtime I had, feeling guilty for taking out any sort of free time without feeling like I’ve earned it.

This week, as I took two days off work to not exactly go on vacation or disconnect but to be away from my desk (currently writing from the couch), I tried to allow myself the luxury of not planning my time off to the minute and to allow myself to recharge. I realized I hadn’t posted in a while, and when I went back to my content calendar to find planned posts I’d skipped over in the past few weeks, I found another way I like to self-flagellate: ruminating on embarrassing stories.

Those embarrassing stories that nag at you, bouncing around your head and making you wish you could go back and pull yourself away to spare yourself and those around you. Unfortunately, by allowing myself downtime to do nothing, my brain came across this memory from last Christmas, one that still makes me cringe and want to hide under a rock. In a hole somewhere. Close to the center of the Earth. Inside a locked room.

So, enjoy. It’s not fiction today, but storytelling, which I enjoy doing just as much, although I do wish the story itself were fiction and had never taken place outside my own brain…

December 2019. A Christmas party. Not a work Christmas party, but a colleague’s of my mom’s. A direct report of my mom’s. This is important to the rest of the story.

My whole family, including my sister’s boyfriend, was invited, and I was grateful I wouldn’t need to drive everyone home at the end of the night. I started drinking, buzzed on being at the only Christmas party I’d been to that year more than on the free-flowing, self-poured mixed drinks. I didn’t know a great many people, and I was self-conscious that I’d come in as part of a crowd made only ore conspicuous by the fact that my sister was on crutches (she’d broken her foot weeks earlier). The solution to that was, of course, drinking and mingling with those people I did know.

No, this isn’t a story about my making an ass of myself by drinking too much and dancing on a table at a practical stranger’s house party, a practical stranger that would have to see my mom at work come Monday. I knew that going in and I knew to behave myself, to be polite, to introduce myself and be chatty enough. However…

I tried keeping to my crowd, talking to my mom’s manager whom I’d met before. She is talkative by nature and wasn’t drinking as she’d come with her young daughter, so she provided as much conversation fuel as I’d needed. The night went on with party games, raffles and nibbles, and I was even more self-conscious when my crowd kept winning prizes. A stuffed animal here, a reusable water cup there and we were one number away from winning a scanner-printer. I felt people staring and their spiteful thoughts at the back of my head – but I just liked winning free stuff so much…

The first slip happened as some groups started leaving, those with young kids. The living room emptied and there was more room to sit. One of the hosts shouted over my head to those behind me, “Before you head out, let’s do a Sherwood picture.”

Sherwood sounded familiar. It’s the high school up one of the main roads in the city, in the more affluent side of the county. I heard once, forever ago, that while some high schools had yearbook spreads of students with cars, Sherwood had a spread of the best student cars, with Mercedes and BMWs making the cut while Subarus and below didn’t.

This memory played in my head as I said, “Oh cool, you guys went to Sherwood. I went to Wheaton.”

I realized I hadn’t talked to this host much, so in my drunk mind this was my way of making conversation. Sober me would have noticed that he was busy entertaining and organizing his guests for a picture. Sober me would have stayed quiet, especially after his reply came.

“Yes, but forever ago,” he said without meeting my eyes, preoccupied with assembling the crowd.

Drunk me caught the slip, too. Of course. These people were older than me, not by much, but significantly enough that they were obviously adultier than me. By my calculations and by my mom’s intel, they were in their mid- to late-thirties. They had missed my high school years by a lot for me to casually want to spark a conversation about where we went to high school. Even talking about where we went to college would have been too far removed.

If I could have shrank and melted into my seat, with my drink in hand, I would have.

As it often does while you’ve been drinking, time started moving in quick bursts, and my actions were erratic. My crowd and I moved to the garage, where I was told there was a ping pong table and a photobooth. That occupied my time for a while, though I couldn’t say then or now how long it actually was. If I were skilled enough to learn Photoshop, those pictures would be edited to look like they were taken over many occasions, not one monopolized instance. Our crowd was big enough that we monopolized the ping pong table and darts board in the room, but we were conscious of that fact and kept ourselves out of the way, long enough for a young couple and their baby to come and take pictures at the photobooth.

Reader, this is where the story turns.

The baby didn’t look older than one year old, year and a half to guesstimate high. He wore a red onesie that would have looked adorable on anyone else, but it looked particularly striking against his white complexion and blue eyes. His parents held him and took picture after picture, trying to get him to look at the camera. My drunk self tried to be helpful, momentarily forgetting that I did not know these people and that I do not like babies. I was being obnoxious. I tried to get the baby’s attention, suddenly stopping when I realized I was cooing at him like I do at my dog, but luckily by that point the parents decided that they had gotten enough pictures and thanked me, much more gracefully than I deserved.

After they left the room, my dad started ushering the rest of us back to the living room too, trying to herd us like drunk cats. I sat with my parents for what felt like half an hour but could have easily been an hour or two minutes. They were waiting for my sister and her boyfriend to finish taking pictures and join us in the living room so we could grab our coats and go home, as I learned later on.

My parents chatted with the host who had invited us, my mom’s direct report, and it wasn’t necessarily shop talk. The young couple from the photobooth were with us in the living room, too, changing the baby and getting him out of the red onesie.

“We have one more Christmas party to go to, and this outfit has to last that long,” the mom said and chuckled. She handed the baby to the host, who was sitting next to me.

He hugged the baby as he sat on his lap and said, “I really want one.” My mom chuckled at that and the young parents continued to gather their stuff and rearrange the baby bag.

When the host turned slightly away from me to chat to the young parents, I tried my attempt at a joke. I looked at the baby, looked at parents and, very deliberately, scooted away from the child, as if I were repelled by him. I continued to look at him over my shoulder, aware I still had my audience, and scooted away a little more. The mom grabbed the baby away from the momentary sitter at that time, and I turned and giggled at my parents.

“Let me get you guys’ coats,” the host said and stood up, leaving me in plain view of the mom as she tried to put the baby in the car seat. I looked as she strapped him in, wincing a bit as the baby started wailing, not wanting to sit outside someone’s arms.

“I’m just going to leave this right here,” she said to me, pointing to the car seat on the couch next to me. “Is that okay?”

“Oh yeah, totally,” I said, casually and very much oblivious to her tone.

She went to grab her and her husband’s coats from the host’s arms, and they were gone shortly after, wailing baby with them.

Drunk me thought I was being funny. Drunk me was doing a bit about not liking babies and being put off by them. Drunk me did not see how that “joke” could have come off completely different to another audience with higher stakes on the butt of the joke than I had.

Before she left, the mom saw me inch away from her child, who wasn’t doing anything other than sitting and looking around at things he didn’t have names for yet. I was repelled by an innocent child who was doing nothing. To her, I was offensive.

I’d learn this weeks later, well after Christmas, too late to realize my mistake but soon enough to be full of shame. I tried to rationalize my behavior, to excuse it, really. Parents shouldn’t expect their child to be well-liked everywhere, especially not if they come across me. Parents shouldn’t expect people at parties to want to hold their child or want to hear stories about the latest development milestone, especially not me.

But every parent should expect their child to be well-received, not offended like I had done, joke or not.

We’re closer to a new Christmas and I’m still haunted by my behavior at that last Christmas party, with the baby incident only the culmination of embarrassing behavior of the evening. I was the boss’ daughter, acting out and showing off like a spoiled child, earning disapproval for her and for me, for our whole family.

Before COVID and its ramifications, my mom said we’d already been invited to the host’s yearly pool party in the summer. I had been thinking of ways to get out of this invitation since I received it, not wanting to own up to my mom that I was still embarrassed about the baby incident, and wanting even less to run into the young family again. They were close friends of the hosting couple, and they would no doubt be at the pool party, and an apology from me wasn’t enough or needed at this point. Of course, that’s a moot point now.

All I know is that even if we’re invited again, even if it’s two years from now and it’s safe to gather again, I will not be going. They probably forgot about the incident by now or would have done by then, and I would like to keep it that way.

For what it’s worth: Graham, Graham’s mom and dad, I’m very sorry.